Exam marking (internal exams)

[PetraDelphiki]

Just wondering how other schools handle telling kids their exam marks? Dd’s School gives them their marks but with no context - so they have no idea whether 70% (for example) is top or bottom of the year!

Surely this just encourages them to compare marks with friends (which they are also told not to do)....

We don’t get told averages/quantiles or anything either, which makes it very hard to know how to respond to an “I got 70%” announcement!

Thoughts?

@tabbiemoo Was that a French school? That is what they do there. Great for the top 3, terrible for everyone else.

I give them a class average and then a year average so they can see where they are on the scale. I teach a GCSE and A-level only subject though, so I can associate this with a grade

This is then compared to their flightpath grade. Yes their flightpath grade is calcualted from SATS. However, the sats grades often follow a trend up to GCSEs and A Levels (with adjustments for a levels), so, unfortunately, SATS are not a waste of time, they're actually surprisingly accurate.

There is a government website where you can break the results down subject to subject and see the correlation between SATS and GCSE results- of course there are anomalies, but as a rule, they follow a trend.

I think the personal feedback you give them is much more important though, I tell each student what they did well and where I think they could improve to increase their grades

It's all very hard to decipher as a parent. DD2 refused to revise for her French listening test, on the basis that she probably knew it all, and if she didn't, her mind would go blank in the test and she wouldn't remember it anyway. She got 30/30, so does that mean that she's awesome at French, or does it mean that the test was too easy? Is she in the wrong set (although I'm not certain they even set for languages)? Was she just lucky?