What a shitshow A level marking and university admissions are this year

[IheartNiles]

We’re in England. Loads of students at high performing school have missed their grades. The Oxbridge shoe-in students didn’t get a single A star.

The concessions made to students in 3/4 UK countries is not a level playing field.

International clearing is offering competitive courses at BCC at Russell groups.

it’s a mess.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to go somewhere she's not enthused about. Would she consider a gap year?

The grade boundaries will be lower because that was where they needed to be to get the right proportion of grades for their cohort. Maybe their marking was less lenient or their questions harder. It’s not “dodgy” as such, but I also suspect that there’s and element of a higher proportion of private school entries meaning more inflated GCSE prior attainment scores in their cohort relative to the other exam boards. That advantage will be hugely reduced next year.

I thought the main culprits for the 2019 grade inflation were the top independent schools. They massively over inflated their teacher assessed grades and undermined the confidence universities had in the ability these schools had to predict their student grades accurately.

Grade inflation and leading independent schools in London and beyond www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/4483332-Grade-inflation-and-leading-independent-schools-in-London-and-beyond

Surely the % grades is based on the UCI data thus suggesting the cohort that took that OCR exam set were indeed a high achieving group?

Not a high achieving group, a higher achieving group than the OCR cohort were in 2019.

They do sound like they are worth investigating. It’s not totally unheard of for that to happen but it isn’t common. We’ve had some kids with great coursework marks crumble in the exam and some who totally flunked coursework rescue themselves with some decent exam marks.

Over the years I’ve also seen exam boards make some big adjustments to marks at times.

It could be that something has gone wrong with the marking, or perhaps the school focused too heavily on coursework and haven’t prepared students very well for the exams, perhaps she made a rubric error or just had a bad day in the exams. Without knowing your daughter or the school it’s really hard to say for sure but there could be lots of different things at play.

I’m sorry she’s had a stressful day today. I went through clearing myself at that age and didn’t get what I was expecting. It’s tough, but your daughter is clearly bright and capable and there will be opportunities for her.

Ceci there is another poster here whose DD has suffered a similar and unexpected drop from predicted grades to actual.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/higher_education/4873934-a-levels-2023-results-day-and-beyond?page=4&reply=128487230

That’s what I mean. If lower achieving schools were told that it was easier to get good grades with Edexcel and AQA and then switched, then Edexcel and AQA cohorts become “weaker” whilst OCR becomes stronger. I also think there’s an element of the OCR cohort potentially having more “inflated” GCSE prior attainment than the other boards. There’s not much OCR can do about that as Ofqual guides them on grade distribution. Schools would be unwise to infer that those figures means that OCR would be “easier” if they switch. If schools with lower prior attainment cohorts now switch to OCR, then the percentage of top grades for OCR will also drop.

Switching exam boards is not that unusual but like you a say, not a sensible strategy for improving results. Plenty of subjects in my school have different exam boards now compared to 2019. It’s been four years. We haven’t changed board in my subject but have changed paper options since then, not seeking better results as such, but because we thought some other papers looked more interesting than what we had. The cohorts of individual schools can also change a lot in 4 years. They might be with the same board but their cohort may be different.

My DS is happy because he got an A * in Maths today so not an issue here.

He has always gone to a state school, never been tutored and we just leave him to it. He turns up to class does his homework and that's that. Nothing above or beyond.

He's going into Yr 13 this September so will take his 3 other A Levels next year. Science and FM.

That said a friend of his missed out by 1 point in getting an A * and that's got to hurt and seems unfair to that person.

The grade boundary mark is about 30 - 50 ish points higher than in 2018 which seems a bit

That said DS did do a fair few practice papers so I suppose he was more proactive than he gives himself credit for.

If lower achieving schools were told that it was easier to get good grades with Edexcel and AQA and then switched, then Edexcel and AQA cohorts become “weaker” whilst OCR becomes stronger.

But if you look at the percentages getting good grades in 2019, it looks like OCR is the 'easier' exam board where you're more likely to get a good grade...you'd have expected the schools wanting an easier ride to switch to OCR, not away from it. It seems impossible to find what percentage of students each exam board takes though I know Edexcel take the vast majority.

OCR in 2019 having a 'stronger' cohort than the other exam boards possibly indicating that it's more popular with private schools could explain it.

I don’t recognise this scenario. All the kids I know did well and got first choice uni. Including one Oxford and one Cambridge. State comp.

Also advice from a lecturer friend:

If you know an A level student and they miss a required university entrance grade by one level, get them to get in touch with the school asap to get the actual mark. For example, an A* might require 90/100, and the student might have got 88 or 89. In that situation they should appeal to the exam board for a remark asap. These are often successful, and university admissions will be willing to reverse decisions in the case of a successful regrade, but it needs to happen VERY QUICKLY. Start the process asap and inform the university admissions that they are appealing."

I definitely think the private school thing is at least part of the explanation.

Saw Michael Rosen saying the other day on Twitter that people should just pass exams if they pass (like a driving test), same criteria every year. Then Universities should hold separate entrance exams. This means exams are a true measure of a person's attainment, not rigged to control Uni entrance. What does the Mumsnet massive think of that?

Same here

I think this is a great idea.

I also wonder whether results should come out before Uni places are offered but there’s probably some sort of admin reason that doesn’t happen.

@Tiredalwaystired There is an argument for criterion-referencing exams like that. The big advantage is that the grades a particular measure of attainment.

The argument against it is the sawtooth effect, where the first cohort to sit a specification are at a disadvantage and get lower grades. Then, as schools and students get a better understanding of the specs and marking criteria and resources like past papers build up, grades get better and better until there’s a spec change and then the grades drop again and the process starts over.

Criterion referencing keeps the “standard” for the grades steadier, but leads to some cohorts having a much better statistical chance of achieving that standard. Norm-referencing (what we use currently) keeps the chances of getting an A more consistent between cohorts, whilst allowing for more variation in the standard.

I’m personally in favour of norm-referencing, but wish the government wouldn’t talk about grade 4s and 5s as “expected” for year 11s when the whole system is designed precisely so that about a third of kids get below that.

Teacher expectations and target grades are totally different , you can know someone is going to fail, but their target grades are worked out through a formula, and can be utterly meaningless

I also wonder whether results should come out before Uni places are offered but there’s probably some sort of admin reason that doesn’t happen.

This gets looked at every few years and they can't find a way to make it happen. It either means changing the school year and exam period or changing university terms and start dates.

I completely agree Spirallingdownwards. My DS was predicted A - got A's /B's. All of his close group of six smart young friends were predicted A's /A and all got a grade lower across the board. None of his peers actually achieved or exceeded their predictions. Yet these predicted grades were only given 6 months ago and based on 18 months of work?

A really tough year - no allowance for Covid, these were the first exams they had sat since SAT's in year 6, days lost from teacher's strikes and other countries in the UK still taking the pandemic into consideration. There were a lot of upset children at school yesterday.

My son fell foul of this. Edexcel maths.

Got a B in maths, having being predicted an A star. He had a nightmare in paper 1 and missed 5 questions. So we knew he'd lost the star. If the grade boundaries were the same as 2019 he'd have got an A. If they'd been slightly higher, by 5 marks, he'd have got an A.

He's lost his university place, feels like shit and knows it's his own fault. He also knows a remark won't change anything. You can see the damage in the breakdown by paper.

It was his first exam too, having never sat formal Gcses and affected his confidence in the rest of his exams.

Maths department were confident that even with those missing questions he would get an A. They felt the papers were sufficiently difficult to warrant a grade boundary at around the 2019 level. The jump of those extra 10 marks between the A and B was apparently unexpected.

And his mark would have been an A if the grade boundaries remained the same or even slightly higher than the last 10 years.

But what can you do? He's learned a difficult lesson.

I've heard lots of stories like this of people predicted A star and getting C. My DD was predicted AAA and got A star A B. The B I was kind of expecting as it was an art subject and the exam piece wasn't her best work even though her coursework was definitely A standard. She worked really hard and got what she expected so I feel like maybe theit predictions were wrong? I do appreciate the grade boundaries were very high and tight. For art it was out of 200 and A was 177 then A* was 189! If others were like that I can see a slightly lower score can easily drop them to a B or C where it wouldn't have before. I do feel for them but it seems most unis have been understanding.

Sorry when i say maybe their predictions were wrong I mean for the kids predicted a star who got bs and cs.

UCAS predictions are always slightly optimistic, it's unfortunately the way the game is played. It's much much more common for people to have a bad day in an exam and underperform, than to pull something unexpected out of the hat. As chance would have it, several of my class ended up within a few percent of a grade boundary and have asked for reviews of marking; we'll see what happens.

Also, despite the best efforts of exam boards to explain exactly how they mark essays, predictions in essay subjects are genuinely harder to make than STEM subjects. My own predictions turned out to be too optimistic this year; I am reassured that I can always put the students in order from strongest to weakest, but how that matches up to a grade is something of a mystery even after all these years.