School giving ridiculously low predicted A level grades

[basilmum]

Do teachers/schools benefit from giving pupils ridiculously low A level predicted grades for UCAS? My DD's school - a grammar - is predicting everyone really low grades (lower than their achieved grades at end of yr12 and start of yr13) and refusing to change them. They forced parents to sign a form saying that we would not attempt to challenge their grade decisions (legal advice please!). So these kids are now unable to apply to or secure offers from universities that they could reasonably aspire to and will probably actually get the grades for in the real exams next summer - no point in having the grades without the offers...So a lot of these kids are distraught and going to be forced to either go to a lesser uni or take a gap year so they can apply with their achieved grades next year. How does this benefit the school at all? My DD said another pupil overheard a teacher saying that he would get a pay rise if the pupils achieve a higher grade than what he has predicted them. A bonus for it looking like the pupils had progressed under his tutoring. Can this be true? It is beyond appalling if it is true. Ruining kids future opportunities for monetary gain...?

@Autumnus 👍

OP maybe the college has been grading the mocks on the boundaries post Covid which I believe were lower. I would ask for an up to date mock test based on 2023 boundaries and see what your DD gets. Don’t just accept their grades without a stance.

I too can't grasp how this is in the schools best interest. Very odd. I'd keep pushing though, I couldn't help myself.

@user746016 No one thinks all RG are better. No one. Clearly there are other research unis. However evidence still points to alumni from the RG doing better in jobs overall but quite frankly we now refer to RG Plus. So add in Bath, St Andrews, Lancaster and Loughborough. Fashionable unis come and go and Newcastle isn’t matching a few others right now on some measures. Neither is Queen Mary’s or Liverpool. Who really cares? Many unis have outstanding courses and students have great outcomes.

Physics is my subject. I work at a top independent academic school. Last year two A (2023), the year before three A (2022) and two the year before - classes of 10. A in physics are like bloody gold dust. Most of my students get an A (or a B). They are judged after the whole A level - a combined score. So A in each section doesn’t equal A. We are reluctant to predict A grades due to this we have to be a dead cert that they are high achieving on equal areas of the syllabus. My daughter just scored 91% on a Year 12 assessment for physics made from ‘difficult’ exam questions(the teacher that set the exams words) at her school , 95% on biology and chemistry. She has been given A targets in each, but just given As in all the year 12 assessments, brackets A. She got A maths in year 12 and was top in the country in her GCSEs in physics, biology and chemistry.

At my school I only predict A* if I am certain- in the last 3 years (only been 4 years at this school) so far I’ve been proved right.

Ps with the over inflated grades during Covid the next few years will be unsettled as the exam board try to reduce this.

Pps less than 7% ie less than one in ten will get an A* in a subject

we encourage a broad curriculum unlike other indie schools - so most of ours take 4 A levels. And get two A and like A, B. Or A, A. But this is why most schools local to us (private) are making them drop a fourth to concentrate on a getting an A eg AAA

These students haven't achieved anything in Year 12, unless they've sat external AS exams, which would be unusual. What the school have probably done is use 2022's grade boundaries to mark 2023 Year 12 mocks. The marks would now be too high given the grade boundary increases in 2023. It's a bit odd of the school to get you to sign something that says you won't challenge the predicted grades though. I highly doubt they could legally enforce that, so it might be worth doing anyway, they might cave for an easy life. If they really won't give aspirational predicted grades there's not much you can do about it though, theses grades are the grades they think your DCs will get given the new, higher, grade boundaries. Could your DC plan to have a year out, so they're applying with their actual grades, if they do in fact do better than their predictions?

I’m a few years out of it now, but at year 12 students arrived with predicted grades already set based on GCSE. There are complex algorithms with suggest certain grades for GCSE usually result in particular A level outcomes. Even for non GCSE subjects like say Psychology, the Science/English/ Hum grades would all be factored in with a value and a prediction would jump out.

So I had very little movement around predictions ~ I shouldn’t be predicting below those grades because the data suggested they could be achieved. I was often loathe to move the grades up because students would then assume that was a given and stop working.

Of course the Covid readjustment has changed everything but believe me, teachers have less autonomy than you think. It’s very data driven.

As for bonuses in state schools for anyone other than Academy leadership …ha ha ha.

The issue with this is that there will only be one secure unseen paper, from 2023, and they're likely using that for official Year 13 mocks later in the year. They can't really use papers that are now freely available on the exam board website, as students just practice the past papers until they've learnt all the answers. If they've applied 2023 grade boundaries to papers already taken at the end of Year 12, that's the best they can do really. I'd be asking just how their Year 12 mock scores compare to 2023's grade boundaries though, to make sure that is what they've done, and that they're not just predicting low grades for some other reason.

But those will be targets set by mathematical algorithms based in prior attainment. No teacher can seta made up low target and then say 'see? Smashed it'. That's not a thing.

My entire class (comp) have 'targets' of A*!

We'll yes, this is also quite a highly likely scenario. It's what we do, we always use the grades generated based on GCSE outcomes, and we very rarely deviate from this. If the school are doing this though, you'd not be surprised by their predicted grades, as they'd be the same predicted grades that they had throughout Year 12.

Our UCAS grades are not (always) the same as actual predictions based on performance and also not the same as the target grades.

What would it serve to give my entire class A* predictions? Many of them would apply for universities beyond their reach.

I was told (by multiple teachers & ucas advisors at different schools) that UCAS predicted grades should be what grade the teacher thinks a student will get on a good day.

Yes, they should.