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

Redsky how many are taking music? Is it a small enough number to make a difference?

I'm sure this has been mentioned before but is deferring to mocks really that fair? As already mentioned, schools do mocks at different times and use the exercise differently. And don't the majority of pupils improve between their mocks and final exams? Unfortunately my daughter did her mocks in Dec after only 70% attendance that term due to a health condition that flared up at the end of the Summer. She was back to better health by February and gutted not to be able to sit her exams.

singing I think there is about 24, so won't fall under Ofqual's "small" category. DS is at a state school and I doubt that any state schools run GCSE groups with fewer than 15 students. (I know in DD's year, the school cancelled a subject because only 10 students wanted to take it).

Using mocks is entirely unfair due to every school doing them entirely differently. It's completely ludicrous to say that it's fine to ignore CAGs which teachers have spent hours working on to check that they are as correct as they can be, whilst mocks which have inconsistent content, sat at different times, marked with varying criteria and not necessarily checked are acceptable!

Now Ofqual are blaming the teachers.

Interesting because when they first mentioned that teacher grades were generally higher than previous years' exam results, they said that was completely understandable and in line with research they had done.

Teachers had to use evidence. They could not guess who would have a bad day, who would panic, who would forget to turn over the last page, who would have hay fever, or a hangover, who would answer the wrong number of questions, who would forget their calculator, who would be unwell, or bereaved, or newly heartbroken. They had to make their judgements based on what they knew the children could do, all things being equal. So of course the CAGs were higher than the exam results would have been. There seems to be an implication now that teachers were trying to cheat the system and can't be trusted, but it's not as simple as that.

I suspect that, in legal terms, downgrading an individual pupil's predicted grade is on shaky ground - surely there needs to be some evidence or proof that the pupil would have got a lower grade? The burden of proof seems to be on the pupil to prove that they would have got a higher grade, e.g. a mock paper, but I think that the burden of proof should be on Ofqual to provide evidence that an individual pupil should be downgraded.
None of this is acceptable when there is no actual exam paper.

Also agree that mocks alone are not a perfect solution. Didn't Scotland not have mocks, so it wasn't an issue there? CAGs may suit other pupils better, but are also not perfect: many pupils in lower sets outperform pupils in higher sets on the day due to more revision mainly, plus unexpected random factors that affect individuals only on the day of the exam.
I think the fairest thing for individual pupils is to let them choose from a real triple lock: moderated model mark, mock or CAG. Resits are totally unrealistic except for maths and english.

@chuilc Mocks were never designed to be an alternative to the real exam but rather a practice run to experience exam conditions and to get to grips with technique, timing and also to act as a wake up call. DDs school held mocks last autumn early in Y11, sitting full papers in a very short period that included topics they had not yet fully covered. They were told papers were deliberately marked harshly so as not to give them a false sense of security. Many students will have come on leaps as a result of this experience, on top of further teaching, practice papers, refining techniques, additional tutoring and the after school and Easter revision courses most schools run. Where is the algorithm for all this?

Mocks are still of some use in that in the current situation they are the last real-life exam the pupil sat before lockdown. So for those who did work and were fortunate not to have any other life problems going on at the time, they are fair-ish. An alternative does need to be available for those who struggled with mocks for whatever reason, especially because when they were sat there was zero expectation that the mark would ever have any implication for the students.

Plus of course: mocks are not an option for a considerable number of pupils who, from no fault of their own, attend schools who did not run the mocks in a formal manner, did not run mock under full exam conditions, used readily available past papers etc. Those pupils need an alterative appeal other than resits in the autumn.
CAG or mocks - pupil's choice - is the only reasonable and ethical appeal grade.

singingstone, it's a bit of a sweeping generalisation/myth that private schools have smaller classes; the only small GCSE class in DD's school is Latin, and that's hardly going to affect state school results. In actual fact, I have 2 friends who are both head of music in state schools, and their students all got predicted grades yesterday because they are small cohorts.

As for the apparent unfair increase of grades overall in private schools, from what I've read, that happens every year. This year, it could be evidence that teachers in those schools have a more accurate way of tracking students' progress, which means that their CAGs are more accurate than the larger state schools.
The media headlines like to be sensationalist, because that's what sells; I've seen plenty of comment that suggests that a lot of high-performing private school heads are furious about their pupils' downgrades.

That's the problem with using mocks - that route to appeal is not available to everyone, through no fault of the students or the schools, so it's unfair before you even start.

At DS's school they take some GCSE papers in Y10 and so do mocks under exam conditions then. They don't need to give the children exam practice in Y11 because they have already taken the real thing, so Y11 mocks are done in class. I don't think that's a good reason for him to lose out on an opportunity to appeal that is available to other people. It wouldn't be right imo for some to have two ways of improving their marks and others to have only one way.

Plus if there have been mocks, they would have been factored in when working out the CAGs so that information is being used already.

@alsoplayspiccolo I'm not sure that it's a myth that state schools have bigger classes. I would imagine very few private schools have classes of 30 whereas that is the norm in the state school sector at GCSE level.

At DCs school, mocks were done under 'exam conditions' in terms of exam hall setting and invigilators. The only thing many schools used the 2019 past papers or sample mocks available from exam boards which students cannot usually access online. Turns out some students with teacher parents or those with private tutors did have access to these papers online and so had an unfair advantage in their mock papers regardless of 'exam conditions'. There are too many anomalies. The whole thing is a farce.

I would like my DS to have the option of mocks, as well as CAG, but I see your point that that would give him 2 options and your DS only 1.
Unfortunately, I don't think my DS mocks would have carried much weight with the CAG - the school is heavily reliant on y6 SATs and those who are gifted/talented at age 11 seem to remain in top sets while those who are average at age 11 never make it into top sets despite consistent on-going improvement between ages 11-16. I think the school assume those pupils who start off cleverer will remain cleverer if they would just put in the work, and they keep giving them the benefit of the doubt right up to the end of year 11. It is true in some cases, but many kids who could get high marks if they worked harder don't actually work harder for the real exams, they have already reached their peak earlier in their school career. A lot of kids who are bright aged 11 or 13 are actually at their academic peak then.

@Backintime - yes same here. I think the mocks were proper exam conditions, but worry that while some subjects bought new mock papers from Pearson (?) others used last year's paper - I don't think that should count as non-valid. That is out of the pupils' control and the vast majority would never have seen it before. Also some teachers might have cobbled together questions from a variety of papers, which I guess minimises a pupil having seen all of the questions.

What a mess - I just want all the individual pupils to get what they would have in the exam on a normal-good day.
No-one should be able to take a grade away from an individual pupil based on a statistical model that only works at a whole-country cohort level.
The government and ofqual need to accept that this year will have higher grades and there's nothing fair that can be done to accurately address that.
I think the attitude of if someone else does well then that takes something away from my DC is not helpful.

chuilc, my point was that only Latin in DD's s school has less than 15 this year, which is where the CAG issue comes into play. Also, it's not class numbers that is relevant but subject numbers - so one class of 30 isn't treated different than 2 classes of 15 in the same subject when the algorithm is applied.

I suspect "small numbers in subjects" is probably less of an issue at GCSE than A Level - perhaps only affecting minority subjects (as piccolo has suggested with Latin). MFL that are not offered by the school but available to native speakers to enter is perhaps the only exception.

Private schools will definitely offer A Level subjects with smaller numbers signed up, than state schools do. Though (in general) private school year groups are smaller than state school year groups which increases the chance that there are a smaller number of entries for a subject.

Also As I understand it, class size is irrelevant - it's cohort size that counts. Independent schools tend to be smaller, and they tend to offer more subjects. Those two facts combined mean that they are more likely to avoid moderation than schools and colleges in the state sector. Of course it can happen in small subjects in state schools, but it will inevitably happen more in private schools, where on average there are fewer students and more subjects. That is unfair imo, for students to be disadvantaged according to the type of school they attend. Imagine if they had abandoned moderation and accepted CAGs for any school with 2000+ students. Just as unfair.

I'm not convinced that private schools get double the increase of top grades each year compared to state schools - here's an article from 2017 saying the gap was narrowing, not widening.

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/25/exam-results-gap-state-schools-private-schools-isnarrowing-figures/amp/

I'm sure there are many private schools whose results have suffered in this process, particularly the larger ones. In a way it's not really sector v sector, but large v small. But that doesn't really change the argument that on the whole, subject cohorts small enough to avoid moderation are much more likely to be found in private schools. Meanwhile Ofqual are trying to avoid large-scale grade inflation so someone somewhere needs some grades to be moderated down to make up for that.

Completely agree neutral that using Y6 SATS is a very poor way of doing it - such a narrow set of measures and so many children only seem to get going at secondary school.

Just checking in after another sleepless night and the morning spent trying to peel DD off the ceiling. I will catch up with the thread properly when my head is less foggy and I can fully take in what people are saying.

Congratulations though to those whose DC are celebrating success yesterday - those nuggets of positivity are badly needed at the moment.

You can’t allocate grades on the basis of a computer algorithm that will cause some to have anomalous grades then have an appeal process that has not been defined and may mean it is not open to all.

Well you can but it doesn’t fit with Johnson’s promise of no child will be disadvantaged and they will get the grades they deserve which is clearly yet another outright lie and absolutely not he action of a Government who have people’s best interests at heart.

Then on top of that it blatantly attempt to manipulate the media into being distracted from the fallout with more releasing lockdown news that was clearly withheld to be distracting today when they knew they needed it is beyond words and the blatant disregard shown to our DC who (as we all have), have been through so much already is utterly despicable.

Children in England are being disadvantaged.

The question is what are we going to do about it?

Fools I am (probably naively) hoping that they have learnt some lessons from the A level debacle and will be putting in some fixes before Thursday. So waiting and seeing at the moment. Looks like legal challenges are being set in motion.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/14/gavin-williamson-under-pressure-to-resign-over-a-level-results-fiasco?CMP=fbgu&utmmmedium=Social&utmsource=Facebook#Echobox=1597401671