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.

Thread 5
Thread 4
Thread 3
Thread 1 year 10

Having read your posts, Cherry, I think there’s good reason to hope that your daughter will get the grades she needs. FFT targets played no role at all in my predictions. I have students with FFT targets of a 2 who I have predicted 5s for. One of my predicted grade 9s has an FFT of 5. The reverse is also true, with a few students with lower predictions than their FFT grade. Your daughter’s school’s previous performance will also go in her favour. I will keep everything crossed for her.

If they just publish a certificate with both grades, that will do the job!

Agree we can’t have the highest gcse grades ever. Maybe they will be announcing a more lenient appeals system

Thanks @MadameMinimes. I was doing okish until this stuff started being reported in the press. DD is SEN and has worked so, so hard. The waiting now is killing me!

I suppose that’s a possibility. In itself it wouldn’t solve the problem for students relying on the better grades for university places, as I assume the standardised grades would be the official ones, but it might help those who don’t need the grades but want their certificates to better reflect what they feel was their full potential. It might help to calm the public anger without really changing much practically, although I suppose it could help universities to see who narrowly missed a grade (a bit like looking when they look at the exam marks of kids who only missed a grade by a mark or two).

Has everyone seen what's just happened in Scotland? All grades getting looked at again ( more info coming tommorow) but Sturgeon apologized and said they had got it wrong. Worrying as Ofqual surely used the same methodology? Will Ofqual do the same. Whole process has been undermined now IMO

Ofqual won't share their methodology until results day!

This is a long read but interesting . It's about A Levels but still the same principles.

www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/08/10/a-levels-2020-what-students-and-parents-need-to-know/

Might be of note that Cambridge International Board ( CIE) GCSES and A Level results are out tomorrow. Will be interesting to see how those go...

What’s the betting that won’t there will be no reflection by OFCAL in England?!?!

Thank you @Piggywaspushed - that article made an interesting read (although not necessarily a reassuring one!).

When calculating the CAG and rank orders, did teachers know that the ranking would ultimately be the more important factor for most schools? I’m assuming (perhaps wrongly) that there would have been some guidance from the exam boards/Ofqual about how to assess the students and how the assessment data would be used?

I would feel much more reassured if we had an individual right of appeal

“When calculating the CAG and rank orders, did teachers know that the ranking would ultimately be the more important factor for most schools?”

We thought the guidance made it clear that the rank order was the most critical thing. I know not all teachers think it was clear enough, but the guidance indicated from the beginning that the rank order would be used to adjust results so that they matched up with the grades that the statistical model indicated were realistic for that school. Where students were borderline we spent more time making sure that they were in the right order than agonising over where we put the cut-off between two grades, as it was clear that the cut-off could move but the rank order wouldn’t.

@MadameMinimes Thank you - that is good to know. It must have been very difficult indeed to rank students of very similar ability - I don’t envy you that.

It was really hard. The trickiest part was trying to decide between closely-matched kids who had different teachers.
Luckily we only had 2 people teaching my subject in year 11 this year as a result of a timetabling issue in September, which simplified things a lot. We each did a gut feeling ranking from looking at our mark books and data just to get our initial thinking clear. Then we used a scoring system that combined various kinds of data (some based on teacher judgement, some based on mock results, some based on other assessments) to create a ranking for the whole cohort.
We then went through that rank order one student at a time and looked at any student whose positions didn’t match up with what we thought to for things like personal circumstances, patterns of improvement, performance on individual papers etc that might justify moving them up or down from the rank order indicated by the raw data score. Looking at the data scoring also showed us examples where actually we didn’t have a good reason for our gut-feeling ranking and helped us to weed out unconscious bias. We had a rule that you couldn’t put a kid up or down the rank order without a logical argument from the evidence that we had available.
In a few really tricky cases we actually ended up scanning in their mock papers to compare over teams to separate out silly mistakes from lack of understanding. The top and bottom were quite straightforward but we really did have to look at some of the 5/6 kids in minute detail.

@MadameMinimes - thanks for your hard work. I hope your students and parents appreciate you.

MadameMinimes - re Scotland the most deprived although downgraded the most as a % still had a higher uplift than the least deprived already .

Yes it was perfectly clear in the guidance to centre heads that the ranking was of greatest importance to the modelling.

The reason that the data won't be released until schools have results is because itbis a completely different set of data for each school ie. THEIR historic data and THEIR prior cohort data. They did not want people to incorrectly try to apply the data to their submitted grades. The school's will get this on Wednesday and will be able to check it is correct. Obviously if not this is one of the grounds to appeal!

Although there will be national statistics there is no national standardisation due to it being related to that school only.

I am now worrying about something else. Did the teachers consider year 10 exams or just year 11 mocks? My DS had an undiagnosed mental health disorder that meant he couldn't handle the year 10 exams and didn't do well at all - maybe 3-4 grades below his year 11 mocks, by which time he was a little bit more aware of why he was struggling and could help himself a little. By the time real GCSEs were going to take place, he would have received a lot of treatment and be in a better place. But these things are confidential and I don't think most of his teachers were aware so his year 10 performance would have looked v bad compared to year 11, while others without this mental health issue would have been more consistent. Can appeals based on mental health issues be submitted?

Excuse my phone and its inappropriate use of apostrophes!!

I’m on quite a few teacher networking groups on FB and it’s no more than what the vast majority of people were doing to make sure they got this right. I’m not expecting students or parents who are disappointed by their grades to be very happy with me but I can stand by the process and a negative reaction is totally understandable in the circumstances. It’s going to be a very emotional day I think.

I echo everything madame says. We knew rank was most important. What we didn't know was how much tolerance there might be of generosity or meanness. We have a red hot data guy who basically used the model Ofqual seemed to have done. It's annoying that he doesn't always see the humans in the system of course!

The rank order was awful for us as we knew it was important but it involved 400 students and 13 teachers, not all of them confident or experienced and our HOD is quite new. At times it became a little 'he who shouts loudest' but I think we got it as right as an exam would and, as I have as I before, I am pleased that some of the very anxious ones will get a grade they deserve rather than one that reflects anxiety and exam nerves.

I thought it was clear from the start that rank order was most important - I remember quite early dd and I looking at last year’s GCSE results and trying to work out her rank for each subject!

I’m pretty sure they’ll put more weight on recent work than year 10 exams @neutralintelligence? It wouldn’t make any sense to do otherwise. And it will be all work presumably, not just mocks.

SeasonFinale- I do think that it looks like the decision to review the grading in Scotland is being driven by the public outrage and negative headlines. As you say, this year’s results actually narrowed the disadvantage gap in Scotland. I don’t think it’s actually that surprising that schools with disadvantaged students had more adjustments. I can see why teachers in schools with very disadvantaged cohorts would have wanted to give kids the benefit of the doubt, especially around the pass/fail boundary. They are also likely to have a larger proportion of students on those critical borderlines, where there have been more adjustments nationally.

Thank you @Piggywaspushed & @MadameMinimes for the info on rankings.

As the time gets closer, it feels quite frenzied.
Early on I was quite chilled - DS has worked hard for 2 years & I just want it to be a true reflection.

The Scottish Gov review - I really feel for those who have lost out on Uni places. What a mess. Do we know if the Scottish Gov & our Gov have used same product for calculations?

Thursday & A-level results will be interesting.

Thank you @MadameMinimes, @Piggywaspushed and any other teachers on here - I hope that all schools were as diligent and objective as you were. It must have been especially difficult with a large cohort with multiple classes and different teachers - as is the case in DD’s school and countless others.

From DD’s point of view, the only subject in which I think she would have been borderline for grades will have been maths. On a good day she’d get a 6, on a bad one a 5 - just depending on the questions and her anxiety levels. The mock result was a high 5 (2 marks off a 6), but her teacher seemed confident she would pull herself into definite 6 territory with more exam practice. That was said at parents’ evening the week before schools closures were announced, so who knows?

Did the school rankings follow sets? I previously thought everyone accepted that there were overlaps between the tops and bottoms of sets and my Ds school certainly moved very few people since the GCSE's sets were placed at the start of year 10 (single figures).
I worry about the rankings - my DS got 3 grade 9s in science mocks but is in set 2, but most of set 1 didn't get 3 grade 9s. If they stick to sets, then that is 30 pupils ahead of my DS to get a grade 9, which obviously he won't get. He might not even get a grade 8 since most of set 1 got 8s. So that is 30 pupils ahead of him to get a grade 8. It seems unlikely that the school will place a set 2 pupils number 10 in the rankings, ahead of 20 set 1 pupils who they seemingly considered better despite not achieving as highly.