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

Thanks for all your useful comments.
DS didn't do well in English Language in Mocks. He wants to join Medicine and he needs either 5 or 6 to be eligible for most Med schools. We will be left with no choice except sitting exam in Autumn.

DS has come to terms with the lower predicted results. He got 8s in Sciences and Maths, so he would be very pissed if he is given 7.

DS is not sleeping well and I am trying to explain to him that such things happen in life, its not his fault.

Our poor DC. They are all suffering unnecessarily through no fault of their own as a result of this shambles. This is real, gut-wrenching injustice.

I’ve been looking through DD’s mock results this afternoon to try and gauge a worst-case scenario. I think it’s unlikely teachers will have gone below mock grades for her CAGs. Art is a bit of a conundrum though as she hasn’t scored at all consistently in her coursework - do you think it will boil solely down to the mock exam or could the coursework count too?

I have gone beyond the point of understanding what is going on in relation to appeals. I have even gone onto school website and worked out average grade for the last 2 years for each subject and tried to see what grade DS would be awarded depending on his rank. I think I am seriously going crazy 😝

@Janie74, yes, NEA (coursework) can be used.

A little reminder of wha OFQUAL said, taken from the lawyers letter coming out of the appeal. OFQUAL your nose is growing......

@MrsHamlet DS was particularly taken with the fact that it is a designedly random game!

@Nard75 I’ve done something similar - I dread to think how many hours I’ve spent this summer holiday, poring over Ofqual documents and trawling historic results at DD’s school. I too feel as if I am going slightly mad.

@janie74

I just discovered today that for GCSEs they'll be going off 2018 and/or 2019 data depending when the new spec came in, I'd assumed it was the average of three years. DD's school did a lot better in both years than in '17 so that's good news for her.

I really hadn't been that worried - she's on borderline 5/6/7 for most stuff so I'd taken the view that if her CAG 6 gets knocked down to a 5 that could just as easily have happened if she'd sat the exam. Now it's impossible to know what to think.

The new grade system has been going for the last 2 years which is what I used when working out my sons grades. According to that he should get the grades he was predicted border line on 2 subjects. Let’s see what Thursday brings I’m not holding my breath.

@neutralintelligence

The spirit that this is being done in is so nasty and mean. It is the whole attitude that I hate in this country of people only feeling they have succeeded if someone else is seen to fail, the feeling that your good mark is devalued if someone else gets the same mark, the feeling that a good mark is worth more if everyone else gets a lower mark.

An appeals process that focuses on the lowest possible mark can hardly be called an appeal. If they are withholding a higher mark with no possibility of using it in an appeal - that is not a proper appeal.

Back in March this is not what we were promised or led to expect.
A high grade that an employer might question does not devalue the grade. No-one can take away a high grade from you once awarded. But a low grade permanently deprives you of what you could and would have achieved - you can't sit and make excuses at every interview for the rest of your life; no-one will want to know.

Your first sentence is spot on.

Instead of prioritising the individual and making sure things were as fair as possible all they've considered is preventing "grade inflation". Everything has been sacrificed to that.

It's so unnnecessary. imagine if they'd come out and said "grades will be a bit higher this year but the only way to prevent that would have been to randomly assign some students to be the ones who had a disaster on the day. And obviously that's not fair." Everyone would have accepted that.

@HPFA Yes - you are totally right!
If they had just said this is not a normal year, because we don't know which pupils would have done better than predicted and which would have done worse, we have had to accept the CAGs and there is a little grade inflation. To do otherwise would have taken grades away from pupils without any exam being taken or marked and without any other evidence.
It is worthwhile looking at the situation from that opposite aspect.

@RedskyAtnight and @MrsHamlet - thank you. Not feeling that reassured!!

What is CAG?!

centre assessed grade

And I was wrong and very naive about the Sarah Vine article in the DailyFail. It is a red herring. The Goves have kids in year 10 and year 12, they have a vested interest in ensuring that the current year 11s and 13s have zero grade inflation as a cohort and as a family only stand to gain if individual pupils of relatively similar ages loose marks. That is why the article does not read right and is inconsistent in places.
Unfortunately, the parents of pupils in year 10 and 12 cannot see past their own kids' interests - if they did, they would see that any benefit of the doubt given to year 11s and 13s will benefit their children too. When it is their children's turn to either sit exams or get their CAGs if coronavirus is still at large, their children will be treated the same as ours were. If our children are treated with meanness, so will theirs. Likewise, if our children are treated fairly, the chances are that theirs will too.

It is totally unrealistic to believe that the wife of a key cabinet member has independently written an article criticising the government's handling of this. Had me fooled for a while, but not for long.

I have just found my usually optimistic, happy go lucky teen sitting in her bedroom with the light off in floods of tears. I am normally able to summon up glass half full positivity in any situation but anything I said to try and reassure in this situation just made things worse. She is angry because I said that her mocks were a trial run and if she worked hard to improve on her mistakes I said it would pay off. She is angry because when the exams were cancelled I reassured her it would be ok as Boris said everyone would get the grade the needed and would not be disadvantaged. She had been working her socks off since mocks and was really, really focused but none of this is going to matter a jot. The rug has been truly pulled out from under her and now she says what is the point of anything. I am so angry 😡

@BackInTime Oh that’s so hard. They are under such unreasonable pressure right now. They will lash out at us as they’ve no way to lash out at those responsible. I’m dreading Thursday.

A* for Monkey's DS!
So DS says it is like rock, paper, scissors - calculated beats CAG, mock beats calculated, CAG beats mocks!

I totally disregarded that article when I realised it was that twat’s wife.

@Shimy I think it's also a vendetta against teachers, a refusal to admit their competence because they are a long established enemy of the government, plus they feel that following Scotland will look weak. Obviously these two things are much more important than the futures of young people.

It is really horrible for our children. Nothing has prepared them for this. It is not how they were told it would work.

My DS is worried all his friends will do well and he'll be the only one who doesn't. I can't even tell him everyone is in the same position, because the A level shambles showed that some people are inexplicably worse affected, while others who are no more capable or deserving get off lightly.

The ranking system does not help. It also cannot foresee whether a pupil will outperform or underperform in an exam situation. I am annoyed that it been used as an opportunity to give a continuous assessment grade that the pupils had no idea they were being assessed for. The pupils thought it was all on the final exam. So it is not fair to grade or rank on anything else. Past performance should have been specifically excluded. The CAG was to directly replace an exam grade not a continuous assessment grade.

There is no end to the ways that this situation is wrong, unfair, inaccurate, unethical. I think I have thought of everything, then there is more and more.

@lilgreen I am often gullible and naive, but then the disillusionment and bitterness is worse

to be clearer:
but then the disillusionment and bitterness that comes after being gullible and naive is worse.
o.

Oh dear, no longer making any sense, brain has been fried.

@neutralintelligence

I’m with you on that. I too was naive enough to reassure my DD that all her hard work would be fairly rewarded. I even suggested that in some ways it might be good because she wouldn’t run the risk of sitting a bad paper in her most dreaded subjects and instead her teachers would grade her fairly.

I’m sure they did grade her fairly.

I underestimated the pure spite and mean-spiritedness of those who would design a system that slavishly protects the national picture at the expense of the individual children concerned.