The pass rates are lower as the students aren't as good.
Official communication from Pearson
17 January 2018
Dear Colleague
Last Thursday we released the November 2017 series results to candidates across the country. I wanted to write to say a huge congratulations to all of the candidates at your school, who no doubt have worked extremely hard.
I wanted to send you some more information about how grade boundaries are set, to hopefully answer any questions you may have. I am also keen to understand your thoughts on how best to communicate this information in future so would be really keen to keep an open dialogue with you, certainly if you have any other comments or questions.
In preparation for setting the first November series grade boundaries of the reformed GCSE (9-1) Mathematics qualification, all awarding organisations worked together with Ofqual to agree a common approach. This common approach is explained in the Data Exchange Procedures (Appendix 1). Information on the approach to awarding 9-1 qualifications follows, and more can be found on our website here.
This approach to setting grade boundaries has taken into account that the reforms to GCSE Mathematics have led to the inclusion of more demanding content, greater emphasis on problem solving and a new 9-1 grading scale. Significantly, this series, we have needed to consider the implications of a largely resitting cohort, and that we did not see a large range of candidate performance across all grades. To account for these changes, and to ensure students are not disadvantaged during this time of reform, statistical evidence has played a key role in setting qualification-level grade boundaries.
This document sets out the process and explains how each qualification-level grade boundary has been set for GCSE Maths in the November 2017 series.
You may have also seen that we are making some improvements to our papers from the summer 2018 series onwards. This is as a result of feedback we received after the summer 2017 series, and as a result of additional technical analysis we have done on our papers after their first sitting.
We are using evidence of question performance from our papers to focus on ensuring that:
the early questions on Foundation Tier papers are accessible to all candidates and will be mainly one-mark questions
the common questions which appear on both Higher and Foundation tier papers are all accessible to candidates targeting grades 4 and 5
appropriate language and contexts are used in all questions, so that we are testing mathematical ability only
there is a good coverage of topics tested each series, including those which are new to the curriculum
the layout of the papers is reviewed to make sure diagrams are large enough and candidates have enough working space.
We are also using evidence of question performance from our papers to further refine our approach to targeting questions at particular grades. This will help us ensure that the difficulty of questions increases steadily through the paper so that candidates are able to gain confidence as they work through each exam paper.
Some of the improvements can be seen in our autumn 2017 Foundation and Higher tier mock papers.
If you have any further queries or would like additional support, please do not hesitate to contact our GCSE Maths assessment team
([email protected]).
Kind regards,
Hayley Read
Assessment Director