Controlled Assessments - how are final grades awarded?

[magentadreamer]

There has been several mentions about CA's being down graded on threads today. I know that CA's are marked by the class teacher but how are the final grades awarded? Are all CA's from a school sent for moderation or is it just a few and if the marking is a bit generous then all of them are sent? Or do they just down grade all of them unseen? DD last year was down graded twice - it didn't effect her over all result but I am now wondering if anyone other than DD's Teacher actually looked at her work.

I know grade boundaries come into play so that DD might have got 30/40 and been told thats a B grade level by her Teachers but 30/40 when the grade boundaries are publish meant that was a C grade *I've made these figures up.

I only know about my subject which is MFL:

Speaking: these are marked and moderated by teachers in the department. Thus if it is larger dept a number of staff might well look at the work but a smaller subject might not have so many staff - so it is possible that only person would have heard the work. Also some depts might ask for a sample from each teacher to moderate rather than going through each pupil's work. The board ask for a specific sample. If they agree with the marks, the whole cohorts marks remain. However if they think we have been too generous from the sample they mark the whole cohort down. In theory they could also mark them all up but have never known this happen

Writing: these are not marked by the school but are all sent away for marking by the board. Teachers however would usually mark the work so as to be able to advise pupils on how to improve and also to help them select which essays to submit. For both speaking & writing pupils may do as many tasks as they like (all in exam conditions) and the best 2 for each skill are submitted.

I teach Science, and this was our first pass at CA since it was introduced with the 2011 specification. We felt we were working completely blind with them, and genuinely had no idea what the grade boundaries would be. Consequently, we only gave our students their mark out of 50. They could do three and submit the best mark. Most of ours did 2 (they are very time havy, and there is a knock on effect on teaching the rest of the course!). Some had all three attempts. teachers marked them, and then they were moderated by other teachers, with the GCSE corrdinator having the final input where there was any doubt (and we emailed our advisor pretty frequently too!!)

We sent off our marks, and then had a sample of 20 specific scripts requested, across the whole marking range.

If the marks areadjusted, it is the marks of the whole cohort. There is, however, a tolerance permitted.

Teachers always need to be circumpect when giving grades for centre assessed work that has to be subequently moderated. Even for our legacy GCSE, which I have been marking for years, I still heavily caveat my grade predictions.

Totally agree TFM - you have to very deliberately tell kids (& parents) that this is not the final grade etc....but despite me frequently reiterating this the students do still say 'I've got a B for writing' etc

That's why is was quite helpful this year when we had no idea and refused to give a grade at all. Next year of course, they'll all be looking at this year's boundaries, but we will continue to just give a mark out of 50.

English - sample is sent to moderator. Moderator checks a sub- sample. If there are issues, whole sample is checked but extra work not called for. If there are major discrepancies between school and mod marks, marks may be adjusted for the whole cohort - this is a very complex process.

The other issue is that mark boundaries are not fixed - so a CA with 20 marks might have been an A* last year but an A or a B this year. Until this summer, relatively small cohorts have been doing CAs - this summer there is a much wider spread of ability and sometimes eight times as many entries, so the boundaries have been set based on a wider sample.

HTH

All CAs should be standardised internally if there is more than one teacher of the subject - so I looked at every single CA for my dept of five staff to check that we were even handed.

CA marked by teachers and moderated internally. A sample (10% of cohort plus highest and lowest) are sent to an external moderator. If the marks are too high, the whole lot will be "scaled". They won't scale if the marks allocated by the teacher and moderator agree within +/- approx 10% in general.

It is very embarrassing for a school to be scaled.

Thanks.