The higher / foundation tier cock up

[Cathpot]

A friend just sent me this article www.tes.com/news/ofqual-saves-wrongly-entered-gcse-pupils-failure
which makes me feel vindicated for all the ranting I’ve been doing about how I felt there wasn’t enough info to chose the tiers properly and higher tier was essentially a gamble on grade boundaries, but also very sorry for the kids put through the wrong exam.

We were given vague information about the same % wpuld get 9-4 as previously got A-C and that 7-9 would be the % as old A/A. 9 would be the top x% in any year.
In a nutshell we had to make educated guesses for all 1st entry.

For English I took the highest boundaries I thought it could be and worked with those provisionally (there was a massive shift between the June 2017 and November 2017 resit boundaries). Really we are at the mercy of the boards and these are the boards who send trainers out to schools and give contradictory advice about what questions want when you compare notes with different teachera across the country.

Maisie did the November grade boundaries shift up or down for English?

For maths they went down!

Up quite significantly for one of the language papers. It was odd because the big jumps were only on certain grades.

Students who scored a grade 6 in June would have been low 5 in November (I think off the top of my head. I'm not at home).

Dd is really panicking about English Lang. Under the old system she would have been an A* candidate and she was hoping for/predicted an 8 but she completely messed up the second paper (thanks Edexel for including questions about stroke victims the day after dh had what we then thought was a mini stroke).

I've told her what will be will be, special consideration has been applied for but I don't know what that actually means in practice and her school is not going to stop her doing A level English as they have described her as one of the brightest English students they have had.

But if the boundaries are high that won't help.

The whole thing is ridiculously complicated and grossly unfair putting so much extra pressure on teachers and students. These exams are not fit for purpose and do not fairly asses the curriculum at the right levels.

What really gets me is the stories in the media scoffing at today’s students ‘only needing 17%’ to get a pass, painting all young people as dumb snowflakes when they really have worked so damn hard. But no let’s blame the kids for all this for all this instead of Mr Gove

I totally agree Backintime. My dd is very bright. That GCSE maths exam was hard, much harder than anything I ever did. the fact that 17% was what was needed to get a Grade 4 only reflects just how hard the exam was. If it was an easy exam then you would need a much higher percentage.

On results day there will have lots of talk about how the grade boundaries are so low but with no mention that in fact the exams have been made much harder and have content for A level standard and above. This is so disheartening for students and teachers.