GCSE and A level Government/Ofqual 'Sweetner'

[HappySonHappyMum]

Does anyone else feel that the government/Ofqual have released appeal info and results pattern information in advance of the actual results to try and offset the fury that thousands of teenagers and parents are likely to feel on results days when they realise their kids have been shortchanged? I felt really angry for the Scottish kids when I saw how the data supplied to the SQA had been used. I am feeling even more worried now than I did before. This whole year group are going to lose out and there's nothing these kids can do about it .

@Graciebobcat

What would have been the actual result of just accepting teachers' predicted grades?

Would it have meant courses were over-subscribed? Just wondering as there are loads more places this year.

It seems to be SQAs/Ofqual's shit algorithms which are at fault here. Having grades predicted by where you come from is one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard in my life.

There are 5% more places available - not loads more.

And the algorithm didn't moderate down based on deprivation of school. That's soon. Read the post prior to yours which summarises very well.

*spin not soon

What if a pupil/parent wants to appeal a grade but the school does not agree?

What would have been the actual result of just accepting teachers' predicted grades?

In Scotland, where this has happened, it means the pass rate has seen the biggest one year increase ever. It also means that the pass rate at Higher for disadvantaged students has gone from 65% to 85% in one year.

In England it would mean that 38% of students would get A* or A at A-level. This has never been above 27% before.

It also means that pupils attending schools where teachers have given realistic predictions lose out to pupils at schools that have given overly optimistic predictions.

That’s not that i think moderation is fair - that’s the problem with statistics. They might give the “right“ answer at population level but exam results matter to individuals

Predicted grades will always be a higher than actual grades for a school, because of the vagaries of exams themselves. If Lucy, say, is genuinely capable, in terms of intelligence, work ethic, and performing at her normal level on the day with a reasonable bitof luck with the questions, of gettinga certain grade, then obviously that should be her predicted grade.

However, she panics in exams (might not do so much in mocks), her dog dies the day before, her mind goes blank, she breaks up with her boyfriend the week before, her period is two weeks late and she is terrified but doesn't tell anybody, she feels unwell (yes I know that's a mitigating circumstance but it has to be proper medical doctor's certificate unwell, not rotten cold unwell), she reads the instructions wrongly, doesn't finish the last question, which can be a big chunk of marks in essay type subjects, then doesn't get the grade.

On the other hand, apart from being lucky with the questions, there aren't many variables that would lead to somebody doing much better than expected.

Maybe that's why there is always a discrepancy?

As a population predicted grades will be higher than actuals. But at an individual level the algorithm can’t determine whose dog would have died and who would have pulled something out of the bag.

I don’t think there is a good answer

Sorry - just realised your point!

I like this 'triple lock', why not give the benefit of the doubt to the group of pupils most badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown?
If they can pick the highest mark, then they are less likely to feel they have been unfairly downgraded or disadvantaged.
Sure, if the results of the whole cohort are much higher than previous years, then people may question their results. But a mass downgrading in a modelling moderation scheme seems to mean a significant number of pupils will have downgraded marks permanently that they can do nothing about without being unfairly penalised (resits in autumn - just when the second wave hits).

OK, sorry, apparently I have slightly misunderstood (the TV news this morning was very unclear) - CAG will still not be allowed, despite being allowed in Scotland? And the third element of 'triple lock' is a resit (during a pandemic, second wave likely in Autumn), so it is actually more of a 'double lock'.
I can see that this still does not solve the problem.

They aren’t re-marking anything. If a pupil gets a grade that’s lower than their predicted grade they can appeal to get their mock exam grade

Predicted grades are different to mock exam grades though.

If you have been awarded an A which was lower than your teacher predicted grade of an A* -because you worked your socks off after your dreadful mock results-appealing to get your mock grade of B (which you were devastated by!) would be pointless.

I can’t think of anyone I know who didn’t get better results than their mocks in the final results.

Mocks are a practice run-you mess up, you’re too slow, you learn from it.

What if a pupil/parent wants to appeal a grade but the school does not agree?

That would probably mean that the pupil’s prior results (mocks etc) weren’t good enough to provide evidence for a successful appeal.

Simply abandoning Ofqual’s moderation would disadvantage children in schools like mine that reined in our predictions before submitting them

Absolutely right. It would also disadvantage schools who also moderated their CAGs with other local secondaries.

The system of moderation could easily have been designed to identify centres whose predictions were generous Or too severe (examining the previous years’ correlation between predicted grades and student outcomes) . Any school with a strong correlation should automatically have their CAGs accepted.

I find it deeply disturbing the government considers mock results to be more reliable than the carefully calculated (often ore-moderated) CAGs which are done on much more evidence and course content covered than mocks (some of which take place in November - it is not reassuring to know you won’t get lower for your final grade than the in-school/non-standardised exams you did over 6 months before the ‘real thing’ should have happened).

All well and good schmedz but schools in England haven't submitted Predicted Grades for years.

What an absolute mess.

The system of moderation could easily have been designed to identify centres whose predictions were generous Or too severe (examining the previous years’ correlation between predicted grades and student outcomes) . Any school with a strong correlation should automatically have their CAGs accepted.

That is exactly what it was designed to do.

In Scotland, where this has happened, it means the pass rate has seen the biggest one year increase ever. It also means that the pass rate at Higher for disadvantaged students has gone from 65% to 85% in one year

In England it would mean that 38% of students would get A* or A at A-level. This has never been above 27% before

I guess what I was getting at was how does this affect university places and so on? As mostly it seems a more positive outcome for the students in unprecedented circumstances.

Mock exams are just about the least consistent variable they could have chosen.
Schools use mocks - and different departments in schools use mocks - for so many different purposes, and mark them in different ways to sit those purposes too.
Some do them early, to give the students a sense of seriousness early on. In some cases a fair amount of what is on the papers has not yet been taught.
Some do them late - to give real exam practice and to identify gaps/ weaker areas for revision - but hadn't done them when the school closures were announced and the predicted grades had to be submitted.
Some do one paper only to give students a flavour, or to test what has already been taught.
Some do all papers from a particular year's exam.
Some mark hard to give students a worst case scenario - especially over things like poor handwriting ('the marker may not know if that was a 2 or a 5') or making it absilutely cĺear which is a final answer.
Others mark more leniently as they are checking understanding and memory through these exams, and will work on the nit picky bits in exam prep classes nearer the time.
Some choose to use 2017 tests. Some do 2019 or 2018.
Some use the grade boundaries. Some don't.
These are all valid approaches as part of the teaching process and build-up to the real exams. But they do not provide any type of valid data on which to base consistent final results.

Anecdotally, when I did O levels, my entite class failed our Latin mock. The teacher had adapted the real paper to remove a section of the translation from a set text ( Caesar's Gallic Wars Bk 8, if I remeber correctly.
He knew that none of us were actually doing the translaring, but were learning off the whole translation worked on in class. Sure enough, we mostly correctly identified the opening line and final line, and wrote the relevant chunk of translated text, failing to notice the missing section, so providing a few lines of translarion for Latin that had not been provided.
We all got Ds and Es, but learnt our lessonand we all got As or Bs in the real exam.
We resented him then, but his tactic worked. How would we have felt in 2020? And how would he have felt?

Its disgusting, almost like playing a board game where you don't know the rules when you start playing the game & the rules change every time you shake the dice, like mega snakes & ladders, slide down one snake, up one rung of the ladder & down another snake. They are messing with our children's future & they don't care.

The system of moderation could easily have been designed to identify centres whose predictions were generous Or too severe (examining the previous years’ correlation between predicted grades and student outcomes) . Any school with a strong correlation should automatically have their CAGs accepted.

The problem is when a school has 10 very similar pupils they expect to get a strong A when normally only 8 do. A 25% increase.

How is anyone, even the teacher, meant to know which 2 would have got stuck on an unexpected question, who would have not slept the night before, who was unwell but not enough for GP note, who misread the question, who slept in and lost those precious marks, who panicked when a question threw them in exam conditions?

Whatever way this goes it is not going to be fair to someone.

My son didn't put much effort into the subjects that he wants to do at A level in the mocks. He was planning to concentrate on them in the "real" exams. In his weak subjects he did ok in the mocks but in his stronger subjects he didn't do well and based on the mocks he won't be able to do his chosen subjects.

Nobody in his Geography class was predicted above a 5 in Geography as the teacher was disappointed with their mock results and wanted to push them to do better. Does that mean that nobody in his class will be able to do A level Geography?

@JellyBabiesSaveLives

They’re basically saying “over 3 years your school,has averaged 1 A and 3As in French, so the top kid in your ranking gets an A, the next 3 get As”. Even if this year the teachers thought they’d 2 kids worthy of an A* and the rest were B’s.

I’d like to know how they’ll handle it when there’s been a lot of variability across those 3 years.

Exactly a worry with have with regards to DS's results. This year 11 group is particularly strong in Maths, with most of top set being predicted 7-9's. Previous years ( particularly last year) were not so strong. I worry the impact this'll have for DS, who was getting 7's- almost an 8- in his mocks, and he's not even the strongest in his class. There's at least 5 students hoping for a 9

How is anyone, even the teacher, meant to know which 2 would have got stuck on an unexpected question, who would have not slept the night before, who was unwell but not enough for GP note, who misread the question, who slept in and lost those precious marks, who panicked when a question threw them in exam conditions?

I know it sounds harsh but we had to rank them.