This grade doesn't add up? GCSE French AQA. How can this possibly make sense? Advice from MFL teachers or anyone else please

[Mumalot]

So DD got an overall A in French. She was predicted A*. We assumed she must have dropped some marks in her listening exam. But looking at the breakdown of her marks something really strange seems to have happened.

For the writing part of the exam – unit 4– DD had to do three pieces of controlled assessment written work in exam conditions and the two highest scored by her teacher were submitted to AQA. These were 29/30 for the first piece and 30/30 for the second piece so in reality a near perfect score. These have come back as a 70 UMS which translates as a Grade B. How can 59/60 be a B.? So my questions to all the MFL experts on MN are

1. Have I misunderstood how the raw marks for the written controlled assessments are translated into UMS?

1. If not, am I to assume that the teacher's assessment have been massively downgraded by the exam board? Does this mean that DD's actual work was downgraded or will the whole class's work have been changed? Is it quite common for this to happen? I have no idea how controlled assessments are moderated by the boards.

1. If so, is there any way to challenge this? If it is possible to get a remark on a written exam paper, I assume it is possible to challenge what is effectively a marking down on a controlled assessment?

I would really appreciate some guidance on this as DD is devastated that her hard work on the controlled assessments has been downgraded by two whole exam grades.

It will have been a downgrading across the board - if the exam board thinks a centre have overmarked assessments they take a certain amount of marks off every student in the cohort. Rigorous internal moderation can avoid this - in 12 years I've had it happen once to work I marked, just after we changed syllabus. We were fuming and I still feel it was very unfair as I couldn't believe my partner teacher and I had, after ten years of marking together, suddenly become incompetent but it's a "rules are rules" situation. You may be able to appeal, I don't know.

Well done to your DD on a great result .

AQA I know a bit about as I teach it.

Written CAs are not marked by the teacher, they are sent away to be marked. We just mark the speakings (and then submit a requested selection to be moderated).

Sounds like yr DD's teacher gave her own version of the mark, but the AQA marker did not agree. Sorry. We had a big issue last year with French written work being undermarked.

You can ask for written work to be remarked - we did this last year as a number of Cs were expected to be As - but none got an improved mark. TBH to go from A to A* I wouldn't bother.

It happens, and it seems really unfair at the top end. You can't, after all, do better than 100% in an assessment to allow for later downgrading.

My post is not very clear - what I mean is that yr DD's teacher has looked at the written CAs and told students what mark she would give - I did this with my group - but in fact that's not the actual mark (as I told mine).

Ah, cross posts with someone who knows what happens in the actual subject! I know the Art results at our school were downgraded last year across the board.

This has happened to our DD and some of her friends too. Very high/full UMS on the other parts, but down to a B on this one. It makes no sense, has happened previously and the school is looking into it. Why would a cohort of A* French students with proven great teachers drop grades like this one part only?
I agree with the previous poster, I wouldn't worry about it unduly. But I would speak to the school and check that they are contacting AQA about it.

I would ask for a remark as they do sometimes come back with higher marks.

The marking of the writting tasks has been controversial before. I seem to remember something about the titles of the tasks (the teachers choose these) being really important as what is written must be on the topic or it doesn't get marks awarded, so if the phrasing of the title isn't open enough then perfectly good french answers can be disallowed for being off-topic.

yy frogs we think that's what's happened at my school before. We are wise to it now and write an all-encompassing title

Exactly this happened to my daughter last year with AQA French and German controlled assessments. She got a C for one and a D for the other and in both cases this cost her an A overall. At a school where 95% of all GCSEs are a/a* she felt like a failure. Remarks resulted in a couple of extra marks but still one or two short of the As overall. The writing marks were low across the board at her school.

Every other mark she got on her results sheet was A or A* so the C and D were completely out of kilter. It was very frustrating at the time and I still can't understand what went wrong, but we have moved on now (she was very happy with her AS results, thankfully, so it is forgotten!).

I would encourage her to be happy with her A grade. It will make not one jot of difference to her life in the future if she had got an a star. As others have said teacher can only give an estimate of what her work would get.

The same happened to my DD a few years ago and this cost her an A. The teacher seemed to think the controlled assessment was an A, but the exam board gave it a D. How anyone can be that far out is unbelievable to me. Meant A level was not pursued.

Same here Milly - she had been considering French A level until getting those marks...in her case she knew the teacher had assessed it as A/a* border so for the exam board to come back so different was a big warning. Looking at the school results table overall the MFL grades at A level were significantly worse than other subjects so it just wasn't worth the risk.

I think they must all have been downgraded, judging by DD's marks.
I feel so sorry for the kids whose grades are much lower than predicted.
It is very expensive to get a remark - we have submitted 2 papers for remarking at a cost of over £60. There are others I am suspicious about, but can't afford to submit any more.

This downgrading is very unfair. It is just moving the goal posts.
What is wrong with awarding marks in a consistent fashion, then grading accordingly?

We just looked at the marks and looked on the AQA website.
It is obvious that the French has been downgraded.
In our case it doesn't really matter because it hasn't affected the grade, but for some people it probably has.
This is political tinkering with people's future life chances.