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

I'm not sure mocks will help - DD school most of mocks weren't testing everything just a couple of areas. She did mocks in October/ January and March and had a real mixed bag of results but idea was to show her what her weaker areas were that she needed to revise.
In English she hadn't answered exam questions on Romeo and Juliet since year 10 and that was her best area.

Her marks although low were consistently improving and enough to change her predicted grades in March.

Her friend's school was in middle of mocks when school closed so the children there didn't even finish their 2nd set of mocks.

Mock results will not help those children that were still working hard in extra lessons or with tutors to improve their grades or for many children that don't take them seriously and work last minute to pull a good result out of the bag.

I can't understand why they won't go for teacher assessment- the teachers know those children best and what they are capable of.

I'm a primary school teacher and I know it's very different but we had to judge where we thought the children would be data wise at end of school year. I know which of my class with a push would be at the expected level at end of year and which of my least able ones would get there with a big push. I also knew which children with all the help in the world would still not reach age related. The teachers will have a very good idea of the grades the children would have got so the government should be trusting their judgement.

In the meantime I think the latest news will cause more stress and tears in this house. She did finally see a small positive in that historically her school achieves fantastic results and improves every year so that might benefit her.

Could I ask a stupid question... does the proposed triple lock/mocks option apply just to A levels, or GCSEs as well? I can't seem to find a definitive answer from the various articles online

School minister on TV earlier says applies to GCSE too.

Hi @JMG1234 the Gov minister on bbc breakfast said it applied to A-level, GCSE & BTEC

I’ve just woken up to the news and am shocked. It’s becoming a farce now and shows how divided the UK has become with politicians in each country not wanting to be seen to follow the other’s lead. I think they would do well to remember that behind all these statistics are 15 and 16 year olds who have had a tough time and are having to deal with things that no adult has ever had to.

Morning everyone

I have been lurking rather than commenting on the thread in the past couple of months but just wanted to say thank you to regular posters for your invariably sensible and pragmatic posts which have been so reassuring to read during this long waiting process.

I was feeling fairly relaxed until events of the last couple of days. Now just feel stressed and completely flummoxed by this sudden knee jerk decision! With the best will in the world it just seems bonkers. Obviously there are always going to be winners and losers in any scenario but it just seems like the decision to offer mocks as a back up option, rather than CAGs, is more politically driven than anything - i.e. to be seen to be doing something different to Scotland - and creating a potentially chaotic scenario as a result.

Will students be able to cherry pick which gcse results they appeal to get a mock grade applied for example? Or will it be an ‘all mock grades or nothing’ option? If the former I suspect there will be a raft of students applying for mock grade to apply in say just one or two subjects where they got an unexpectedly good mock result.

As with so many things I don’t think this government have thought this through at all.

I have long been saying to DS that by and large he should probably ignore his GCSE results, accept that they were awarded in a less than entirely satisfactory way, and just try to move on with his life. Feels like the case more than ever! (A harder decision to make at A Level, I know). Half of me at this point is thinking that a random number generator would be more likely to produce a valid set of results!

But mocks as a fallback ... terrible idea. DS knows several people who ended up with very high grades (entirely against the run of their normal ability) because they'd practiced the paper in advance. Plus all the other points that others on this thread have already made.

Please let this be a case of the government announcing something outrageous and waiting for people to protest en masse, so that they can subsequently change to something that is still far from perfect but so much better that everyone cries with relief!

This is so absurd. Mocks?...Completely different in every school. They have just devalued all the GCSE’s. What an incompetent group of morons.

Hi everyone, in the same boat here and daughter very anxious. She had mocks in October so hardly into second year of GCSE and teachers told kids “not to worry” as they were grading mocks on hardest possible curve- and with a cap of 7- in expectation new GCSEs would be bedding in and therefore teachers would get better at teaching and it would be more competitive, but they said the real thing very unlikely to be so brutally marked. argh!
With regards to determining what your child’s predicted grade and ranking is (the latter being the important bit), this is interesting from the higher education policy institute-“what students and parents need to know”
www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/08/10/a-levels-2020-what-students-and-parents-need-to-know/

Here is the relevant extract- Ofqual have said that schools may tell students and parents their proposed grades. As for rankings, they might or might not be revealed, depending on whether revealing the ranking for the student concerned might also reveal personal ranking data about other individuals. It is for each school to decide its policy, but individual students or parents may submit a Subject Access Request or a Freedom of Information Request (FoIs apply to public bodies like state schools) to get proposed gradings, and perhaps ranking, information. Such requests must receive responses within one month from the date the request is received – which presumably means the response might not be received until 13 September.

I found this through an excellent evening standard editorial here -www.standard.co.uk/author/anne-mcelvoy-0

A bit late to the party but happy to report that DD's iGCSE results yesterday were excellent. 5 down, 5 to go and hopefully no wild disparity between boards. She has worked hard consistently over the 2 years but didn't do a huge amount for mocks. Consistent during internal tests otherwise. Exceeded her expectations slightly but overall I would say she got what was fair for her regardless of it she would have got the same grades if exams have taken place.

At least no one can say 2020 hasn’t been memorable.

Congratulations @TheTeenageYears, That’s fabulous news.

Great news @theteenageyears sounds like a job well done so far!

That’s really good news TheTennageYears 🙂

Mr Not in the Fridge in BBC earlier doesn’t want to apologise to students, parents and teachers. He is claiming that most grades will match the CAG and there will only be one grade difference if not and this is added in as another safety net for those who don’t fall into the first safety net of schools being able to appeal if significant change of leadership or cohort composition.

I would be very interested to know :

1. What percentage match CAG?
2. What percentage are a grade lower than CAG?
3. What percentage are over one grade lower than CAG?

Can’t help feeling the answer to 3 is higher than they would like to admit and they are trying to get ahead of impending Social Media storm. Would love to be wrong about that. The Scottish situation has made things tricky for them.

Well there I was thinking that nothing would change this near a level results day. Is a complete farce. It’s all reactionary with no actual plan anywhere. Universities are going from the results they've received already but no let’s have a knee jerk reaction instead.

This thread moves so fast!

My first time checking in at the beginning of a thread - got DD2 awaiting GCSE results. Due to serious bereavement over Christmas we’re in the unfortunate position of no mock grades and low attendance for the term that followed. However she’s optimistic and chilled right now - whether that will be the same in a week I can’t say... right now it’s DD1 who’s a bundle of nerves awaiting A levels.

Congratulations to your DD @TheTeenageYears! Stressful to have the results spread out but at least a good first batch should give peace of mind.

sarahC40, have you got any sense of how different mock results in your subject are to CAGs submitted?

I’m wondering whether there will be a grey area, ie the difference between standardised grades and CAG that the government think they’ll mop up by offering the chance to sit exams in the Autumn; offering mock results seems more haphazard than allowing CAGs.

Wow, how blinking confusing.

I don’t post much but thanks all for these threads, they have certainly kept me up to date with what on earth is going on (as much as anyone has a clue!!)

So Scottish students get CAGs or moderated grades, whichever is higher.

English students get moderated grades or mocks, whichever is higher. (But only if mocks were taken under exam conditions? How would Ofqual know this, or be able to verify the grades, come to that?)

Still a deafening silence from Wales 🙄

I think anything that helps the pupils get the result they deserve, whether that is CAG or mock, is good. But I wonder how they will deal with the administration of all those appeals. I anticipate appealing about half of my DS GCSE without even knowing the moderated marks yet, based on suspecting where his school would have placed him in the rankings (school obsessed with predictions based on y6 SATs).
Will the school issue the revised grades and inform the exam board, or will the exam boards have to deal with hundreds of thousands of individual appeals?

I think guy on BBC said all appeals are through schools, not individuals. Could be wrong .

@singingstones very good point about how will Ofqual know about actual exam conditions for mocks?

Some schools, my DS’s included, pretty much replicate the public exams and I know this because I’m one of the invigilators - exams in the main hall, side rooms only for those with specific circumstances, all overseen by external invigilators but no teachers in attendance, more or less the same way as we run the real thing right down to the instructions read out at the start. But other schools may do them far more informally, in classrooms with teachers in attendance and so on. How on earth will schools be able to prove what they did one way or the other?

Congratulations to your DD @TheTeenageYears it is good to hear a good news story in amongst all this uncertainty.

I..just..what..eh..

Each day, a new exciting twist in the farce of 2020. We all know from these threads that each of our schools ran mocks differently. In my DSs own mocks some were marked incorrectly, grade boundaries were moved to not represent national ones but internal school ones (high performing), and one maths paper was cancelled as they suspected a child of cheating so the marks from that paper were removed despite being the easiest of the papers (and so highest marks). Our school only sat one set the first week of Jan.

If there is no consistency in mock exams how can these be relied upon as a final mark?

Anyway, thanks @OrangeCinnamon1 for the new thread and congrats to @theteenageyears DD.

Yes @FoolsAssassin that is what I understood too. An individual cannot appeal.

I’ve just heard a radio presenter summarise the changes by saying - a student can either choose which grade they prefer or do a resit 😤

I would like to appeal individually. What if your DC moves to a different sixth form - it could be hard to organise an appeal through the previous school and they might not support it.
I don't want the school to decide whether I can appeal or not.