AQA Art GCSE upset

[Historygeek05]

My DD has arrived home today with the marks for her GCSE art. She has been assessed as a 6 for her portfolio despite the fact that, apart from the first couple of months of year 10, her sketch books have always been graded as a 7. She got a lowish grade 8 for the external set task. As things stand she might just manage to get a 7 but if the grade boundaries go up even a little then she will end up with a 6.

What I don’t understand is how work that has consistently been assessed as a 7 is now a 6. All the friends she has talked to are in the same position - given a grade lower than they were expecting/had been working at.

Can anyone shed any light on this? Will the external moderation have any effect?

Thanks in advance.

It will be the external moderator. They come in and go through everything. The school can appeal and might do if all the marks have been reduced.

Hi op my ds is out at the moment so can't give exact details but we're going through similar with the same exam board.

He was predicted 7/8 and his most recent assesment was slightly below a 6! Doesn't make sense. This is from a boy who could draw before he could talk and has always done amazing in art. His best friend is in the same boat but scraped a 6.

They are both starting to worry. 3 years of strong work and results don't reflect their effort.

I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been externally moderated yet - the letter from the school says that the marks are from assessment done by the art department.

It’s the difference between their teacher and external exam board. The teacher was obviously was a bit too generous with her markings. It’s hard as art is subjective.

You mean it’s the same people marking her work? Then that doesn’t make sense.

Yes it is! That’s what we can’t understand. If she was really working at a 6 it would have been nice to know at the time so she could at least have tried to make the necessary improvements to up her grade.

When the school does it’s own grading, more than one teacher will be involved and they have to reach a consensus. It is possible that your DSs teacher was marking too generously in the opinion of the other teachers. That is, of course, before the work is externally moderated when marks can go down again. The issue is the school will hope to avoid a downgrade by the moderator as all the students have their marks reduced by the same amount which can be really unfair.

This might be helpful, it might not but I’ll share anyway.
When I was at school (many moons ago) art was pretty much the only subject I truly cared about. I was predicted to get an A (I understand this is equivalent to a 7 now but may be wrong). My teacher led me to believe this is what I would be getting and I put a lot of effort into it, always achieving this mark throughout the year. GCSE results day rocks around and I’ve only gone and got a B. I was devastated. The rest of my results were really good but this didn’t matter. That art result meant the world to me. It was the only subject that I had a passion for and I’d felt misled somehow.
Once I got the breakdown of grades I discovered I had missed out on an A by 1 point. I was gutted for a little while, thinking about how I could’ve got that extra point but it didn’t put me off what I enjoyed. I went onto college and got a high marking A there for Art and Textiles.
Now, looking back, it all seems so trivial. And I don’t say that to diminish GCSEs, just that, if she does end up with a 6, the anger and upset will quickly fade.

Well not sure if this helps, but one of the things that has become clear to me, having been on the journey with DS doing GCSE Art (he is doing Edexcel, but I am not sure it matters), is that it appears that the actual Art is only a part of it. One also has to produce Artist Analyses on artists that have influenced one, and explain how they have influenced you in your journey towards your final piece. You also have to annotate all your work, and that seems to involve not just saying "I did this, I did that, this is a painting in acrylic, this in oil, this a drawing in tonal pencil", but explaining why you did this in your journey towards you final piece (going down dead ends is fine, so long as you explain that, and explain why you came back out again and tried another path).. Then I get the impression that it helps if you can waffle on about why your work has greater significance than it just is - eg it reflects your identity or your political ambitions or something a bit larger. So while any given piece of art might be accurately evaluated as, say a 7 or more, that is only a part of the overall grade, and quite a bit seems to be given over to how you have explained what you have done and why you have done it, and how you have critically evaluated what you have done and developed as a consequence. The Edexcel specification contains "Four Assessment Objectives" which are:
develop ideas through investigations, demonstrating critical understanding of sources
(AO1)
• refine work by exploring ideas, selecting and experimenting with appropriate media,
materials, techniques and processes (AO2)
• record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions as work progresses (AO3)
• present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and demonstrates
understanding of visual language (AO4).
I do not know if AQA is similar, but if it is, then the actual painting piece by piece is only a small part of the Assessment Objectives - and how you pull them all together is key. That might explain the difference in grade. In my DS's case, his teacher was very careful not to give them a piece by piece grade, as she said it had to do with what had been built up, so we were told at the end of Year 10 he was working at a "5" because he hadn't done enough pieces yet to get to a "6" - it didn't matter how high quality any of the pieces he had done were.

I have just checked teh AQA specification on line, and they also talk about four assessment objectives - which look very similar to the Edexcel ones and are:

AO1: Develop ideas through investigations, demonstrating critical understanding of sources.
AO2: Refine work by exploring ideas, selecting and experimenting with appropriate media, materials, techniques and processes.
AO3: Record ideas, observations and insights relevant to intentions as work progresses.
AO4: Present a personal and meaningful response that realises intentions and demonstrates understanding of visual language.

They also appear to be equally weighted - ie 25% each. So even if your DC have been graded at 6-7 or higher in one area, they might not have done well in the other areas such as "recording ideas, observations and insights as the work progresses", and so will not get that 25% of the mark.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to reply - much appreciated. The work which was repeatedly assessed as a 7 included everything done each term - art work, analysis (which she was always told was of a high quality) and development of ideas etc. Basically the grade took account of all the assessment objectives - or so we were lead to believe! Anyway we are just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping there is not too much change to grade boundaries and/or that marks are moderated up a bit. DD knows it doesn’t matter too much in the long term but it is frustrating for her.