January GCSE modules - will grades be available?

[creamteas]

I have heard on the grapevine (but not found anything solid to back it up) that it has been decided that they will no longer publish the GCSE grade boundaries in January.

Does anyone know if that is the case?

At our school, they decided to enter everyone for GCSE English exam in January so as to be able to fit in a retake in June if there is a repeat of last summer's problem. But clearly if the grade boundaries are not available, then it will not be possible to judge who needs a retake.......

I've not heard about this, but I assume that student's will be given a grade and a UMS score which will decide which grade they get. The UMS score for each grade boundary never changes, so I assume they just won't publish the raw scores needed to achieve each grade.

This is correct for English/English Language only. Pupils will only get raw scores for January even if all elements of the exam are cashed in. Just another way of OFQUAL trying to justify their appalling behaviour, apparently if pupils didn't get their predicted grade early evil teachers spent hours working with pupils to improve their grades the following June. Well that must be wrong!

how can this be legal? If students have taken the full exam series then the results belong to them no matter when they were taken so anyone should be justified in taking action if the boards withhold their grade without good cause

It does seem that they are trying to design the cover up before they make a decision as to if they need one!

And how can they justify this for English and not the other subjects? The whole things stinks but doesn't actually surprise me.

Info from ocr here:

www.ocr.org.uk/news/2012/item_065.aspx

DS is already in the situation where he doesn't know what grade he got for English language - he has an A for the June 12 paper and his controlled assessments are all band 5 but as the qualification isn't cashed in (he's in year 11 now) it could be an A or A depending on grade boundaries for the CAs. He is resitting the written paper in Jan to try to ensure the A but we will be none the wiser