Mock GCSE grade boundaries

[spababe]

If your DCs have just had mock GCSEs, what grade boundaries did the schools set for each subject?

As grade boundaries are not decided until after the exams and last year's new style English and Maths had low grade boundaries, I am wondering how the schools will judge this for the new exam subjects.

I'm also interested in finding out the answer to this.

In Maths and English schools can extrapolate from the June 2017 results.
I think one exam board (Edexcel?) did a large-scale mock for science, so that data could be used.
But the other subjects?

Not sure how true this is but I believe that most schools are looking at their cohort. Obviously the teachers will know what individual pupils they think would expect to get an A (7) and what pupils they would expect to get a C (4) from knowing the pupils and previous experience. They are then looking at the scores for these pupils in the mocks (taking an average) and setting boundaries accordingly. The difficulty being the 9. But it is a rough estimate.

DS1 school has just sent them through.

There looks to be quite a big variation between subjects.

For history a '9' is 80 but for Latin it's 95. These are IGCSEs though.

For my subject (not English/Maths), there is a Facebook group for teachers. We have all used the sample paper on the new specification and one member took the DfE data to make a grade boundaries sheet which they uploaded. Lots of us used it and compared our results.

At the end of the day, until students have sat the exams, they have been marked, moderated and results released (and potentially challenged) nobody knows. What we do know is that (for example) the top 2% of students will get a grade 9? We can use the statistics produced by the boards for previous years and extrapolate them BUT it will only ever be an educated guess. Sorry not to be more help.

Edexcel / Pearson did a year 10 science exam in 2017. 80k students sat it. However, Pearson refused to use the results to calculate grade boundaries as they said it would just be a guess and would be misleading.
They had 80k students sit the same exam at the same time and knew that the results would be too s skewed to extract meaningful grade boundaries but somehow school departments up and down the country have managed to calculate them from maybe 60 - 200 students???!

Haha we guess!

It's bobbins, innit?

My yr 11s did mocks last term and we MFL (based grade boundaries on last year's maths as it was also a tiered exam. But it was a finger on the air job to some extent.

Mmzz pearson were being duplicitous over that exam imo. 80 000 candidates is considerably more than the total entry for many subjects. They either could not be bothered or were too worried about come back, should not have offered to collate the results if they weren’t prepared to go the whole hog.
We have calculated grade boundaries based on statements from ofqual as to %fix at specific grade points, and in collaboration with a number of other local schools. We hope they are reasonably realistic, but wouldn’t say more than that.

I think Pearson were of the view that there was a type of school (grammars and outstanding comps) that were more likely to have their students take the year 10 exam. Given that (almost?) everyone does science, creating grade boundaries around the more able and better prepared students would be misleading

This blog post explains so much better than I did the futility of trying to guess grade boundaries.

If I have broken any rules, I'm really sorry, but it is relevant to the discussion above:
ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2018/01/26/gcse-grade-boundaries-in-2018/

Thanks Malbecfan - basically no-body knows until the exams are taken and then they will apportion the grades accordingly. I think I will look at the % marks my DC get in mocks rather than the grades that the school predict those % will equate to and draw my own conclusions eg needs to revise/work more/is OK etc