End of year reminder: Flightpaths are bollocks, schools giving ‘working at’ 9-1 GCSE grades to KS3 kids are bullshitting

[noblegiraffe]

Basically that.

If your kid comes home with a report with a wanky flightpath on it, take it with a hefty pinch of salt. There’s no science or data behind it.

If your KS3 kid comes home with a report that says they are currently working at a GCSE grade 4 in Science (or worse a 4+, implying technical accuracy), then know that it is made up, no one knows what a grade 4 in science (or any subject really) looks like, and applying GCSE grades to kids who aren’t studying GCSE courses is just nonsense.

Given that the grade boundaries are supposed to be pegged to the grade boundaries for the previous GCSE

Not the grade boundaries, the proportions of students nationally achieving a particular grade, and it’s only pegged at 1, 4 and 7. Schools also don’t know how well they are teaching the new syllabus compared to the national picture, certainly not well enough to set grade boundaries for mocks with much confidence.

The others told them at the time of giving them the absolute grade, what their number was. So that 73% for Science was a 4, while 60% for English was a 3

This is total, total bollocks. Utter shite. I expect quite a few parents think it’s meaningful too.

When I was at school and NC levels didn't exist and GCSE/O levels were A to whatever letter, nobody thought getting an A in a test or school report in your 1st year at secondary school meant you were on track for an A at O level or GCSE. An A just meant you were doing really well that particular year, in your school's opinion, based on what you had been taught that year in school and what they had tested you on. Why does it have to be any different with numbers 1-9? Why can a child not be given a 9 for brilliant work all year in year 7? Why does the grade have to be something to do with a spurious "flight path"? Why assume it is linked in the parent's mind with GCSE grades at all?

And why assume parents think there is a huge amount of science in it? I always assumed it was just a teacher's impression... and was happy with that! I still liked the numbers and letters...

But I still don't understand why it is not meaningful.

This school has done a reasonably good job in the past of getting KS3 students through KS4 and GCSEs with reasonably good grades. They managed a reasonably good job at getting last year's GCSE cohort through the English and Maths new 1-9 GCSE.
Yes, because this year is the giuinea pig year for most GCSEs, it might be that the school will turn out to have messed up its teaching of subject X or subject Y, and the grades won't be as good in that subject. in which case, the school is likely to throw everything it can at that subject or subjects to try and fix it for next year, and while it might still be too late for this year's Year 10s, it would seem reasonable to assume that by the time this year's Year 7s get to GCSE, the school will have worked out how to teach these GCSEs reasonably well.

So, by then one would expect it to be achieving pretty roughly the same average grades as it was before, just translated into numbers (leaving aside the 9s, which are clearly the wild card, and may well depend on how many super bright and motivated DCs there are in a given year, along with luck on the day).
And if for the past 20 years there has been a bell curve at Year 7, and it has translated into a similar bell curve at Year 11 (even though, as we all know, some DCs start working and some lose interest and the places on the bell curve change), why is it not reasonable to give a grade that indicates the place on the bell curve where the kid is at the moment based on the particular exam taken at the end of Year 7? Why is that not meaningful? Sure, we have all seen DCs suddenly click with the subject matter. Sure we have all had DCs be sick on a particular day and under perform (as they can do on the GCSE day). While the KS3 curriculum may be different from the GCSE curriculum, the school is teaching it by and large because it believes that it will lay a good foundation for the GCSE curriculum, and if by and large most students have moved from this curriculum to the GCSE curriculum in the past, and achieved as expected, why should an assessment of it not be meaningful, with the obvious caveat that if a kids stops working, or starts working harder, things may well change.

Because we’ve moved from a system where KS3 kids were measured against a national standard, with an impression of technical accuracy (level 5a, 6c etc) to a system where KS3 kids are measured against what looks like a national standard (9-1 GCSE grades) with an impression of technical accuracy (4+). Obviously parents are going to assume that schools know what they’re doing.

why is it not reasonable to give a grade that indicates the place on the bell curve where the kid is at the moment based on the particular exam taken at the end of Year 7

That’s fine. What’s bonkers, is calling that position on the bell curve a ‘4+’ in Y7, then a ‘5+’ in Y8 then get to Y10 and suddenly the grade assigned is not a position on a bell curve, but something different - a level of attainment on a mock paper. The two systems collide and there needs to be an adjustment. The kid may look like they’ve made a huge leap forward (hurray, well done!) or taken a step backwards (why’ve you taken your foot off the pedal, you need to work harder).

Not seeing the collision there. An A for overall work all year and an A on an exam paper were never considered the same thing, so why so with numbers?

Getting a 4 in year 7, though, would piss me off - like getting an E in year 7... If you're doing brilliantly within the school's year 7 syllabus, you should get a 9, not a 4...

Because people have got used to the grades being assigned actually meaning something (or supposedly meaning something) rather than being plucked out of the teacher’s arse.

I don't assume the grades mean anything more now than they ever did pre or post NC levels. I would have thought most teachers have an idea of what they are looking for in a child's work when they mark it, though, rather than entirely relying on their arses!

Agree with everything roundaboutthetown has said

The fact that my children's exam grades go up and down each term (sometimes wildly) makes it clear it is only based on how they did in a particular exam, same as when i was at school. How a child does in an exam isn't the same as a grade being pulled out of the teacher's arse.

”...nobody thought getting an A in a test or school report in your 1st year at secondary school meant you were on track for an A at O level or GCSE. An A just meant you were doing really well that particular year, in your school's opinion, based on what you had been taught that year in school and what they had tested you on. “

This is exactly what I meant in my earlier posts, and is how I view the grades that my DD has been given this year.

I really can’t see the value of having predicted GCSE grades in year 7 & 8...!

But that was a million years ago. Data is actually meant to mean something these days. And a lot of schools are giving the impression that it does. If you want to be clear that the grade on the report is simply a ‘well done, great job!’ then fgs don’t make it a GCSE grade.

Only people who have older kids will be used to it meaning what grade you can expect. The rest of us will be used to it meaning the same as it did a million years ago

My DD’s school have clearly stated on student’s reports, that grades given for years 7 & 8 are NOT equivalent to GCSE grades.

The school is just using the same numbering system for their internal grading - and I believe in most subjects the highest available grade is a 7 except maths & English (I think).

So kids go through primary school getting meaningful reports and they hit secondary and parents expect it to suddenly be bullshit?

I’m pretty sure that they don’t. I’ve answered enough ‘what do my DS’s Y7 report grades mean?’ threads over the years.

Well if the reports in primary school are considered to meaningful, then why are they suddenly not being in year 7 & 8?

The reports in primary aren’t aligned to GCSE grades, so why do they need to be in years 7 & 8 ?

Reports in primary are generally aligned to age-related expectations.

Why is it bullshit to get a grade based on how well they've done in an exam?

How do you think the grade is arrived at?

In maths by how questions they get right, turned into a percentage then into a grade

Aren’t there any age related expectations for year 7 & 8 ?

Even if there aren’t any official/national guidelines, shouldn’t schools know (based on their previous cohorts) what a top/middle/bottom student looks like and therefore be able to derive expectations from each group?

In maths by how questions they get right, turned into a percentage then into a grade

But how do you suppose that the percentage should be turned into a grade?

Aren’t there any age related expectations for year 7 & 8 ?

No.