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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@Janie74 welcome. It is worrying if your DD deserves 9s in three subjects which each only had 1x9 last year. She may well be fine, but try to persuade her that universities treat 8 and 9 equally, so if she does not get 999, it is only her pride which takes the knock, but that would not stop it being unfair at an age where fairness really matters.

@Monkey2001 thank you for responding. Last year was the first year they did this and obviously it hasn’t happened this year. It’s reassuring that the school might be able to appeal should she not get a 5. I’m trying so hard to be blasé about it all to her and keeping my wobbles private. Roll on the 20th when at least we’ll all know one way or another!

Thank you @Monkey2001 - the uncertainty is getting to me now, as it must be to everyone else. I wish I could see results for the earlier years to see if there is any consistency, but only last year’s are on the website in any detail. The school’s overall performance on the Ofsted site looks pretty stable, but I don’t know if that really means anything or if I can read too much into it. I feel I’ve learnt far too much about secondary school data over recent weeks!

Yes there is a school locally that puts their lower sets in for Maths and English language in early in y10 in the hope that they get their 4 and then can concentrate on other gcses and of not they have 2 more attempts before 6th Form.

I can never make up my mind if that is a good move or not.

My friends daughter had to take Maths in year 10 and got a D (this was a few years ago, she’s 20 now) and then she ended up being made to retake it a further 4 times over the following 3 years and got a D every time!

DS is away with his Dad for a week, so I’m having a week off worrying 😬
All I am really concerned with is Maths & English as he’s been accepted for his A-Levels regardless of results.
He was predicted 6 & 7’s for Maths & English.

Obviously I will be torturing myself by reading the A-level results thread on Thursday!

@Oblomov20
My DS is just the same, he was just getting going on hard core revision having not worked especially hard for mocks, so he won't do as well as he would have. That's the unfairness from his point of view - he has a perfectly valid approach to exams, but now that they are being measured in a completely different way that nobody was expecting, he is at a disadvantage. But there you go. Hopefully he'll do well enough to do A levels and we can all move on. And I've told him every lesson and piece of work and assessment counts in Y12 and Y13 as this might well happen again
(He is also the requester of the Bakewell tart, which I had completely forgotten about until I saw your post so thanks for the reminder )

Janie74 same boat here, no idea how ranks outside his class as such a big year. Luckily he is philosophical about it as long as can get into next place.

Oblomov that is difficult. Do you think what has happened will mean he goes at it harder from earlier with 6th form?

DD still doesn’t have maths despite 3 attempts.

@FoolsAssassin You’re lucky your DS is chilled - DD is climbing the walls and currently talking of taking the autumn exams to get her 9s. I am not convinced that is a good idea - I think we all need to move on if we possibly can and focus on A-levels, which are ultimately more important. I am exhausted from being the voice of calm reassurance when inside I am as anxious as she is!

I don’t really understand how the CAGs work - DD’s report (issued in February) showed a target grade, a mock grade and a working at grade - in some cases the target grade was 1-2 grades lower than the mock result and the working at grade, which makes no sense to me at all. And in light of the TES article a few days ago, and the fact that DD attends a large school, does it even matter?

Would target be a computer generated one from KS2 results or something similar?

He has given up I think and just wants it behind him. Your DD may feel differently when the results are here and they are back and are cracking on with A levels maybe? Right now saying she will resit is the only control she feels she has in unchartered waters so might be a coping mechanism possibly.

Well its all crap...

DD dyslexic so a spiky profile (to say the least), most likely as her school doesn't get a lot of 9's (or any) she will miss out on the two subjects she has been getting 9's in all year. It is going to be a blow to her confidence because it really mattered to her to get top marks in something, as others marks (like English) aren't going to be anything like the same level. I know it doesn't matter if she ends up with 7's - in two subject - that's a great mark. But she's worked so so so hard and now it feels like it won't be recognised and is out of her control. If she'd had a bad exam she'd be okay, but this just seems unfair.

@FoolsAssassin I hope you’re right re: the autumn exams - it could well be that she needs something concrete to hold on to just now. She is a bit of a control freak with studying so that would make sense.

As for the target grades, I suppose they could be a throwback to KS2 - I confess I can’t remember how she did with her SATS as it seems such a long time ago! Hopefully the stress over GCSEs will be an equally distant memory one day!

@Wheresthebeach - I agree! At least if they’d had a bad exam paper they would have some sense of how it had gone, and time to accept that it just hadn’t been their day. Plus they’ve had so much time since school closed to dwell on things (as have we...!) - I wish they’d had their results earlier as originally suggested.

@Janie74 - I can't imagine why they've left it so long since they decided to ignore teacher predictions. It's a huge slap in the face to teachers - I get that the there would be downgrades esp around the 4 mark. Teachers are human and if they thought there was a chance on a good day for the pupil to pass then of course they'd give them the benefit of the doubt. But this means the kids work is dismissed, so the whole year has grades based not on their work, but the school. It's bonkers, and wrong.

Also the lack of warning, waiting til the last minute to announce what they are doing is just so awful and cruel. DD was quite relaxed, now not so much. Do they not care one jot about the impact of their decisions?

@Wheresthebeach It has been so poorly handled. I am not convinced that teachers have over-estimated grades at all - the ‘grade inflation’ could just as easily have arisen because teachers have had to assess on the basis that each student would revise and turn up for the exam, that they would be in full health, that no unexpected family emergency would affect them, that they wouldn’t choose to answer the wrong questions or run out of time etc. That alone would surely account for the apparent increase in scores. It is so offensive to teachers to ignore their professional standards and integrity.

And don’t get me started on the lack of individual appeals! Surely someone somewhere with enough money to do so will mount a legal challenge to that.

You do realise that false TES "news" article has been refuted?

Also to all those saying kids were about to settle down to revision and hard core work that is quite usual for all of them. Mist don't start revising until Easter hols so after Lockdown. Teachers know that and will factor it in.

@SeasonFinale I saw that Ofqual had put out a statement in response, but I don’t know that it specifically refuted the general disregard for CAGs - but then I have read so much stuff over the past couple of weeks that I may be getting muddled. I would be happy to know that it had been fully refuted!

@SeasonFinale
I think the point is that someone who didn't work hard for mocks but was turning up the heat later would be disadvantaged, even though that is a perfectly acceptable approach in a normal year. Some students decide that as mock results don't affect anything, why not chill this term and go for it nearer the time. It doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether they would have done better or worse than their more consistent classmates in the exams. But this year those students have not provided their teachers with that crucial evidence and teachers have to use the data available - maybe they can assume everyone would do a bit better in the real thing, but I don't think they can decide who would have worked harder in April and May and inflate their grades relative to those of other students. (But ready to be corrected by the teachers on here! Actually did every school use the same data in the same way?)

No because it every school works in the same way. Some don't even mark homework. Some don't do end of topics tests. So those who have more marked pieces of work will definitely find it easier to assess their students than those that don't. Some set past papers as mocks, some set their own harder exams, some set past papers but put the grade boundaries higher. Some schools already had NEAs in and if they did could use these as part of thw material to calculate the grade but some didn't. There was not set criteria because each school works differently.

@singingstones our DD didn't apply herself properly to mocks and then got stressed. I told her not to worry as mocks are just a practice for the real event(!) and it would give her a kick up the bum for the 'real' exams. Little did I know this would come back and haunt me! I really believe if she knew the mock exams would count in any way towards final grades then she would have applied herself at the time as she is very conscientious and would have wanted to do well. Her mocks were sat in early November and her school didn't do any further mocks. When schools closed due to
lockdown she hadn't finished the syllabus for quite a few subjects so when she took the mocks it would have also been the case. In her maths mock she didn't do that well but some children got 100% and it came to light that they sat last years GCSE and a lot of her year had the paper and answers. Following the chat today of how different schools did mocks at different times, I know of children in other schools and other friends started their GCSEs in year 9, completed in year 10 & were bored in year 11 as they were just completing past papers. It will be interesting to see how all their GCSE results compare.

Do we know whether the unused 2020 papers will be used for the Autumn exams? DD’s English teacher ran a prediction competition on the poems that would came up, and she wants to know if she won!

Another parent of very stressed child here

DD has SEN and suffers from really bad anxiety she struggles with panicking in exams.

Bottom set Maths and Science and was on foundation papers for both.

She was scoring U / low 1s for both subjects in year 10 - she panicked in exams and forgot everything.

School were great she was moved into a class with about 5 other children in for maths and less than 10 for science. She was attending booster sessions before and after school and given personalised revision plans so she knew exactly what to revise and when.

They changed how she accessed exams from the large hall to a small group with rest break allowed if she started to panic.

She did her last set of mocks in February and went from 1c in maths to a 3c and 1aa in science to 3ab.

Both her teachers then changed her predicted grades from a 3 to a 4 as they believed with the progress she was now making she would get there.

The worry is now that the predicted grades will be ignored and she will be assessed on the previous results.

She only managed 4s in everything else so potentially she could fail everything when we know she would have done enough to get onto her course.

She has worked so hard to pass this year. She was never going to be top set / 9s across the board - not every child is like that. No matter how many times we tell her we are proud of her whatever, no matter how many emails her tutors are sending her over summer saying the same it still doesn't stop all the tears at the moment and her saying she is stupid and a failure.

DD has said that in some lessons homework was handed in but it was never marked, it just stayed in their folders until the end of term. Now she's annoyed that if homework is to be taken into account then this might look as though they haven't done any.
Or is she ( and me) reading too much into this particular aspect of it?

@practicallyperfectwithprosecco It is such a worry - keeping everything crossed for all our DC to get what they need to move on. The mental health impact from all this has been horrendous

@practicallyperfectwithprosecco
That is really tough on your DD..
I'm sure the teachers would have given her 4s and they have the evidence of her improvement so far to back it up. Just cling on to these thoughts for the next 10 days - overall this year's results will be slightly up on last year's. And most grades will not be adjusted down. Everything crossed now that she gets what she needs 🤞