Re-mark of controlled assessment

[aliena]

Dd's school seems to have little idea of how to do this. DD got high As in her Spanish examined papers but her two controlled assessments were savagely marked down by the moderator from As to an A and a B giving her an overall A. Apparently she was not the only one to whom this happened. The teacher has 31 years experience and this has never happened before to her apparently. Can i get re-marks of both the moderated assessments? School in general dislikes re-marks and i get the impression they dont know what the procedure is- they said sending one off was sufficient for both. Thank you!

The thing I find odd about this is that it's children who are getting A* in their written exams - a number of cases of this are listed above. Can completely accept that assessors are highly trained etc. but it just seems a bit weird that children who are clearly talented linguists in their examinations aren't managing to show that in the CA.

Yes, everything else was an a* in the end but the written CAs, which took her marks down to As. It doesn't seem right

I'm a teacher, we mark controlled assessment to a very strict markscheme. It gives an overall score, NOT a grade. As a rule we don't tell students the grade, but the score, with an ESTIMATE of what that would equate to. Until the exam board set the grade boundaries its impossible to know what the grade will be. Eg a score of 19/24 in past years may have been awarded an A grade, but may only be a B subsequently.

Thank you everyone. I am somewhat relieved from reading the responses that dd isnt the only one with a startling discrepancy between the exams ( for which she got 60 ums in each which i understand is full marks) and the moderated assessments.

Am i right in thinking that we can ask for a re mark of both the written and the spoken assessments?

Am i also right that the root cause of the moderation might be that the teacher somehow got it wrong? And hence that is the reason everyone in the class was savagely marked down?

I must say i dont like these wretched controlled assessments. Too much pressure on the teachers for one thing.

Aliena, you are right on all counts.

And don't get me wrong I love teachers, I am one.

I still think it's likely to be teacher error OR a govt. conspiracy/exam board marking down.

Either way, you can't win - sorry!

Arrrrgh. After everything I've just said, the teacher is apparently still wrong?! What is going on?!

So all the teachers that this happens to year on year are wrong?! I suggest you all go and read the MFL forum on TES to see just how widespread this is every year.

By coincidence, I have just been reading the comments. I've also been looking for the percentages awarded each grade, but couldn't find them for this year. What puzzles me is that everybody claims that their grades are lower than expected, but nationally the percentages awarded each grade stays about the same from year to year.

If your candidates are regularly getting Ds when you think they should be higher, I wonder if it's worth approaching the subject officer for your board and seeing if somebody could go through some work with you and explaining the grade. It might be expensive and I'm not even sure they would do it after the fuss a couple of years ago when chief examiners were apparently giving too much away. However, with controlled assessments, there isn't an issue with knowing questions in advance. I assume you've read the relevant examiners reports.

It does concern me if your candidates are being awarded Ds and you don't know why. Maybe it's because I've read so many scripts, but there really IS a difference between a piece of work worth a B and one worth a D.

Just found the percentages awarded each grade:

www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm

The percentage awarded top grades has fallen slightly since last year, but not dramatically.

Interestingly, the percentage awarded *A-C is consistent with the figure I gave previously (approx. 75%), so I guess the work I marked was typical.

I'm not allowed to say too much about the work I marked, but I can put my hand on my heart and suggest that some candidates are "supported" more than others - either that, or they are in telepathic communication with each other and manage to write very similar pieces of work, including the same idioms, etc. It is also quite noticeable that schools with very small class sizes (usually private schools) have candidates with much better work. It's not fair of course, because teachers with large mixed-ability classes can't give their students the same level of support.

This happened last year to DS1 (and the rest of his class). Exam board moderated down the teachers mark dramatically. She had given him full marks for a CA and so he didn't bother to re do it because there seemed to be nothing he could add. When he got his GCSE it had been given a C while every other paper and CA got A*. It brought his overall mark down to A.
We dropped it as we got nowhere with the school, who of course are happy with anything above a C and DS was not doing languages at his 6th form.

Doobeedee with respect if it is happening to you every year you need to reconsider your teaching/internal standardisation.

It can happen to the best of departments occasionally, but all the time? There is an error somewhere.

We noticed in a couple of subjects CA's grades were down. We never, ever take the CA grade that the teacher gives as gospel. IMO they shouldn't tell the children their grades in the first place.

DS2's business CA was marked at a high A* by the teacher and moderated down to just an A. The whole class had their CA down graded, it doesn't surprise me one iota, the teacher was crap. If anyone was wrong in the marking it was her.

Controlled assessments and coursework are exceptionally rarely changed in appeals.
The problem is often the UMS system. For example, the teacher awards just short of full marks thinking that will be a top grade. However, the only guaranteed top grade mark would be 100%z

Would you mind saying which language and which board? I can promise you that if I marked your students' work and they used a variety of structures and their work was coherent with little ambiguity that they would not have been awarded a mark lower than that required for a "C".

Just one thought...are you giving them tasks which don't restrict them too much? Sometimes teachers direct their students too much, which produces formulaic work, concentrating too much on the bullet points and not producing something which is original and "flows".

Littlemiss- I get into arguments every year with 6thformers wanting to know what grade their coursework will mean. I have to say, I don't know, the UMS system often hammers teacher marked work. I just encourage them to aim for full raw marks.
Our raw marks were all upheld and have been every year but this still results in disappointing grades sometimes.

All members of the department are extremely experienced outstanding or good teachers (though how long that will last with these results...) who have never had these problems before under the old system and who have never had speaking marks questioned. We have all done the AQA training and spend hours writing and rewriting tasks. We also consult our controlled assessment advisor to get our tasks approved. We have differentiated tasks to ensure all students get the correct amount if support. When I say that it happens every year, I mean for the last 2 years as that's how long the new system has been running if you discount the first year which was not a great reflection of the exam.

Well dd's was unit 4 in both french and German AQA. All other units a* and unit 4 b.

ONS, It isn't just a question of terminology. There is a big difference between moderation and external marking. MFL speaking tasks are marked by the schools and a small sample is then moderated by the exam boards. Unless the marks are very wrong, they might be adjusted slightly, but are usually allowed to stand. A candidate can be caught out if his/her work is not part of the sample and has been marked accurately, but if the sample needs adjusting, the marks from the whole centre will be changed.

Schools do not even have to look at controlled writing assessments. If they want, they can just put them in an envelope and send them off to the assessor. They CANNOT guarantee or award a grade. Most schools do look at the work, so that they can ensure that the best work is submitted and to give candidates a predicted grade, but (in my opinion) are very foolish if they tell a student that a piece of work is going to be a certain grade. They just cannot know, because (as mentioned above) grade boundaries do change slightly, as to the detailed marking instructions. Your dd was misled if she was told that she already "had" a certain mark for a particular piece of work.

And I'm not talking about them being downgraded from the teacher's assessment as the writing is not marked by the teachers. I'm talking about the writing grades being so much lower than the other skills. As for teaching, as I said, we have all been graded outstanding or good for years. I just don't get how we can be so right on speaking but so wrong in writing.

Yes, why is it that it seems so many of them performed two grades worse in unit 4 than any other? It does seem very strange.

It may well not have been marked by her teacher, actually - to be honest I started to lose track of what was the mark for what over the last few months. What I do know is that every assessment she did in MFL, every mock and every other unit paper in both GCSEs was an A*. So it seems strange, to say the least, that unit 4 in both MFLs came out as a B. And annoying that that made her overall grade lower.

I am not planning to make anything of this - I doubt we could do anything about it, and I don't want her blaming anyone or anything else, or indeed feeling that an A is something she should be in any way unhappy about getting. But it certainly seems that something is a bit rum, given all the similar posts above!

Yes absolutely. It's all very well to keep saying that teachers shouldn't tell students the grades - ours didn't but they did say that the work was in line with the predicted overall grade which was A. We're not questioning the way you are marking the papers daphnedill, but don't you think it's slightly odd that all these children who have A across the board for every other aspect of the GCSE are getting Bs for controlled assessments? We were AQA by the way.

Well done to her for the A!

FWIW, I think written controlled assessment in languages is the most stupid assessment ever and I can't wait for it to be scrapped. I used to mark terminal exams before coursework and controlled assessments were introduced. The majority of candidates couldn't string a decent sentence together unaided - and they still can't. They don't understand enough grammar to form a framework for their writing and rely on spoonfed "chunks" of language. I know from my own dcs, from pupils, tutees and from marking, that many of the highest achieving candidates in writing have private tutors, friends/relatives who are native speakers or have been taught in small classes with - ahem- a considerable amount of help, so that it has become a mere test of memory. Unfortunately, some of them can't remember very well, don't understand what they're writing and haven't got the grammatical skills to check their work. They don't know how to use a dictionary either. They end up writing down the bits they can remember, which is sometimes total rubbish. There is little incentive for deep understanding, because students think they can just remember what the teacher has told them to remember.

I'm not sure that the grades for writing are lower than other skills nationally, but I actually think they should be, because writing is the most difficult skill. It is also possible for a pupil with a good tutor and good memory to achieve full marks, which is a hard act to follow for pupils, whose teachers do things by the book. To be honest, I would be more worried, if pupils were achieving lower marks in the other skills, because I think they are more valuable and much more difficult to - er - manipulate.

I don't work for AQA, so I can't comment. No, I don't think it's odd that they're getting Bs in writing - see above. I'm not actually sure that's true nationally anyway. I work for Edexcel and we're told, when marking, to start with a B and are given examples of work at that level. We then look at the work carefully to judge whether it's better or worse than a B - and then "fine grade" it. From what I can remember, about 25% of the work I marked was better than a B, about the same percentage was approximately a B and about 50% was C or worse. This is about the same percentages as the overall grades. About half of the A/A*s were from one well-known public school. ;-)

Well daphne, thanks for the 'well done', but I have to say that since it is followed by comments about students not being able to put a sentence together, being spoonfed and writing rubbish, it does come across as slightly more patronizing and insincere than you probably intended it!

This is a child who got and a in Latin at fifteen and as in English lit and lang throughout: she does understand grammar, and she can put a sentence together. There's something wrong with any exam where you can get a* in everything, including an exam in exam conditions where nobody can spoon feed you or get you past your apparently lamentable skills in language and grammar, but you get a b in one unit which should be testing just those skills, I think.