How grades will be awarded. The government and exam boards have got it wrong.

[bigvig]

Teachers will rank order students and award grades. The exam boards will then alter the grades so they are in line with the grades from the previous year group from that school/college. Each year grades in our area grades can fluctuate by 10-20% one way or another. So this year group can only do as well as last year's cohort. Fair?

Chloe KS2 as part of analysis on a cohort level not individual level. They have been clear they aren't going to 'reorder' the pupils, so they might shift where a school puts its grade boundaries, but if a school ranks Tim below Mary they won't ever 'promote' Tim to have a higher grade than Mary iyswim?

My understanding is still that teachers will award grades then the exam board will move grades up or down so they are in line with the results from last year.

That's not correct though

The standardisation model will be complex and the school's recent results would be just one factor. The are also proposing to consider e.g. prior attainment of the cohort.

KS2 as part of analysis on a cohort level not individual level.

Yes true, sorry, having re-read your post, you were not talking about the KS2 being used by schools. My mistake!

My understanding is still that teachers will award grades then the exam board will move grades up or down so they are in line with the results from last year.

Your understanding is wrong. As several people have explained.

@bigvig please come back and retract your OP before this thread gets any more traction.
The situation is stressful enough for our DC without misinformation being posted as fact.

A comparison of predicted vs awarded grades would be VERY interesting to see

I know! I wonder what success would look like. Only 17% (ish) of UCAS predictions are correct, so ironically if final awarded grades also only have a 17% match rate then we can be assured that overall the cohort as a whole has been awarded the right grades.

Hard to explain that as success though.

only 17% correct. That's frightening. titchy Do most students tend to outperform or underperform in relation to UCAS predictions?

My DD is really worried about her grades as she had a shocker in Y12 (severe depression/change of schools etc...) and has only in the last few months had a need for extra time recognised (and subsequently granted by the exam boards). In the past few months since mocks she has been making massive progress in her academic achievements. She is gearing up to have to sit the exams as it is highly unlikely the grades she is awarded in July/August will reflect what she should be able to achieve in the exams after a few more months on this trajectory... not quite sure how any student can maintain the momentum over the summer though. As long as she gets her uni place it won't matter, but for that sense of personal achievement, I think this year's grades will fall flat for all the exam candidates.

There's clearly no perfect system anyway, though...Que sera, sera, c'est la vie and all that!

This does depend what you mean by correct

Extensive research was published last year revealing how incorrect exam marking - especially in history and English- can be!

In addition, there is a longstanding tradition in some schools of UCAS grades being the best possible grade a student could achieve (this is where the problem of this being done less for BAME and disadvantaged students comes from). The internally gathered PGs are probably not as high.

I hear tell already today of students contacting teachers and telling them what grades they 'need'.

Most underperform.... so a success of this years system will be if the majority of A level students are pissed off....

I think I would still be worried about teachers deciding grades. I did music GCSE and one of my teachers really disliked me. She did all she could to give me the lowest grades she could within the confines of the moderation system. But she couldn't do anything about my exam performance, so to her annoyance, I got a pass grade. But if she had been able to give me an overall grade I would have got a D or lower. I suspect there are a few teachers out there like that.

I know there will be a chance to take the exam if you don't agree with your grade but that might be too late if you needed a particular grade for sixth form college.

Our big issue is that we've dramatically changed the way we do our tiers of entry this year. So we put 50% more of our students on foundation expecting they would do better.

We also took lots of our strong students off triple science and put them on double award. So they would see a grade increase.

That won't be reflected in this new methods. We flunked out last year. Put too many in to higher tier and hammered our results

I'm worried

Perhaps you'd like to come up with a better system, OP.

What do you suggest?

But cologne that's why HOD and Head of Centre have oversight and why it should be based on existing evidence and prior attainment. They are trying to make it as robust as possible. Of course there are issues : a bigger issue is inaccurate marking within schools being used as 'accurate data' but I can't see another way.

Dd is the only student ever to have done a certain A level at her school. She got a Grade 9 in it at GCSE. The overall cohort fluctuates wildly and her school is so small it is exempt from reporting progress 8 figures. Most of the 6th form didn’t attend the school for GCSE.

So this will be interesting.

UCAS predictions are always going to be way off though titchy
If i have a kid come to me in September who I reckon will get a B at the end of y13 ask me to put them down an A prediction because that is the course standard offer, then I will do that.
Why do I do this?
a) they may get the A anyway
b) it’s not my job to piss on their chips and demotivate them 9 months before their exams
And most importantly
c) they are offered AAA, get AAB and the uni takes them anyway ( we have seen this happen a lot, especially since we lost modular A levels but unis haven’t lowered their offers in many cases)
So my personal prediction would have a been a B, and that would be on their tracking data, but their UCAS prediction would be the aspirational A

I have tried to say that a few times rosie and wholeheartedly agree.

Plus, exam marking is wildly inaccurate. saying predictions are incorrect is making an assumption that exam marks are correct. The number of successful appeals does rather suggest otherwise!

Cologne, I’ve marked coursework for 25 years. At no point have l ever not given a mark because l don’t like a student.

In fact I’ve never disliked a student, even though they think we do. Nor have l had favourites.

I mark everyone fairly, and so do my colleagues.

Cognitive bias comes into play, to a degree, when you have to rank the entire cohort as people are human.

I hear tell already today of students contacting teachers and telling them what grades they 'need'
I was wondering if anyone who was "that parent" right through school might suddenly change to sweet talking the teacher over email.

We have been clearly told not to contact the school or any teachers to ask for info.

I’ve had swathes of begging/pleading/ sob story emails from my students, only a couple from parents so far.

I wonder if they are aware that teachers have to rank students and to push a particular child's grade up you'd either have to leapfrog them over a more deserving student or inflate the whole cohort's grades (which would probably be adjusted down again by the exam board.) That's if I've understood correctly

It's pretty obvious that the "in line with last year" part is so that schools don't give everyone 9s or A*s for everything.

Schools which achieve a higher percentage of 9/A grades than other schools are going to be able to get through a higher percentage of estimated 9/A grades than other schools, it's quite straightforward.

Only comparing it with the year before makes sense, as changes (such as a new, fantastic, head, or a new, appalling, teacher) take a couple of years to have an impact.

There are however always students, (and their parents, ohhh their parents!) who are convinced that although they got a 6 for GCSE they are definitely going to get an A* at A Level and I wouldn't want to be the teacher having to negotiate with them.

@Rosieposy4 I so don't want to be that parent.

But (and I guess all of those parents have a but), ds got exam adjustments arranged after mocks, having never had them before. He's severely hyper mobile which means his hands get tired. He was to have extra rest breaks, not extra time. Realistically it was only going to help him in a couple of subjects - it was one subject teacher who suggested we get them as they felt the mock didn't reflect his ability - he wrote the right thing, but not enough of it and his handwriting deteriorated at the end.

As a teacher, would you really hate the parent (me) who writes to remind them to take these adjustments into consideration? Is there a way of reminding them without being incredibly annoying?

PatienceVirtue in your shoes I would do it anyway, it may be a little annoying but definitely worth making sure every teacher had noticed the change to access arrangements.