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

@LillyM50

First of all many congratulations to all the a level students!

DD asked me a question yesterday and I have no clue, are the GCSE grades already decided by now or can they still change? Thank you.

They will already be decided. Whether they stay decided this year is anyone's guess.

I agree @RedskyAtnight all this talk of percentages removes the fact these are individuals. I want to see the numbers!!

Thank you @MrsHamlet

piccolo That's absolutely fair enough then. I was just raising that it's odd that a standardisation model should cause results that are "non-standard" (as other schools have definitely seen).

@Northumberlandlass - no idea how to get my reasoning heard by government.

The trouble is so many people have vested interests: anyone without a year 11 or 13 child seems to want the results kept as low as possible as that gives their own child an advantage. And the moderation this year protects other years' pupils' interests over the current year 11 and 13s' interests. Even the TV and radio interviewers betray whether they have a year 10/12 child with their questions or whether their own year 11 totally stuffed up their mocks etc.

I wonder what the overall results would.have looked like if the algorithm was applied but then individual checks were made to make sure students did not go up by more than one grade or down by one grade???

The 'standardisation' won't work without an actual exam paper that proves what the pupil actually got. Only that mark can be moderated.
You cannot moderate an exam paper that never took place. You cannot base a grade on continuous assessment that never took place and was abolished several years ago in any form.
The current algorithm is not even correct at an individual school level, let alone an individual pupil level.
The only resolution that is fair to the individual pupils who have to live with these results is a CAG or a valid mock result - preferably a choice of either.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but the issues with A level grades has more or less dropped of all my news apps and been replaced with quarantine/ economic and Covid spike reports instead. By tomorrow it will be forgotten entirely.

I’m sure the government put the quarantine stuff out last night as a means of distraction. It doesn’t look like there will be much sustained effort to enforce any real change:

Hmm. I took GCSEs in the era before the A grade was available. I got some A grades (clearly the highest I could get). I don't remember people being up in arms when the A came in, that this downgraded the A grades of those who'd already taken GCSEs (which it did effectively do)?

Without coronavirus, this year the pupils were only going to get a grade based on the exam. The final exam (apart from NEAs) was the only grade the pupil was going to get. That is a very individual situation and subject to some factors that do not fit in an algorithm without an actual marked exam paper to use as the basis.
So mass moderation that takes into account SATs is inaccurate: selective schools who only take pupils who are clever at 11, possibly after tutoring for 11+ or common entrance, will massively benefit from having pupils with high SATs but many of those pupils as individuals do not perform much better than pupils who are not tutored at age 11 and just go to a good comprehensive. Conversely, a very good comprehensive that takes hundreds of pupils with so-so SATs and adds huge value will be disadvantaged.
Any algorithm that does not take into account Progress 8 or similar will be wrong from the outset.
That is before the random factors of pupils' individual performance on the day.
What the government/exam boards/Ofqual have done at an individual level is unethical.

@RedskyAtnight

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.

I agree!

If the school appeals a grade, does the parent pay the bill? I read it's about £110+ to appeal one grade (could be wrong though). That again would seem hugely unfair and could it lead to some schools refusing to appeal grades?

Yes yes yes to either a CAG or mock result.

This algorithm just seems like a disaster and some of the stories on the A level thread are heartbreaking. Sure, at macro level it appears that the standardisation has worked but you only have to read a few pages to see that at individual level it has been grossly unfair and appears very random too.

DS1's school has a selective 6th form - don't know the % breakdown for this year's A levels but am aware that they have had some downward moderation and lower results overall for this year group when they had predicted higher (leafy comp with good results history).

And I don't know what to say to him now. (The answer is nothing, for the time being; can't do anything about it and no point him worrying as much as me, he might as well enjoy the next few days if he can, he's been pretty chilled so far). Early this week when the government announced about 'being able to opt for your mock result' (ha!) he said he was feeling 'pretty confident' on the basis of his performance history. Which seemed absolutely fair enough because he worked reasonably hard and got decent mock results (1x9, 2x8, 4x7 and 2x6) and (with the exception of the 9, which admittedly was a happy surprise) he has a consistent track record of performing around those subjects levels in all formal and informal assessments to date. Ooh, that should stand him in good stead, we thought. But now I know it could all mean f*ck all and the bloody algorithm could decimate the lot. For DS, he should hopefully still get into 6th form even if results are massively moderated but I'm so aware that for loads of others it will mean the difference between pass and fail.

I feel so sad and angry for all our y11 and y13 DC.

Delurking to join here and reflect on this whole shambles. Some helpful posts here about how the algorithms look to be working. I'm worried about DS, his mocks were on September so none of the cohort were prepared and none did very well, school admitted it was to get them moving a bit and working harder. He is predicted 8s and 9s mainly (apart from English where he was 6) but he'd only achieved 7s in some of the mocks. Unfortunately looks like this will be reflected in his result, but who knows?

This is so horrible for our young people

And since Scotland's results reverted to CAG with some increase in the overall grade of the cohort as a whole, English students will be at a relative disadvantage comparatively. The only fair thing to do in the context of a United Kingdom is to provide a similar instant alternative result to the English students, irrespective of whether that annoys previous generations of students who only have a secondary interest in all of this.

Just checking in here, back from hols and settling in for the wait.

Agreed, @neutralintelligence.

And will previous generations really be that miffed? You know, the ones who yes, had to revise hard and take the exam papers but also got their leaver celebrations, their proms, their golden chilled out summers, their proper sense of achievement and their riotous freshers weeks and their vibrant social lives...all the stuff our DC have and will miss out on.

I’d like to think that the significant majority of former students will recognise how comparatively lucky they were compared to this year’s cohort. And given that the 2020 results will probably bear the Covid19 label forever, with employers always being slightly cynical about them, I’m not even sure that the dreaded “inflated grades” would be seen as that much of an advantage anyway.

@FlyingPandas - I agree.
Undue priority being given to generations of pupils who only have a secondary interest in this year's results. Those with a primary interest are those who are being allocated them in this unfair and inaccurate manner and who have to live with the consequences.

Dd2 has started worrying this morning, she was predicted 7 and 2 mocks at grade 7 in maths.

Eldest Dd1, just 1 year older, has told her the top 30 in her year last year got grades 5-7, with mostly 5’s.

@FlyingPandas

Agreed, *@neutralintelligence*.

And will previous generations really be that miffed? You know, the ones who yes, had to revise hard and take the exam papers but also got their leaver celebrations, their proms, their golden chilled out summers, their proper sense of achievement and their riotous freshers weeks and their vibrant social lives...all the stuff our DC have and will miss out on.

I’d like to think that the significant majority of former students will recognise how comparatively lucky they were compared to this year’s cohort. And given that the 2020 results will probably bear the Covid19 label forever, with employers always being slightly cynical about them, I’m not even sure that the dreaded “inflated grades” would be seen as that much of an advantage anyway.

Absolutely agree!

...in maths.

Dd2 thinks she sits at about 25 so no chance of a 7. I really feel for her. Dd1s maths class didn’t have a teacher for year 10, whereas dd2 had a brilliant teacher for both years...

It’s so hard.

...in music the class generally consists of a mix of good musicians, middling musicians, and "not remotely musical, picked the subject because they thought it would be a doss" musicians.

In DS's year they are virtually all good musicians, bar DS and one other boy who are probably "middling musicians". Standardising the group is likely to downgrade everyone's marks, and there's a real chance that DS (ranked lowest or 2nd lowest but still on track to get a decent pass) will end up with a very poor fail. Though, tbh I'd expect the teacher to appeal the whole group; shame it's not clear yet how that will be done! And of course music is one of those subjects that has a high proportion of NEA, so neither mocks nor resits is a really acceptable fallback.

I agree there should have been a maximum moderation of +- one grade.

CAGs do seem the fairest way - I disagree about mocks though, which are absolutely useless to anyone who hadn't taken them yet, or whose school don't have the space available to do them in exam conditions, or who didn't work hard for them because they had university interviews or tests around the same time etc etc.

Two other things that are hugely problematic I think - firstly no individual appeals and no information about appeals, which leaves so many children not knowing what's happening next. And secondly the decision to use CAGs for small cohorts - while I understand why that might have briefly seemed like a good idea - it was obviously going to advantage private schools. The larger increase in A/A star grades at private schools compared to everyone else is an absolute disgrace, as is the fact that as far as I know, no minister is admitting that it's a problem.

Anecdata alert, but a poster yesterday mentioned an independent school near them, rated inadequate but with a very small sixth form, where they got 24% A / A star, up from 0% last year. And meanwhile friends are telling me of students in poor performing schools in disadvantaged areas, holding oxbridge offers having interviewed and taken tests, missing out by two or more grades because of their school's past performance. Those university places have been taken from disadvantaged but deserving students, who having chosen their secondary school, were unknowingly then in a position where they could never get to oxbridge. Whatever they did, however hard they worked, the A* they needed simply wasn't possible with the current algorithm. Maddening.

(I think the 'best' example I've heard of downgrading was a student doing Spanish, she is 19 having spent a year in Madrid after GCSEs, fluent in Spanish, predicted B, moderated to a U based on prior GCSE attainment)

Now Ofqual are blaming the teachers. Does it actually matter whose fault it is?
The only thing that matters ethically is that the problems are fixed for those individual students who have been affected: those who have been told that the system has guessed that they would not have met their teacher predictions, despite there not being an exam paper to mark to prove this, and now have to live with a mark lower than expected.
How can a system lower a pupil's mark based on a supposition that someone at their school would not have got that particular grade. There is no evidence that it would be a particular pupil(s). There is no exam paper so no evidence to support downgrading of an individual's mark.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but the issues with A level grades has more or less dropped of all my news apps and been replaced with quarantine/ economic and Covid spike reports instead. By tomorrow it will be forgotten entirely.

Absolutely. Entirely predictable that they held back announcing new quarantine restrictions for France just at that very moment when it would wipe the exams fiasco off the headlines. This announcement should have been made days ago. There is no depths that this government will not sink to.