GCSE grade changes following reviews up by 52% this year - mostly due to English

[noblegiraffe]

I wonder how much of that was down to @Piggywaspushed English thread which prompted so many to go for a remark.

45% of marking reviews resulted in a change to marks (although not necessarily to grades). That's pretty terrible isn't it?

schoolsweek.co.uk/gcse-grade-changes-increase-by-52-mostly-due-to-gcse-english/

Ofqual have whined that the reason for the massive increase was 'exam boards not following the rules', and that they would be taking action against them.

schoolsweek.co.uk/52-hike-in-gcse-grade-changes-happened-because-exam-boards-didnt-follow-rules-says-ofqual-chief/

What rules have been broken? If it's the one about reviews not remarks, and only changing grades if there was a marking error rather than difference of opinion, didn't they come in last year?

Whatever Ofqual say the marking was appalling. We had numerous pupils go up 2 grades. One pupil went up 4!!!!! That was due to an admin error but...such blatant mistakes should not be made. A tolerance of 2 marks on an 8 mark question is ridiculous, that is 25%! We did exceptionally well before our remarks but because our HT had budgeted for us to challenge any anomalies we did. I put our first remarks in on results day and 65% went up at least a grade and we challenged every grade within 5 marks of the upper boundary.

DD school sent a load of French papers back to be remarked, the school paid, that's how unfair school thought marking was. Because some kids did get A*, no other marks were changed, though. I wondered if the marker was already mentally moving to the new tougher 1-9 system.

And poor old child 4 who was 2 marks off a 7 didn't move at all.

lljkk for some reason French (and German I think) grades are always about half a grade lower than every other subject.

Nobody knows why.

Interestingly requests for reviews to Edexcel fell by 17% after it introduced its free access to scripts service, and they also saw grade changes fall by 7%.

This means that the percentage increase is down to the other exam boards (and will be worse than the headline figure).

I don't understand how Ofqual can say that the marking was the same standard as last year, and the rules were the same as last year, but the grade changes have increased so massively on last year because the exam boards aren't implementing the rule changes properly. Aren't they at least implementing them the same as last year?

I'd like to think some of it was down to my public spiritedness!

There was also redsrule who had almost her entire school remarked with much success if I recall.

It's shocking really.

Aaaah... just seen good old redsrule upthread! Long time no confer reds ! This thread is like a reunion

Oh look, top GCSE paper for reviews of marking was AQA English paper 1. Nearly 10% of entries were put in for review! Given that schools have to pay for a review, that's a huge amount of money.

Given that we know that AQA were really struggling for English markers, www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/2937753-Oh-dear-god-they-still-dont-have-enough-markers-for-GCSE-English can it be assumed that the grade changes and rules not being properly implemented were because of a poorly-trained workforce drafted in at the last minute?

Piggy! Hope you are well! We had so many grades altered that AQA offered us the chance to see all papers not remarked well after the final date, which I commend them for. Amongst the chaos of the marking I discovered reading 70+ scripts times 4, it did seem admin was a clear problem, for example one pupil was awarded 34 for section A on Lit P1 and 3/30 for Section B yet the examiner had annotated it as B6. So he deservedly went up to a 9. We hadn't 'd queried because 7 was his target. However the margin of error on the 8 mark questions clearly had an impact. There was no rhyme or reason to the marking. Indeed after doing this I was concerned about the mock marking: there is no way I can be as erratic as AQA!

AQA have said sorry they ballsed up the remarks and they will properly train their reviewers for next time

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/aqa-admits-breaking-rules-exam-re-marks

Yeah right.

Markers have no idea what the grade boundaries are. They mark according to a detailed scheme after training on how to mark each question and every day they log in they have to pass 'seeds' (which are pre-marked scripts) before they can continue to mark.
Ofqual needs to push exam boards to guarantee they have enough markers instead of panicking about backlogs in August. I'm willing to bet that's where most of the successful reviews were clustered.
Post-marking admin must be improved to avoid stupid errors.
All scripts should be available online for review, as Edexcel did.
After grade boundaries are set, borderline cases should be automatically reviewed.
There have always been errors in marking but I think the impact of the move to 2 exam papers in English language has been underestimated. The new spec was rushed in at the expense of students and teachers having enough time to get used to it.
As for discrepancies between language and literature: the extracts for language are unseen (and quite unlike texts that teenagers usually read). Despite some overlap in techniques the language papers have specific demands - students need to create original writing as well as analyse texts and the writing sections are far more demanding in terms of accuracy. The time pressure is very demanding.
Literature is more predictable and less demanding in terms of SPAG.