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.

It’s worth remembering, that every normal year,only about 20% of predicted grades are accurate. The vast majority are too generous. Even the government advice sheets ahead of results, which were aimed at parents and students mentioned this figure…trying to manage expectations.

I think the reason the lower than predicted grades hurt more this year is due to;
a. More of these students had stellar GCSE results given to them than woukd normally have achieved them in exam circumstances….so they thought their inflated predictions were realistic (as perhaps their teachers did too….made it hard for teachers - especially in colleges where the staff haven’t taught them previously- to distinguish between genuine 8/9 students and those who’d been bumped up in Covid years)
b. Media hype - emphasising and focusing on a harsh drop in top grades with a focus on comparing to 2020/21 rather than to 2019.

In standard pre-Covid years, many students were always disappointed with their results and found d them lower than predictions. They just accepted it and moved on. In the end, it felt down to them and their exam performance and not the fault of anyone else really. During Covid years, people who were disappointed felt it was due to forced outside their control as they hadn’t sat exams. Now even having sat exams many are disappointed and feel that despite doing exams, the boundaries have been manipulated to disadvantage them. It’s harder to feel that the results reflect your own attainment.

Very little is being made on any threads of the fact that overal the % getting top grades is still higher than 2019. It doesn’t fit the woe narrative.

And yes, different types of schoolsare seeing very different outcomes. As far as I can see so far (and this is based on so all amounts to if data) the independent schools have held up well against 2019. Some might have inflated too much during Covid and have seen drops compared to those years, but performance compared to 2019 is strong or often stronger still. The same seems to be the case for selective state schools and some of the very good Comps.

To me, this limited data simply supports the fact again that in times of difficulty (Covid and years recovering from effects of it…still probably in that boat) students in affluent areas and with supportive parents and schools able to respond quickly and effectively to changes as they arise, pull ahead further and those with the least advantages get further left behind. To be honest, it’s not surprising…depressing but not surprising at all. It annoys people because it’s a stark reflection of the different opportunities and resources available to different people and the impact in hard cold data.

No what’s competitive is access to university. Not the A levels themselves.

No, A levels are competitive because grade distributions are set and decided in advance. So if it's decided that 10% will get an A star, students are competing with each other to get into the top 10%. The A star itself doesn't tell you whether they scored 80% or 50% on their exam, only that they came in the top 10%.

@WombatChocolate

Great post.

My school doesn't put UCAS predicted grades on student reports, we put our own predicted grades which are regularly updated - often UCAS predicted grades are based on end of Y12 performance which is woefully out of date by the end of Y13.

I do wonder when you see kids saying 'I was predicted A*AB but I got ABC' whether they are talking about UCAS predictions (which are always optimistic) or teacher predictions.

Students still also stick to the idea that they will go up a grade after their mocks. No, no you generally won't. Especially the mocks after Christmas. I used 2019 boundaries all the way through- although this year's boundaries still went up. I was pretty accurate in my predictions. The trouble is, as pp have said, in an essay subject it can often go either way. Eg. A fair few of my students could have been b or c, but I have to make the call. I like to err on side of caution.

I have to say, I still don’t understand who A levels works.
Coming from another country and looking at boundaries that keep changing from one year to the next (why and under which criteria?), grades that vary depending in results (eg you might need 50% to get a B in one subject and 70% in another subject to get the same B) and the sometimes very tight squeeze at the top leaving few points to differentiate between an A*, A or B. None of that makes sense.

If it’s an exam, treat it’s like an exam at Uni for example.
Set criteria (you need 40% min to pass, a first is over 70% etc…), no variation of boundaries so people always know where they stand and a spread in criteria that actually allows to really differentiate between the top students.
It should be about evaluating the knowledge and understanding of pupils. Not ending up feeling like a game to understand the system and which school will be the best at passing on that information.

Because you need to fill at certain number of places

We had a very simple system but it was still flexible year on year

If you got loads of people applying for engineering or different outcomes 158 to go might be 164

It had to be flexible

Aren't grade boundaries are a bit of a red herring because they are dependent on both how easy the paper is and on the strength of the cohort? So they can really only be helpful if used for a particular exam paper and even then the student only learns the grade they would have achieved if they had taken the exam in a different year as part of a different cohort.

I was expecting boundaries to be lower this year to reflect the covid disruption / lack of exam experience. But maybe some boards made their papers easier and/or as PP have suggested, they may have a higher concentration of DC who were less disadvantaged by covid.

It is basically impossible to write a paper that is the same difficulty every year, so if you set '40% is the pass' then you'd have more kids failing one year than the previous year, regardless of if they were just as good at the subject. This would not be fair.

@TheMoth , but students believe that because that’s what they are told. And they are told that because it’s a way to ensure that said students will revise and make efforts up to the end.

The thing is, erring on the side of caution rather than optimism with UCAS grades doesn’t really do them any favours.

So many students get an offer based on their UCAS predictions, then miss their offer by a grade or two…but still get accepted. However, without the UCAS prediction in the first place, they wouldn’t get the offer. That’s the reality isn’t it. And given that’s the approach that most schools take (realistic but optimistic predicting) if you go for a very cautious approach, they are disadvantaged.

In our place, we always use the grade boundaries of the previous year (2019 through Covid and until now) in internal exams. Students have a yr12 target grade that they are graded against and then in yr13 have their UCAS grade to be graded against. We don’t do what Noble mentions in terms of having another internal predicted/target grade too. After UCAS grades are set, those are what the students are interested in. So we grade them as exceeding, on track and below in their performance against those UCAS grades.

On a macro level, school is pretty accurate in knowing what % of students will get each grade. However, on an individual basis it’s impossible to be 100% accurate as some under and over perform. We give what is achievable on a good day. They have to have evidenced working at that level.

It’s a difficult balance. When only 20% of grades predicted overall are accurate with most being too generous (which unis know and adjust the amount of offers given to reflect this) students need to keep working hard and remaining hopeful and optimistic. They rarely know that so few achieve their predicted grades. The idea would probably be very demoralising. And so many get taken by their Firm or Insurance if they miss their grades anyway, and quickly that become the key thing for them. Really substantial misses though suggest either very generous predictions which were unrealistic ir sometimes errors in marking…it certainly happens. Schools and colleges will be looking at their outcomes and should be factoring it into the predictions for the next cohort.ll.although of course many Yr12 a have already been given their predictions. The timeline of them needing their grades ahead of the summer so they can meaningfully consider uni applications, doesn’t allow reflection in actual A Level results to be built into the next round of predictions.

I was expecting boundaries to be lower this year to reflect the covid disruption / lack of exam experience.

I did see on twitter about Edexcel maths grade boundaries that Edexcel had said that they intended to make the papers more accessible, so higher grade boundaries would have been expected. It's unfortunate that it happened the same time as grades being reset to 2019 as it does make it difficult to unpick the impact.

I am really interested to see what happens to GCSE grade boundaries next week - this Y11 cohort have been visibly impacted by covid - the apathy is notable, the national absence rates appalling.

Y13 - the ones who made it to A-levels are rather a self-selecting bunch of those less impacted by covid, iyswim.

Well I don’t know but they do manage that in France.
Somehow between the exam paper, the criteria for marking and the review to settle down the final marks, they do manage to have a system that is consistent year on year. Like Universities really (because they will have the same issues right?)

Ive never heard ANY issue like the ones here in France. Even teachers (and I have a few in my family and a friends) never complain about difficulty of papers (variability), boundaries issues etc…

For me (from my own background in engineering & quality) when I hear ‘it’s impossible to do X and Y’ I hear ‘the system doesn’t quite work but I’m not ready to do the work to make it better’, usually because ‘that’s how we’ve always done things’.

The aim of A levels shouldn’t be to fill university places though.

It’s an exam. One used by employers to know if people have achieved a certain level. One that is supposed to tell if students have acquired a certain understanding. Just like have. 2:2 or a first at Uni (or failing) has a different meaning.

Criteria to go to Uni is a Uni problem. It shouldn’t be an A level issue.

Well I don’t know but they do manage that in France.

They won't, but they'll pretend that they do.

@LifeIsShitJustNow

The reason why grade boundaries move is to do with how hard the paper is-and how good the cohort is, although with the numbers taking the more popular subjects that should vary less.

Think of it this way:
When I was at secondary school in year 8 I got 52% in my geography exam. In year 9 I got 73%.

When I first got my year 8 paper I was disappointed. Turned out I was 3rd in the year. It was a hard paper. Unfortunately my joy in year 9 was a bit tempered by the fact that it was a far easier paper and I was 15th in my class. It was probably fair enough, as I wasn't continuing with geography so hadn't revised.
So in terms of A-levels my year 8 paper would have been an A*, by year 9, around a C, maybe.

University exams, which set the pass mark at 40% do similar, but normally by scaling the marks to get the normal curve they way. So although they say it's a set 40%, the number of marks (despite the total being the same) to get 40% is different.

The way a-levels/GCSEs work is they have a set percentage getting each grade. So if this cohort was generally less well prepared, then still the top, say 10% gets an A* but with lower grades.
So if the grade boundaries are higher this year than 2019, it's either because the paper was easier, or that the cohort was better.

It’s fine it works well. Plus not every test is exactly the same as in pp

Actually I’ll amend that slightly the 158 requirement v 164 in another year might be a separate system. That there’s a point where places match applicants means it works well

Y13 - the ones who made it to A-levels are rather a self-selecting bunch of those less impacted by covid, iyswim.

Yes, good point. Next week's results may tell a very different story.

I am amazed by some of the stories on the results thread, DC predicted A star / A, feeling good about the exams and then getting CCD etc. I can't remember if there are more of them than usual, or figure out what is behind such surprising results - is it wildly optimistic predictions, or maybe the grade boundaries are all squished up so that a few marks make a big difference.

In a lot of subjects, the grade boundaries have been spread out more, rather than squashed up. My perception (I haven't looked at all exam boards) is that in sciences, there is a longer "tail" for the C/D/E students. Getting a wide spread of marks on the exam isn't a bad thing in itself though.

I think, to some extent, it is optimistic predictions, and some of these students will have been receiving other feedback through year 13, which suggests they weren't on target for their A grades. As I think has been mentioned, most of our predicted grades are set by about October- so mostly on Y12 performance, and that's a long time for a student to start to struggle for whatever reason. And obviously you get parents leaning on you "oh but they got all 8s at GCSE".

I do think there's also some impact from this being the first set of "real" exams that students have sat. The students I teach have never done a full exam series in the hall in most cases- for their Y12 mocks, they did use the exam hall, but they didn't sit a full set of papers.

Doing 9 x 2-3 hour papers over the course of not that many weeks is a lot, and I do think some students struggled with it because they'd never really done anything similar. And the impact of that won't be uniform. Some students also definitely struggled with feeling real external pressure for the first time.

Yes, I suppose the posters are generally parents who may not know exactly what the DC's teachers have been saying, beyond UCAS predictions a year ago.

It's pretty terrifying to think that you can be predicted A star / A, achieve that in mocks, come out of the exams feeling like you did just as well, and then completely unexpectedly drop to C / D.

My DS was one of those who were predicted A* & A's and came out with BBC yesterday.
Every bit of work he did across his subjects in yr 13 was at A*/A level.
Every mock he did in yr 13 he was awarded A* or A.
He saw his marks from College all the way through YR13.
He got as far as interview stage with Oxford after submitting a piece of work.
There is thorough confusion in our house as to how he came out with BBC.

I'm sorry to hear that, @Ottercave, and that your DS finds a way forward. Were they essay subjects, by any chance? It seems to happen less often in STEM subjects.

Yes all 3 were essay subjects.
Luckily he still got into his insurance which he liked just not as much as his firm.