Predicted Grades for UCAS

[LibraryBook]

Just trying to understand how different teachers/schools arrive at predicted UCAS grades for A2, to put on the UCAS form?

I'd be grateful for any explanations.

libray

No idea why you are asking teachers this. Every one of your posts suggests you think you know everything already.

Dominodonkey you shouldn't have bothered name changing.

At an academically selective boys' school there's a lot of pulling up by bootstraps after AS, and a lot of grade increases. Perhaps that doesn't happen much in non-selective maintained schools.

Indeed, in my bog standard comp we encourage them to work hard from the start of Y12 instead, so that they achieve their full potential at AS.

I'm a maths teacher, btw, and simply going back and resitting C1 would be extremely unlikely to raise a D to an A. Also, if they were crap at the non-calc stuff, then doing C3 and C4 won't help.

noblegiraffe - do you also teach further maths?

"Indeed, in my bog standard comp we encourage them to work hard from the start of Y12 instead, so that they achieve their full potential at AS."

Quite. Parents need to realise that ASes are 50% of the final marks, and think through the consequences of that. This isn't the 1980s. These aren't old A Levels. For maths, it's not like doing OA or AO maths at the end of the lower sixth as a check-point. C1 and C2 provide precisely as many UMS points as C3 and C4.

In order to pull up your overall result by working harder in Y13, you need to score two extra UMS in Y13 for every one extra UMS you need overall: on average, you will need to improve by two grades in order to get one grade better overall.

Library - you seem to be almost boasting that your ds hasn't got experience of holding down a part time job and all that entails. Personally, I'd see that as a really positive thing on a young person's CV

Interesting what they do with statistics though - in the selective school near here, if they haven't got at least B in every AS, then they have to leave - they are not allowed to go into the 2nd year, so naturally, if you are then looking at % grades at the end of Yr13, the pupils who were allowed to stay on are all quite likely to get a handful of A or A*s, as they've not allowed all the pupils to actually finish their A levels.

library I have just left a job in an academically selective school as a maths teacher. DDCE would be considered a massive underachievement by any student there. This is because of the grades they need to enter the 6th fom and how this impacts on their minimum target grades. For a student who has massively underachieved at AS if they pull themselves together then they could turn it around like the example you gave. However for the record this is still an unusual situation.

We find that the students we teach that needed to retake didn't do as well in general as those that didn't. The extra time they spent revising for their retake modules greatly affected their current learning in Y13. They are also all told from the start of y12 that what they do that year will be the biggest influence when applying to uni as we will base our references on their work ethic and achievement in year 12, not what they tell us they might do in year 13.

As I said earlier we apply a formula to our students based on their AS grades to start and then go through each invidividual student and consider all sorts of things, the things that have already been listed above by very many teachers. If we are borderline we will tend to predict the higher grade, but make it clear to the student that we feel they are borderline and that they need to consider that when applying to universities.

What is a 'Sutton Group Uni'? Did you mean Russell Group?!

"My godson improved his grades from DDCE to get AAB"

With resits, presumably (even with 100% UMS in the A2 papers at the end of Y13, that wouldn't be sufficient).

Much harder now, as January 2013 was the last opportunity to take module resits other than in the summer.

Library my school does, I don't personally. It's dead man's shoes to get to teach it

BackforGood - You've misunderstood. I was just saying my son doesn't have a part-time job to worry about, so has had no excuse not to get good grades (which he did). His best friend works 4 evenings a week in a supermarket and got Bs at AS. He would like to be predicted A grades and feels he can get As if, among other things, he gives up his part-time job. But his teacher is rigidly sticking to the B predictions.

I've never heard a school kicking an A level student out for not getting a B grade at AS. That sounds a little extreme. (Can you name the school?) But I know kicking out or at least not being able to continue happens at D grades and lower in some schools.

What backforgood said is true.
This article was entitled "we shoot a few just to encourage the others".
It's about how many selective and independent schools maintain their position in the league table.

The most selective private and state schools are increasingly using public exams to weed out their worst-performing pupils, forbidding them from returning in September,

Maybe the teacher believes that with teaching qualifications and experience of teaching A-level that their professional judgement of whether DS's friend can get an A should not be overridden by what DS's friend with no experience of A2 reckons he can get.

I can see their point.

noblegiraffe - yes, of course I see that point too. But there is no professional judgment attached in this case. It is school policy to predict the achieved AS grade for A2. Final.

Which would suggest that nobody ever changed their grade between AS and A2.

Statistically, predicting a B from a B is the safest bet. In fact a B is more likely to drop to a C than it is to go up to an A

www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/images/109919-predicting-a-level-grades-using-as-level-grades.pdf

See page 4.

"I've never heard a school kicking an A level student out for not getting a B grade at AS. That sounds a little extreme. (Can you name the school?)"

www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/11plus/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=28405&start=10

noblegiraffe - if you look at the 2009 graph. If you got a D at AS in 2009, it was statistically more likely to move up one or two grades than it was to stay the same, and much more likely to move upwards than downwards.

And what you say of B grades is of course correct, but it is also true that a third of B grades to elevate. That's not to be sniffed at is it?

do elevate, not to elevate.

I've just emailed that link to the boy's mother, it is actually very encouraging. Performance between AS and A2 isn't fixed.

"If you got a D at AS in 2009,"

2009 is another country. Because there were still January resits, and January modules. There are no more January exams. So in 2009, you could take C1 in JanY12, C2 in JunY12, C3 in Jany13 and C4 in JunY13. If you wanted to resit, you would thus be able to do it a few months after completing study, alongside one other module.

Now, someone who is not working at a sufficient level will not know their C1 or C2 result until they've taken both at the end of Y12, and their first opportunity to resit one or both (most likely both) will be alongside C3 and C4 at the end of Y13. That's a substantially harder task that for previous cohorts, especially as people tend not to just do badly in one AS. and therefore will have similar issues in other subjects as well.

Yes, good point. I don't know how that will work out. But perhaps it will be neutral in that there was previously lots of resitting going on, even at the A and B grades.

Do the grade boundaries lower if there are fewer students scoring very high marks?

"Do the grade boundaries lower if there are fewer students scoring very high marks?"

Not necessarily, no. A Levels haven't been norm-referenced since the 1990s. It might be seen as grounds to look at the criterion-referencing, so might trigger discussion when deciding the scaling from raw to UMS, but unlike in the past there is no defined proportion of the cohort who will get particular grades.

Library, almost by definition a re-sit is going to produce a higher mark - they know what to expect and how hard they need to work. Coupled with the fact that exams and resits were spread across the year made it much easier to improve a low AS.

That isn't possible anymore, and although I'd guess a re-sit taken at the end of year 12 would also produce higher grades on average, it would almost certainly be at the expense of the A2 exams so the overall grade at A2 would be unlikely to go up now.

And who only knows what will happen in a few years when AS's don't exit

Sorry a resit taken at the end of year 13

If you got a D at AS in 2009, it was statistically more likely to move up one or two grades than it was to stay the same, and much more likely to move upwards than downwards.

That's probably due to students who are unlikely to improve on their D grade dropping the subject, so you are left with the more hopeful D grade students, IYSWIM.

And what you say of B grades is of course correct, but it is also true that a third of B grades to elevate. That's not to be sniffed at is it?

Where did you get a third from? I can see nearly 20% going from a B to A/A*, not a third. As mentioned, that would have been in a year with more resit opportunities than now, too. When there were January modules we spent time carefully analysing UMS totals and advising students on a borderline to resit select earlier, lower scoring modules in the hope of tipping them over into the next grade. Without those January results, we're flying blind.

If grades fall across the board, perhaps the removal of the cap on AAB students will be lowered to include BBB students. Although prospectuses for 2014 are asking for A*AA-AAB for RG universities, which would suggest that lots of places may remain unfilled, come results day.