GCSE summer 2020 thread 6 - Carry on Corona Cohort, Further adventures aboard the Corona Charabanc.

[FoolsAssassin]

The summer of discovidtent for the Corona Cohort trudging on towards results day.
Ofqual have done them a little video to explain their results:

Please feel free to join us to see what twists the next bit has in store for us all.

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Thread 1 year 10

School have given yr11 the option of going in for results or receive by email. They have said CAG and ranking will be disclosed to a pupil (not a parent) if they ask.

There are more than 15 pupils for every subject DS takes. Looking increasingly random given the TES article. I don't read the response as a strong denial. I feel sorry for the new head & all the teachers who spent so much time on all this.

For next year it has to be exams or results will potentially become further removed from the reality of students' abilities year on year and improving schools will not see that reflected in results?.

Well you will all be pleased to hear the TES article has been dismissed for the scaremongering twaddle it was.

www.gov.uk/government/news/response-to-tes-story-about-centre-assessment-grades

Do read the blog it links to of 6 August at the end too.

EwwSprouts does the pupil’s request need to be verbal or written in order for them to find out their CAG and rank per subject at your DS’ school?

ProggyMat if attending for results staff will have info, I guess to inform discussions around 6th form/college etc and if have asked for results to be emailed need to send a separate email request. I know we're lucky it sounds as if there will be a few staff in not just examinations officer.

Can I join in please? I am so worried about GCSE results day. DS school never really accepted that a kid who was given grade 6s based on y6 SATs could get 9s at GCSE, even when he got these in his mocks. He got higher in his mocks than his predicted grades but they didn't change the predicted grades. I worry about the teacher predicted grades, ranking, and exam board mass downgrading. I worry my son will be devastated and have a mental health crisis. Also what happens about sixth form entry criteria? Will schools relax offer requirements if lots of kids do less well than expected? We have been told to let the sixth forms know by midday on results day if we will take up a place, how can we do that with all the uncertainty and especially if the results are a disappointment.

@neutralintelligence I feel the same. It’s just down to luck how the school did last few years.

I am worried going in for results will be carnage with hysterical pupils and parents(me included). How can the staff deal with a hundred or two hundred pupils who haven't got what they expected before they have to choose a sixth form place the same day? There won't be a chance to speak to staff properly, especially with social distancing requirements. Normally pupils vaguely know if exams went ok or badly, but this year no-one knows what they will wake up to.

@neutralintelligence I think sixth forms will be flexible with entrance requirements this year. With all the news reports it’s looks like it’s going to be very turbulent for a lot of kids so hopefully colleges are making plans to deal with it all fairly.

At the moment I am considering buying uniforms for 3 different sixth forms with the possibility that on Aug 20 we will need to apply last-minute to some other college entirely if results are dire. Ds current school hasn't said anything about those kinds of contingencies.

@neutralintelligence I think as much I am freaking out inside, I am all cool and collected in front of my DD. I don’t want my worries to rub off on her. I can get all my venting done on here so she doesn’t know.

According to the BBC new, schools will be asked to be more lenient about their 6th form entry criteria so your DS should be fine.

It’s good he got 9s in the mocks, they should have used that to rank him highly. It’s not the only thing they use but they should put him pretty high.

I have the opposite problem. My dd didn’t revise for some subjects so only got 4s and 5s in some subjects she is normally very good at.

I am getting really worried now about results day. My son got all 8’s and 9’s in his mocks but what relevance do year 6 Sats have to how well a young person will do in their GCSE’s. Also my sons school marked pupils down on grades in their mocks to motivate them to do better in real thing. They predicted pupils would get at least 1 grade higher in the real exams.

Neither of those things will be used against your DS as an individual. The KS2 SATs are just used as statistical modelling to predict outcomes across the cohort. These have been sued for years by schools, LAs and the gov to predict outcomes (your DS may have been give a target grade, for example, which is generated form this). Don't panic about this affecting him as an individual. Our stats guy used these to tell use how many 9s, 8s, 7s etc. we might expect per subject and we , more or less, fitted our CAGs to this.

It's the rank order that matters. Ofqual did respond as someone e said, tot he articles yesterday, distancing themselves form the idea that pupils were set to get wildly unexpected result.

I do think schools have been predicting too many 9s to students in the last year, thereby creating a situation where lots of students become 'disappointed' with 'only' an 8. For context, my reasonably high achieving comp allocated 7 9s out of 400 students for English. We'll probably see about 5 of them get them, I suspect. 9s should be astonishingly good. For my DS he could feasibly get a 9 in 3 subjects but I think he will only be top of the rank order in one : we know eh may get 0 9s. That's OK. Come back to me if my DS gets 7s or 6s for any of those! That may get a different, less philosophical response!

We just have to be optimistic in the face of anxiety!

@Nard75 - yes, my son's maths teacher did this. I don't think the teacher even gave the pupils marks for working out! Maths was the one mark that was below his predicted grades - a 5, but then at parents evening the teacher said Ds would get an 8 or 9! But since Ds didn't get to sit the exam, a 5 in these non-exam results would stop Ds doing any of his career options, getting into any of his university courses etc.

@Piggywaspushed - it is not the Ofqual use of year 6 SATs that I am worried about. My Ds school is overly reliant on these results to predict GCSE results and won't accept that their system is flawed. My Ds was predicted 5s and 6s based on his Year 6 SATs by the school. His year 10 exams were mostly 8s and his year 11 mocks were mostly 9s. But they still won't accept that their modelling doesn't work for everyone. It is not a huge school, they could easily have given more individualised marks. In the end, his predicted grades were still at least 1 grade below his mocks. They also kept the kids in sets based on these inflexible predictions, so my Ds never got out of set 2 science despite consistently achieving higher than many in set 1. So that worries me for the school's ranking.

@Bluemarigold - it is horrible, isn't it. The conservatives removed all continuous assessment from the exam system and now it seems the pupils are actually being given marks based partly on 5 years of informal continuous assessment that they didn't know would ever happen. I hope your Dd can get some credit in her grades for that.

It is really unfair. We should have been looking forward to results day to some extent - a reward for hard work and progress since year 7. But that has been taken away and now I am thinking how I can keep my Ds safe if the exam results he could and would have got have been taken away from him.

EwwSprouts yes, that is lucky!
DD was hoping to see her subject teachers to thank them and say goodbye in person.
Looking at the info for the 20th it’s likely it will be SLT only at current school and a quick in and out- hopefully I’m wrong.
I’ve asked DD wether she intends to open her envelope in school or outside with me. She was of the mind to wait and open with me but I’m thinking it may be best for her to open it inside and if disappointed flag it to exams officer.
Keeping my fingers firmly crossed she walks out with a big smile on her face as I really don’t want to see her upset.

My DS is confident that he will get 9’s in all of his subjects and possibly an 8 for one subject. I am now really worried that he is going to be disappointed after working so hard for the last 5 years. He took his mocks really seriously and revised as if they were the real thing. Surely they can’t downgrade pupils can they?

Nard75 - your Ds sounds like mine.
I am worried he will be in a minority of pupils who get awarded lower marks than they achieved in mocks.
I trusted that y6 SATs would never be used to assess the individual child, only the primary school, then found my Ds school based their predicted grades mainly on y6 SATs. Wish I had stopped him sitting them now.
My son is best at science and humanities, and less good at English literature and maths, so y6 SATs and modelling based on these in secondary school have worked against him.
I always thought, oh well ,it will be OK in the end because he will take the exams and get the results he deserves anyway and the school's sets and predicted grades won't matter. I worry this won't happen now. We should be looking forward to a set of results mostly 9s, maybe 8s in a bad year of lots of clever kids. All the control has been taken away from us and given to teachers that decided who were the clever kids in year 7 (or even in year 6 before they even arrived secondary based on SATS) .

By the way, I come from a family of teachers! I am not anti-teacher. One of my parents was a chief examiner. I thought I knew how things worked, but y6 SATs seem to be king when predicting GCSE grades at my Ds school and I don't like it.

neutral all (state) schools use KS2 SATs to set targets. Some might combine it with equally flawed things such as CATS but Ofsted and external targets all come form KS2.

I agree it's a bit crap, and each school does something a bit different (so my DS had the same 'MEG' for every subject whereas my own school fine tunes them).

We have decided that whatever happened, we would give my DD a reward. I asked her what she would like and she said she wanted to watch a family movie.

I am not minimising your worry btw and can see where you are coming from, but , in all honesty, if he did so well in his mocks, that is something the school will definitely look at. That's the hard evidence. Some schools sue the word prediction in a confusing way, I think, and that isn't helpful. they actually mean 'eternally value added target'.

use

Y6 SATs and Y7 CATs are used at most state schools to set teacher targets, but that should not be the same as teacher predictions. It is a contentious thing, many schools do not look beyond the SAT/CAT target to asses whether a student is on target, but I have known several kids whose SATs did not reflect their potential due to dyslexia or how much primary schools focused on them. It is ridiculous that art and music have target grades based on SATs in English and Maths.

If your DC got 9s in the mocks, it is very likely that they will get 9s in the CAGs, which will mean 9 in the real thing for the majority or students. However, the effective difference between 8 and 9 is really negligible at the moment, so it really should not matter to you or your DC if they are downgraded to an 8 as it makes no difference other than to their pride. The 9 grade was brought in to distinguish between the excellent and the outstanding, but barely any universities, including Oxbridge, discriminate between 8 and 9. Bizarrely this meant that instead of 9s being the top half of the old As, there are almost twice as many 8/9 as there used to be A, but the universities regard them as equal. It is likely that at some point the universities will not treat them as equal, but it will not change for our lot.

My DS was has said that he will be OK with it as long as nothing moves down from the last predictions in his report by more than 1 grade, but he might be inclined to do the autumn exam if he is 2 grades down on one of his favourite subjects.