GCSE German coursework mark puzzle

[GnomeDePlume]

I am looking for a little guidance for DD here after receiving GCSE results today.

She has got an overall A for German with results paper showing Bs & Cs for coursework. She is a bit puzzled by this as the marks she was originally given by the school for the coursework were A*. Is it likely that this coursework has been moderated so far down?

DD has asked in school about this but as she is leaving I don?t know if they will really do anything. What steps does she need to take please? Does she need to request a remark?

All advice gratefully received.

Not the same but a similar situation here. DD2s Geography coursework marked internally and awarded 56/60 which was clear A*, but appeared on exam paper as a C.

Apparently all the Geography students coursework has been downgraded ( many quite substantially like DD2) so the teacher is appealing on behalf of whole year. Don't really understand what could have happened. It may be of course that the teachers at school completely misinterpreted the marking and assessment guidelines and so gave the wrong guidance to the pupils. Guess the pupils lose out in that scenario. School was absolutely rigid on observing the time allowances and controlled assessment nature of the task, to the extent that no papers from their field work could be taken home and no work could be done outside the classroom and the computers they used were barred from accessing any files or internet sites while they did the write up - all what should be done of course, but you do wonder if all school interpreted the rules quite so strictly. Again though, no comeback for the pupils if that should be the case. Or it could be that the person moderating this school's coursework did so too harshly so the grades will be lifted ( fingers crossed).

So re the German, I would have thought the first thing to do is to find out whether the coursework was marked down for your DS's peers as well. In any event you should approach the tecaher and ask how the downgrade could have happened. Hope it works out OK for you.

Your DD's teacher has marked it as an A* but these marks are not passed on to the exam board. The teachers only mark the written work so that a. they can give advice for improvement and b. they know which 2 essays should be submitted.

It is unusual for there to be such a discrepancy between the 2 marks and if it seems to be the case for the whole cohort - ie the whole lot have been marked down then the school might ask for a re-mark. I'm a French teacher and we had a re-mark last year and won our appeal. In our case we are a department of 6 so our written work is looked at by 6 different people thus we felt confident in our marking against the exam criteria. However it may be that in your daughter's school the German dept is small in which case there might not have been much moderation....

The choosing of essays is not the case for Geography though is it - this is a single piece of controlled assessment work based on a field trip. As I understood it, as for the three sciences the controlled assessment work is marked by the teachers and then a random selection only are moderated with the marks of the others going up or down as appropriate. (Might be wrong.)

Re language written work - I didn't realise the teacher could choose which to send in - DD studied four topics, did one piece of writing at end of year 9 and another in year 10 under school exam conditions ( both jsut for practice) and then two more essays written in GCSE exam conditions in November of year 11 and then in June, which were the ones they submitted.

Marks for these and the three sciences investigations were as marked by the teacher. Ditto history assessment. Just the Geography completely out.

yes for MFL pupils can complete as many essays as they like (all written in exam conditions), teachers hand in the best 2. The marks are not submitted to the board. This can produce the situation in that pupils think they have say a grade B for writing, but they don't. This is only the teachers estimate. There are actually very few marks between the grade boundaries so it isn't really surprising if the final result differs a little. However A* to C is a big discrepancy.

Thanks for the comments. It is a tricky one. Literally only a couple of students in DD?s year took the higher tier exam. The puzzling thing is that there is such a discrepancy between the coursework grade (B&C) and the overall grade (A). The implication would be that she had absolutely stormed the exam but strangely lapsed in the coursework.

I know I?m worriting at this but this was DD?s strongest subject and the teachers were convinced she was a nailed on A*.

I will contact the school tomorrow to see what they are doing about it.

Hi gnome, I teach French and German. We have found that with the coursework, the biggest thing affecting marks is correct verb conjugation, i.e. the French/German equivalent of saying "I went" rather than "I goed" or "I going".

We have found that firstly the pupils who wrote simple but very accurate pieces tended to get higher marks. There has also been a tendency for examiners to ignore whole sentences which don't have a clear meaning, so there have been cases where pupils have written a 20 word sentence which is complicated and advanced, but because their verb at the start of the sentence was not quite right, the other (perfect, A* quality) 19 words have been given no credit whatsoever because the overall message of the sentence was unclear.

This does seem really harsh but when you think about it, verbs are linked with tenses and timeframes so even a little slip can really skew the meaning of a sentence/paragraph/whole essay. I think that this is the first year that scripts for writing will not be returned but it may be worth asking the school if they kept a copy of the scripts/recordings. If you needed someone to look over them, I'd be happy to do so.

Do you know what exam board she was doing? I know that the OCR French boundaries have changed from 2011-2012 by as much as 5 marks. Could this be what's happened with your daughter? The German and Spanish boundaries have also changed in OCR but by very little - still odd though given that there is a mark scheme to follow and the same / very similar pieces of writing / speaking can be produced year on year. This effectively means the same piece of writing produced in 2011 would be graded differently if produced in 2012 .

In my dept we have found some strange marking this year and I will be asking the HM to fund a remark of the writing in German.

She's done well to pull it up to grade A overall though - reading + listening = 40%, speaking + writing = 60%. She really must have aced the receptive exams.

The exam board was edexcel

Now I'm home and have been able to discuss properly with DD the problem papers are speaking and listening not written coursework as I had thought. Apologies for my own confusion!

DD1 had A* for the reading and writing papers. She wasnt surprised to be marked down on the listening (graded as B) as she said it was quite difficult to get through that part in the time (only allowed 2 listens).

The problem has been the speaking paper which was marked internally then sent off for moderation. Originally this was marked as A* then marked down to a C in the results.

The thing that makes this so perplexing is that DD is a fluent Dutch speaker so should have not struggled with the speaking paper. The only risk would be slipping into Dutch and not noticing!

Ho hum, I will contact the school tomorrow.

Many thanks for all the insight and advice. Unless DD has had a brainstorm in the speaking paper (and the teacher didnt notice!) I shall be asking if it is possible to get a remark. I know that this is only possibly the difference between A and A* but DD is concerned not to have anomolous grades which may impact university applications.

I teach French & we use the Edexcel board. The grade boundaries for the Listening paper this year have all been raised so that a lot of my pupils who I thought would score say a 'C' have come out with a D or even an E in some cases.

yes the speaking will have been moderated and a sample sent off. Hers may not have been sent off but if the board think that the sample have been marked too generously then they'll bring the whole cohort down. Maybe that is the case - the marking was over generous and although your daughter's was good the whole lot have been brought down. Do you know if hers was submitted? If so possibly the examiner felt that she didn't develop her answers fully and that her accuracy wasn't tight enough, whilst the teacher, knew what your daughter was trying to do & knowing how hard she had worked was too lenient over grammatical errors.....

The school will have to ask the Head for permission to have re-mark and I think they'll have to pay. Best write to the school to get clear info on what her speaking had been marked at. The staff will then need the time (once the new term starts) to see if the whole cohort have been affected and to see if a re-mark is possible. This will take a few weeks.

Good luck - for what it is worth I don't think an A instead of an A* would affect uni applications but I understand your concerns.

What chocolate has said makes a lot of sense. It is probably either the whole cohort having their marks adjusted (although that adjustment is massive, I've never heard of people dropping more than 1, maybe 2 grades on a component which was adjusted), or the accuracy was not good enough. Like I said before, even a spelling error or a missing umlaut can make all the difference if it involves the verb as it will mean that whole chunks of speaking are disregarded as not having a clear message.

Plus, a massive amount of emphasis is put on the exam question - did she answer every question exactly without going off on a tangent? Did the teacher ask every question which was written on the task sheet they submitted? Were the questions asked relevant to the task title? They are harsh on that, e.g. If the title is "school and education" then talking about work experience or hobbies etc will gain no credit even though they could be to do with school...

Was the recording long enough, did she speak for more than 4 minutes? More able students often tend to speak faster and therefore run the risk of not delivering a long enough piece and dropping marks.

Sorry for the essay but there are so many factors to consider - some of them down to the student, some are teacher error but it's useful to know what the common issues are when trying to investigate crazy results.

Yes, in fact the whole cohort was sent off. Would they have in fact marked them all again?

She has an A grade A level in Dutch which according to DH (studied German himself) is grammatically very similar to German. I would be surprised to find her grade being marked down so far (A* down to C).

If I'm honest my fear is that there has been a simple administrative mistake and tapes have gone off with the wrong labels on.

Of course it could be as you say, chocolateshoes, in which case the school needs to know that its marking is so adrift.

Thanks spg1983, I definitely need to get more clarification from the school.

I know that it probably seems like I am banging on about a very minor (in the grand scheme of things) anomoly but the school has a number of problems especially in recognising and dealing with issues (has been in and out of special measures a couple of times over the last few years). My experience over the years has been that unless parents make a genuine fuss the HM is keen to brush problems under the carpet.

DC2 & 3 still have to go through the GCSE mill so I am keen to chase this down (enlightened self interest!)

Gnome it is very strange that the whole cohort of speaking was submitted. Usually about 20% of pupils are called for. It may be that the board were unhappy with the first sample and then called them all in but I haven't ever heard of that before with Edexcel. Our marks were adjusted last year but they didn't ask for any more samples. I wonder if your DD has got that wrong...the teacher may have said that they get sent off without really clarifying that it is in fact a sample.

it is actually very difficult to mark the speaking. At times the criteria can seem quite vague and it can be quite subjective. Hence the need to moderate as a department.

I doubt it is administartive as these days it is all MP3 files & the students names etc are on the recording - but you never know.

Our results were brought down last year, we asked for a remark & they were brought back up again - apparently it was an administrative error...who knows!

chocolateshoes I have checked with DD. She said the whole cohort got sent off because it was only 10 in total. There was a very wide range in that group skewed towards the lower grades.

Is it possible that the sample needed to be larger because of the in and out of special measures problem?

Who knows? In the first instance DD has raised this with the examinations manager who has said she will read the examiners report then we go on from there.

gnome the sample is nothing to do with special measures - if there's fewer than 20 pupils sitting a language then they automatically all get requested. Hope you get the answers you're looking for - and yes, Dutch is v similar grammatically to German and I'd imagine your dd's accent was also brilliant as well with her background. The mystery deepens... Keep us updated and let us know if you need more info.

And yes they would all have been re-marked as they would all have been treated as the official sample for moderation.

Thanks for that spg1983, the plot thickens!

ah - as such a small group they were all requested. I see. Hmmm in that case I wonder if there is only 1 German teacher at the school and therefore no moderation?

Hi chocolateshoes, yes, there is more than one teacher and there was at least another review by the other teacher. DD got on very well with the staff in the MFL department as she is a keen linguist so was probably kept better informed on precisely what went on than would one of the less enthusiastic students.

I have contacted the examinations manager and raised the question of a remark so will see what happens next.

good luck!

thank you!

Have finally managed to talk to the exams manager at the school. Apparently this paper counts as coursework so cant be remarked unless all students papers (or recordings I suppose) are remarked.

I am a bit hacked off about this as I detected foot shuffling going on. The subject teacher is due to phone us so we will see what she has to say.

It sounds like the school really dont want to do anything.

As a matter of interest if the school dont want to appeal against the grade is there any way that we can independantly?

From my conversation with the examinations manager my concern is that (yet again) the HM will sweep this under the carpet in case other students get downgraded.

My daughters Edexcel writing was controlled assessment in school and sent off to be marked. The teacher did mark it herself for, I presume, some idea of how good it was and internal statistics but no grade was ever issued. We were, however, told it 'ought to be of a C Grade standard'. She actually got a B for it. (Although a C grade overall when it was all added together with the exam and speaking marks).

Still waiting to hear from school on DS1s French.
He was given 100% and A* on a CA by the teacher. The rest of the class redid the paper but he did not as he could not have improved on it.
When he got his results it showed 72% and a B. He got A* on everything else but that brought it down to a B.
I thought the teacher marked CAs and exam board just moderated?