GCSE Summer 2020 Thread 7 : Carry on Corona Cohort, Cruising or Crawling to The Final Countdown

[OrangeCinnamon1]

Welcome all to the 7th Thread for this year's GCSE cohort ...or the Corona Cohort as has been termed by @FoolsAssassin.

Some of us have been here since I started first thread back in 2010, some will be new. Everyone has been friendly and helpful in the past. It is hoped this will continue. Going forward we intend to stay in secondary so any new threads should have 'GCSE Summer 2020 Thread # : Carry on Corona Cohort' in title just to make it easier to find.

From now on our DS/DD may go down various paths so we decided not to be exclusionary and stay right here in Secondary

Thread 1 The first GCSE yr 10

Thread 6 last thread

Well done to your DC RoiseCap and Kingscote!

DS's school has posted a "congratulations to all students" on its website and specifically mentioned a few students who've got university places or apprenticeships. More interesting is what it's not posted - it's not put individual grades for all the students it's called out (only some of them) like it usually does, and there's no "general" comment about overall results at all. I'm imagining school is considering appeals, hence the reticence. Would be nice to know, but obviously they are not obliged to tell me :)

They can't be asking for scripts!! People spread this belief back when we were doing the CAGs too. They scrapped hard copies of exams and coursework going to the board.

I did say seems though as their meaning of valid may cause problems.

Good question lily!

Delurking as after yesterday’s debacle Feel I am going to need a handhold for next week. Trying to stay positive for youngest ( older 3 at uni) and that thankfully school confirmed back in May his place in sixth form, but reading the a level page was maybe not a good idea for my own MH🤷🏻‍♀️

I think I must have totally misunderstood the significance of the announcement that teachers’ grades were going to be ignored and only rank order used.

I assumed that, if last year 10 students got an 8, then Ofqual would let the same proportion of this year’s cohort have and 8, and this would be worked down through the grades, so that if you got down to, for example, grade 4 and everyone had been allocated a grade accordingly, there would be no fails.
Presumably, that’s how no-one would move by more than 1 grade.

I had NO idea that someone has to fail if last year’s results say they do.

So, does that mean that people have also gone up 2 grades?
Surely that means this isn’t simply a case of private schools - advantage, state schools - disadvantage?

However I think this twitter feed ( copied from a level thread) explains why grades for some individuals was mystifying and why grades seem illogical for some

twitter.com/a_weatherall/status/1294012623776817158?s=21

I’ve just been onto dd’s school website to see their announcements. Their last message was yesterday morning- saying goodbye luck. It’s a pretty mixed bag comp.

Good luck - sorry!

AWanderingminstrel, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

What that seems to say, to me, is that outliers in this year’s cohort have had allowances made for them (eg A* student in a subject that previously only had As as top grade), but this year’s cohort are being made to fit any outliers from previous years (eg fails when no-one was going to fail this year).

Or is this the area that moveable grade boundaries usually deal with?

Thanks @AWanderingMinstrel - that’s very interesting!

I really hope the pressure remains on the government over the next week. I’ve read some heartbreaking stories on here.

A friend works in a wonderful HE College, in a deprived area & said yesterday was awful.

That’s reassuring Piggy, thanks. The misinformation that keeps popping up doesn’t help does it - the mocks scripts and the everyone having to adjust rankings immediately come to mind.

Saw that about that Twitter thread which I do think explains a lot. Don’t think it is simply a case of State v Private Piccolo, think the figures show that overall state slightly more effected but that could be down to them having bigger classes so CAGs were counted less. Our local private’s Head sounded pissed off and the only result I know from there is A*, A, A going to A, A, D

DS school has been reduced 38 percent- state school but one of the best sixth forms in the country. Other local state school downgraded 35 per cent. Am absolutely dreading next thurs now

My daughter was in a cohort of 1 for an Alevel subject. It’s never been taught before at her school and she basically self studied with a weekly tutorial from the gcse teacher. I know her resultbased on the CAG IS robust as she not only did the AS level last year but the teacher submitted dd’s work for moderation. to a teacher at another school who do teach that subject also the teachers husband is a university lecturer in that subject. Her A* stands and I’m very proud.

But in another subject they have all been downgraded In a cohort of 12. Last year the school got 25% A but the previous two years they got no A and only a tiny percentage of A. This years cohort was expected to do better than last years but the overall average appears to have dragged it down. Dd got a B.

Fools, the media have jumped on the 4% grade increase in private schools, against 2% for state, and people seem to be running with this as prof that they’ve been disadvantaged.
Its clearly much more complex.
The only thing that Twitter feed doesn’t explain is how prior performance fits into things - presumably, taking into account that, it’s actually not as simple as matching the % grade distribution?

Of course, there’s still the question of why the government/Ofqual only announced last week that they wouldn’t be using CAGs; they must have done that originally, panicked and changed their minds, but surely long before last week?

My DD is worried they will now change & lower GCSE results in private schools before Thursday to avoid a second uproar. What will be will be i guess.

I posted on another thread about why the system used is unfair. It comes down to Ofqual/gov/exam boards wanting the result to be in line with previous years, which they have achieved, but only at the very highest level of the overall year 13 cohort.
The random factors that determine whether a pupil gets their predicted grade cannot be used in a statistical algorithm: lack of revision, good/bad luck with the high-mark essay questions, panic, illness, social life problems, death of pet, oversleeping, getting drunk with friends the night before etc etc.
So to achieve the standardised model that does not greatly exceed last year's, they have had to assume that pupils who are borderline at a grade border or whose school was lower performing in the last 3 years will be the pupils who would have underperformed in the exams. That is a fundamentally incorrect assumption, which is why at an individual level many pupils have been downgraded unfairly.
To those that say, what is your better algorithm: there isn't one. This year there is no exam paper to show that a certain pupil underperformed, so it is not ethical to downgrade that pupil from their predicted grade.
The only ethical solution is to use a CAG or a valid mock result.

Absolutely agree @neutralintelligence
Can you let the government know? 😬

The current system gives disproportionate priority to the interests of previous years of pupils who took GCSE and A'level exams. The concern is that they should not be disadvantaged by the current year 11s and year 13s getting overall higher results.
That priority is wrong. The priority should be to ensure that the pupils who will have live with the consequences of these grades are treated fairly at an individual level. It should be of lesser importance that as a whole the year group has higher grades.
The current system is no more than a guess at who would have underperformed from predicted grades just so other year groups do not feel disadvantaged, but in doing so many individuals in the current year group have been very disadvantaged.
Without an actual exam paper to mark and review, mass moderation does not work.

@neutralintelligence I'm so glad you posted that - it's going round and round with DD and I - just don't understand their reasoning and nobody on Sky News is convincing me otherwise - what a way to alienate and demotivate

@neutralintelligence I wish you had a larger platform or newspaper opinion piece - what you're saying so eloquently needs to be shared

neutral anecdotally we're hearing schools report that their results are not in line with past ones either though. piccolo posted upthread that her school's results have gone up a lot this year. Unless the cohort is significantly stronger than previous years (as defined by GCSE results?) this seems ... wrong. We're clearly also seeing reports from schools whose results are a long way down.

It also begs the question of what you do if you don't have consistent results year on year (claiming a vested interest here as DS goes to a large comp where there is large variation in results from year to year).

The standardisation model also doesn't look at grades. So if a pupil was borderline B/C and their CAG was a B, you could argue that giving the lowest ranked in a school a "C" was fair but the model might still give them a D. This is clearly unfair.

neutral I agree entirely with your post of 9.39 (which I think you wrote as I was typing mine!). The model might make sense at a macro level, but at an individual level there is too much unfairness.

I'm also finding annoying that the reports say "only 3%" of grades were downgraded by more than 1 level. 3% sounds like a small number. I don't know how many entries there were, but that's actually a lot of affected students. And, arguably, it's extremely unlikely that teachers would overestimate by 2 or more levels. IMO there should have been a cap of 1 on downgraded levels.

Redsky, I looked back at how last year’s cohort did in their GCSEs and tbf, the results were below the following year’s GCSE results, so that could explain why this year’s A levels are better than last year’s.