New GCSE levels - what should a top student be aiming for?

[RhodaBull]

Under old (current) system, the benchmark was at least 6A*s for Oxford for humanities, rising to ten or more for Medicine (extenuating circumstances excepted).

But now how is a pupil to know what is good or not? Ten 9s? Five 9s? What if, say, Westminster pupils all get ten 9s but someone from a comprehensive gets 8s (when they would previously both have got all/mostly A*s)?

Is 9 even achievable? Obviously in Maths it is easily done for a very able person, but what about English/History? How is one to know if a 7 is decent or a disaster?

In an ideal world that's right bobo and I'm glad it's (mostly) played that way for my DC.

But it's tough for teachers to be so pragmatic when a school's rating and league table place rely pretty squarely on grades. Ditto teachers' pay.

Then there are the parents' expectations too.

I can see why many schools get themselves totally wrapped up in exams and grades, as exhausting as that is for teachers and pupils alike.

I actually think this is going to be awful for some high achieving children- at the school my dd went to a lot of the girls got incredibly upset about any mark less than an A/A*- and if only 3% are going to get 9s then by definition there are going to be a lot of ridiculously distraught high fliers.

Interestingly, at ds's school (he's in year 10 so will only be doing English and Maths under the new scheme) they are talking a lot about 6/7 being excellent scores. But it's very hard to manage expectations. Psychologically it will be very difficult for a lot of children to be happy when they know there are 2 or 3 higher grades they could potentially have got. It needs a complete change of mindset- and that takes time.

I have one of those high achieving kids... she's ok with 7s but she's upset about not getting A or A*. Anyway, I see all that as HER problem. She needs to learn to be more pragmatic. This is her character defect at work. Not the fault of any system that has grades that she takes it so ridiculously seriously.

"Not the fault of any system that has grades that she takes it so ridiculously seriously."

I agree. But I was just commenting that there will be issues for some kids come results day- high achievers have been conditioned to expect a string of top grades and they won't get them any more. I think this needs to be managed very carefully.

Its perhaps better for high achieving perfectionists to experience 'failure' of grade 8 and relax a bit

If the top grades are about achieving perfection rather than testing extended knowledge or problem solving skills or flair then I am not persuaded that GCSE 9s will actually have more value than 8s with regards academic potential for HE.
I would rather have a student wider read etc than spend ages eliminating errors on past papers.

Surely if DC are in a year group of 100, and see that only 3 students get 9s in Maths for instance, they will be able to handle getting an 8. People intuitively understand that achievement in this context is relative.

I really agree with you sendsummer that the substantive difference between an 8 and a 9 may not be much. And I agree that broad, wide thinking is better than perfectionism which could be more of a hinderance than a help at university level.

And it's swings and roundabouts.

While stress levels might rise over the ultimate grade, at least there won't be endless CAs puncturing years 10 and 11 like a bad guest at a party.

The focus on grades distorts what school is about. Children (and parents) seem not to understand that the need to own knowledge and skills far outstrips the need to get a string of top grades in fairly meaningless examinations.

tiggy won't the majority applying at the same time have taken the new exams ? That will establish the benchmark for any GCSE grade criteria for offers rather than universities basing it on the minority of gap year students.
In the end it is achieving the required A level grades that will count the most.

"Very few people are gifted at everything which surely a clutch of 9s would indicate."
I agree. Trouble is it's difficult to get that message across in a world where all As/A*s is considered fairly usual........

Of course it's better to be a rounded individual. Ds - who is hardly University Challenge material himself - is frequently appalled at the lack of general knowledge of his peers. One person in his A Level English class had not heard of Isaac Newton. However, school exams as they currently exist reward the sloggers and going off piste with interesting bits and pieces garners no marks. I suppose it has to be like that, otherwise people would have a host of model answers prepared which could fit any question.

Of course, there should be more to education that exam results, but, unfortunately, in the modern employment/FE world, your future is almost defined by your exam grades. Yes, loads of jobs and FE courses advertise "minimum" qualifications which look reasonable, (i.e. a recent job my nephew applied for cited 5 GCSEs grade C or above), but in reality, there were so many applying with far better results that anyone with "the minimum" wasn't even short-listed.

Unfortunately, the education establishment has shot itself in the foot with the grade inflation of the last decade or two. In the 80's, an A was the exception rather than the norm, most of my peers (many of whom became professionals) were happy with a clutch of Cs and Bs. Now, so many people get a string of As and A*s so a load of Cs are really pretty much worthless because they simply don't represent the level of a C twenty years ago.

The 1-9 grading is the first step towards re-alligning the grading system so that only the top few percent get the top grade. That's how it should be.

"load of Cs are really pretty much worthless because they simply don't represent the level of a C twenty years ago. "

There are whole rafts of children (not the children of mumsnetters, obviously! ) for whom Cs are absolutely bloody vital. There are whole rafts of children(even more not the.....) for whom any paper qualifications at all are absolutely bloody vital.............

Grade inflation makes sense to me, human beings get better at things so of course they get better at teaching to the test. Anyway, the top GCSE grades were only given to about 6.5% of test takers in 2015 (iI hope that link is reliable). Top% could be capped simply by fitting a normalised curve, if it's so important that only 2-3% of people can possibly get a 9, regardless of the standard of their work.

For plenty of teens getting the pass grade is all they need.

Fixed grade percentages are extremely unfair. Back in my day you could get 90% and if a suitably large number of people had got 95%, you got a B.

Predicted grades seem daft to me. I mean, why wouldn't you want inflated grades? Kids are always encouraged to aim high, so to say, "Well, actually, to be realistic we'll say a B," is a bit of a confusing message. So they get an AAA offer from a university. But do actually receive a B come results. They are still in the game: they can plead with university to take them or the university may have had quite a few who didn't achieve grades and are happy to give them place. However, another student who stuck with a B prediction was not offered a place there, and may in fact have got an A in the end but still ends up at a lesser institution.

Ds is applying post A Level. I am now wondering if he will be at a bad disadvantage holding whatever he holds, versus someone with 4 pie-in-the-sky A* predictions.

Opposite, Rhoda. Definite known grades are a real advantage in the Uni application game, over predictions.

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

Bird in the hand rhoda.

Ok. I hope ds is holding two birds of paradise rather than two big turkeys (the latter looking increasingly likely based on the amount of procrastination going on at the moment).

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

I've long said that reporting the pupil's position is far more useful than any kind of grade/mark reporting, especially as we know that grades are "normalised" in different ways to produce the result that the educational establishment want to portray.

At our son's school, they don't give grades in the year end progress tests. They give the actual mark, the year's subject average, and tell you which quartile they are in. That's useful in that it tells you where your child is compared with their year's peer group. They are also very open with reporting GCSE and A level results by grade for each paper, so you can compare year by year and see that, eg, 25% get A in Physics, so if your child is in the top quartile, they're likely to get A.

Grades, whether A-E or 1-9 are a very blunt instrument, especially when in some subjects you need 90% plus to get A* yet in others you only need sometimes as low as 70%. Worse still is the fact that in some subjects you can "pass" i.e. C or above, with a mark of less than 50%, i.e. you can get more wrong than right but still pass!

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

Because it doesn't give you any idea of what the kids can actually do, just how they performed against their peers.

So if someone got a C in English you'd expect them to be able to read and write, but if they were at the 50th percentile, what does that actually mean for their literacy skills?