New research: number to get straight 9s could be as low as 200

[noblegiraffe]

Unlike the previous prediction of 1-2 students getting straight 9s, this one is based on an analysis of 2016 exam data by Cambridge Assessment.
For students taking at least 8 subjects, they reckon between 200 and 900 will get straight 9s, out of about half a million students.
About 2000 got straight A*s in 2016.

www.tes.com/news/very-few-will-get-GCSE-clean-sweep

My daughter has been told she can reasonably Target 9s in a number of subjects and she has sensibly refused to accept or believe it.

She's clever enough to know that her teachers don't know, can't possibly predict and have nothing but their pie in the sky assumptions to go on. She may do better than others in her class - but that still doesn't equal a 9.

However we do expect mostly 8s, maybe a 9 or two and a couple of 7s.

She keeps reminding herself that these represent A grades and are excellent.

Latin isn’t a useful subject to track. English, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, History - yes.

To cos Lear it was only the Cambridge board saying this. Larger exam boards say it’s inaccurate.

I should probably confess that I have one DC doing a thesis on returns to education and a friend’s DC doing a thesis on returns to entry level grad jobs. The 9-1 data is the stuff of their dreams!

gilly by 7+ I mean 7 or above, so 7, 8 or 9.

gilly Not sure if you have understood. 7+ just means getting a 7 or 8 or 9. So for any subject the percentage of pupils getting 7,8,9 will be the same as got A or A* last year (adjusted for how clever they think the cohort is based on SATs results 5 years ago).

x-post

Noble, that’s what Dds teachers were doing in Year 10. They were predicting in bands so Dd was predicted 7 plus for example & her friend was predicted 4-6. They got a bit more specific in year 11 but even then in her best subject Dd was predicted 7/8 with a verbal aim for a 9 but we don’t really know.

I'm an idiot, excuse me. I blame the heat and a couple of glasses of vino/ my Birthday
I thought you were suggesting there were +'s for the levels.

Happy Birthday Gilly!

Wish you could like an MN post - Noble's of 10:28 would be one.

DD's lovely yr 11friend (Dd is yr 12) is targeted all 9s, she is bright but I really think it is daft of the school to do this; she dies German (my subject) and I reckon a 7 in that this year will be an ace grade. Mind you we don't know as we have no idea of the grade boundaries!

If she gets 999887777 she should be absolutely made up.

clary noble's post at 10.28 is very sensible but it does rather assume that parents of clever DC, like myself, can't work out that 9s are actually probably very unlikely in every subject. Same for the clever DC themselves. It assumes we're out of touch tbh.

It will be interesting to see how well DC's do with MFL's . I maybe wrong but I thought I had read an article stating that 9's in MFL would probably only be allocated to multilingual children (so a child where one parent was a different nationality or the child had lived/been brought up in a different country and they were therefore fluent in said language) because obviously they can converse and understand to a much higher level.

Do not underestimate the pressure that some DC put themselves under, even if the targets themselves are rationally unreasonable.

Surely the way the uk system works the government effectively picks how many 9s it wants to give by the grade and boundaries. Don’t understand why we can’t just work on a% and be done with it. A* or a 9 it’s all bollocks really.

No I don't underestimate that at all noble - I have some of those DC myself - but parents in those cases have an absolute duty to dampen down expectations and not ramp them up. I think the suggestion of 8/9 or 8+ is good too, but in fact I don't see a real difference between the pressure which was put on DC with a full house of A* predictions and those this year with a full house of 9s. I think the pressure perceived by the DC was/ is exactly the same, so I don't buy that this is a new concept, from the DC's point of view. Actually in some ways I think it's easier, because there's so much coverage about just how few DC will score all 9s.

I don't see a real difference between the pressure which was put on DC with a full house of A* predictions and those this year with a full house of 9s

No, me either, tbh. I know a child who had a breakdown over unreasonable A* predictions too.

It’s not enough to expect parents to damp down expectations, schools should have always been looking at things holistically and with the welfare of the student in mind.

It really annoys me that we have a big focus on mental health in schools and they still do stuff like this. Sometimes the consequences are awful.

Mixed feelings about how that works in practice. Do you think SLTs/ the pastoral lead should review any DC's predictions where each individual teacher considers a 9/ A* appropriate and then they pick a couple of subjects to dumb down to an 8, on the grounds that so few will manage all 9s?

I agree that parents shouldn't be left to inject reality because of over enthusiastic teachers but I do have some sympathy for individual teachers simply setting a target/ prediction they feel, with professional experience and judgment, is fair.

(I do of course realise that you're going to say that apart from English and Maths teachers don't thus far have experience of these exams, but they did with A* and you seem to agree that that raised very similar concerns re mental health).

I think they shouldn’t give a straight targets of the top grade as it as the only options are to meet them all or fail, and they are only average targets in the first place. Predictions also tend to be optimistic, we know from UCAS that teachers have a tendency to over-predict. A+ or 8+ or whatever for all would suffice to hint that a higher grade would be possible but when an 8 is the outcome, it still looks acceptable.

If the school needs a clearer target for data purposes then this can be held internally.

This is more critical with the 9s this year than the As perhaps as it affects more students and the targets and predictions are much more inaccurate. We had years worth of data when FFT were creating computer generated target grades of A and they were far more nuanced than the 9 predictions that were churned out last year for maths/English and will have been churned out this year for the other subjects. I’ve seen my FFT targets for Y10 be amended in the light of the first lot of real data from last year’s Y11. Several have been downgraded from a 9 prediction and they look more reasonable now. I expect the same will happen in other subjects next year.

Dh is a lecturer working in Higher/Further Education & until I made him listen to an explanation he had no idea about the new grade system.

I’m not sure that any old academic is interested in data tracking/analysis of students’ grade history and how well/badly in predicts future performance on specific degree courses. Most academics I know avoid admissions like the p’ague!

plague

The usefulness of data tracking/analysis is the way it enables minimum academic entry standards to be set in order to reduce the share of students who struggle to complete their degree course. This is a real issue for students and universities in this era of massive fees/loans and parents and pupils ought to welcome all attempts to make selection into degree courses as informed as possible.

But as a parent of a current year 11 he also had no idea.

We've had lots of explanations through the school, through Y10 and Y11 Alexander, so that even parents who aren't involved in education have as much grip as any lay person with the new grades. It's down to schools to pass on the info coming from the DfE/ Ofqual to parents and then apply it to the individual DC through the usual means - assessments, reports, parent meetings etc.