Thread 8 Carry on Corona Cohort: GAV give us the CAG?

[OrangeCinnamon1]

Welcome all to the 8th Thread for this year's GCSE cohort the Corona Cohort!

Some of us have been here since I started first thread back in yr10, 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 until HQ chuck us
At this precise moment in time we are awaiting GCSE results that seem to have been produced by an algorithm that also takes very little account of Teacher Centre Assessed Grades. There is an appeal process but it was changed yesterday to include mock results and coursework, then taken down again for review.
Trying to protect our young people's mental health.during this shit show , which the government claims is their priority...when they talk about wanting students back in schools/college in September...

first ever thread

previous thread

Great news for NI students. Surely Wales and England have to follow suit?

Asked on old thread so I’ll ask here:

If an underachieving student goes to a higher than average achieving school does this mean their grades could potentially be better than if they had have sat them?

My daughter when she wakes up will just be wtf!! Dumped by her school, not even a phone call home, predicted 5s, worried endlessly the last week and now other areas of our so called united Kingdom are doing it differently. A PM no where to be seen, no guidance. What does this tell our young people, they will look back and tell their children what a stupid government we had at a time we needed them. I hope England follow suit today for every 16 year olds future. So the results may be higher, they aren't releasing league tables anyway and if these young people have worked on a course let them have it or the fear is they never work hard again because what's the point

Please wise women of mumsnet, tell me results won’t be delayed. My head might explode.

I don't know why the original model was not just to use CAGs with random moderation at a centre level to verify that results had not been massively inflated. Surely it was obvious that an entirely statistic based algorithm was never going to work, and it would be impossible to design to take into account all cases (the Eton case of being given the national spread of results for a subject they are taking for the first time this year, being a good example)? I'd like to think there will be a full enquiry and heads will roll; but somehow doubting it.

@Confusedbutheyho Yep that’s what it means. DD’s school is very middling with results. A couple of her friends got 2’s in mocks and really weren’t concerned. School has a very high pass rate so the algorithm won’t expect failures, equally its unlikely to anticipate 9’s either.

I think the government will want this shit show to end, so I’m hoping no delay.

Both Wales and England were meeting tomorrow, seperately as boards, weren't they?

It’ll be CAGS as appeals.

That would be such a dumb idea because everyone whose CAG is higher will appeal. Grades overall will be more inflated because the small number of people whose CAGs are lower will stick with what they've got. It's basically allowing people to choose CAG or moderated grade, whichever is higher. Weeks / months of admin to produce a worse result than than if they just abandoned the moderation now and went with CAGs for everyone.

I completely agree about the govt being unable to follow the nations though. They are tying themselves in knots to avoid Nicola Sturgeon appearing to lead the way. And meanwhile thousands of children still have no clue what's going on.

Maybe the only solution is for Johnson to do one of his "oh I only just heard about this today" moments and sack Gav and a few Ofqual people. That might give the impression of strength from the PM, even if the govt looks weak. Try to get the press focusing on that and do a quiet u turn on CAGs. The press will lap up a couple of brutal leaks about Gav's incompetence, I'm sure.

Totally agree @singingstones

Heard the end of R4 piece @Monkey2001
Doesn’t seem like a representative from Gov is making an appearance on any news programmes today 🙄 absolutely spineless 🤬

The head of the sixth form association was on the BBC this morning - I think that is just sixth form colleges?, so not representing interests of school sixth forms - saying that he wanted moderated CAGs. I suspect that is because sixth form colleges maybe tended to give the benefit of the doubt for those borderline and the higher mark. I know that won't work for my DS school - it is a very rigorous school sixth form and there is no way the man in charge of predictions would have allowed a grade higher for anyone. So if CAGs are downgraded by one mark, all of the pupils at DS school will lose a grade. That is 9 grades less for GCSE, making the GCSE total score much much lower than it should have been and prevent pupils going to potential chosen sixth forms and career choices.
He was saying the algorithm could be tweaked - but it can't. We have seen that a mass moderation of a predicted grade can't work because it has no way of knowing which individual pupils would have underperformed in the exam. That is why the current algorithm didn't work. Each year some pupils underperform and get less than their predicted grade. But in a normal year, these pupils can be identified due to their exam paper which is marked and maybe re-marked. That is how those with a grade lower than their predicted grade are identified.
This year, there is no exam paper, there is no way whatsoever to know if an individual pupil would have got less than their predicted grade in an exam. It is not automatically the borderline pupils, that is absolutely not accurate or fair. Mass moderation automatically downgrades borderline pupils. That is unfair, inaccurate and unethical.

By the way, by 'borderline' I mean borderline in the school rankings.
In a normal year, pupils who are borderline have taken an actual exam and there is evidence of their exam performance.
This year there is no evidence of exam performance (except mocks), so no-one, and certainly not the algorithm, knows if the pupils who are borderline in the rankings are those who would have been borderline in the exam. Many factors affect exam performance, not just ranking order.

[quote MrsHamlet]@Nard75 because the CAGs meant that the pass rate went up too much - way above a normal year. We always knew there would be moderation of the CAGs to keep the grades in line with the trend. But with everyone following their trend to a greater or lesser degree, it went too high.[/quote]
This.

As a parent I always knew there would be moderation. There was a clear curve shown in the original publications of how are grades are spread and we know moderation happens every year.

I understood grade boundaries were set each year after results too?

But it doesn't explain how C/D students are getting U and how a student predicted (news report and CAG not mentioned unless that's prediction) ABC got awarded 3 E's.

The flaw seems to be that the algorithm doesn't moderate correctly? Instead it works on a national prediction that doesn't actually consider schools individual performance (as we are lead to believe?)

I know indi schools have also been affected but I also can't work out why their A* grades rose by over 4% on previous years and other establishments rose between 1/2%.

My MP (who is a shit and proper Boris arse licking Tory) posted on SM about how our FE college 99.5% of students were awarded the grades they deserved.

I commented that it wasn't what they deserved but actually what they achieved themselves and were put in for based on performance.
And that I hoped just because college on her area that doesn't do a levels was ok it wouldn't stop her campaigning against the disaster that was a levels nationally!

@Northumberlandlass - grade boundaries do disadvantage pupils every year - but the crucial difference this year is that pupils are not at a grade boundary because of their performance in any exam. That argument is totally irrelevant and does not apply this year. Why do Ofqual keep getting away with that argument unchallenged?
This year, being borderline is simply a rankings situation - the pupils have no control over that. They didn't sit an exam that put them in a borderline position. If they had sat the exam, they very well might have been at the top of the grade and not borderline. A pupil ranked at the top of the grade might have messed up the last big-mark question and be borderline. That is fair because it is their actual exam performance. Being borderline based on ranking is not fair or accurate if that means you are downgraded without any real-life hard-copy evidence.

D to U at A level isn't that big a drop. If they were CAGed at D as the lowest D student, but everyone above them was algorithmed down, that's entirely feasible. Fair? No. Feasible? Yes.

What about schools that were honest in their CAGs - those pupils will massively lose out if there is moderation of CAGs or, god forbid, another tweaked algorithm.

I read that the cags for NI is only for GCSE students, not A-levels.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-53802428

I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland ... every day is becoming curiouser and curiouser although It's me who want to take of all their heads!

R4 are not impressed with Ofqual and the government for refusing to engage. Nothing gets their backs up faster than being ignored by the people they are trying to hold to account.

I agree @neutralintelligence I am sick hearing half-arsed justifications from Gov & OFQUAL for this colossal fuck up!

@MrsHamlet

D to U at A level isn't that big a drop. If they were CAGed at D as the lowest D student, but everyone above them was algorithmed down, that's entirely feasible. Fair? No. Feasible? Yes.

Yes I meant fair.

Not in a "it's not ffaaaaiiirrrrrr" way. But rather in a way that a teacher surely wouldn't have put in a CAG of D for their lowest acheiving student without evidence of performance at D.

So to get a U based purely on ranking is a massive failure of the system design?

Being borderline based on ranking is not fair or accurate if that means you are downgraded without any real-life hard-copy evidence.

Agreed. What happens larger schools where there will be numbers of students with a very similar ranking and ability?

Absolutely. I did CAG a student at D because she was a D grade student. And she got a D. If we'd had any E or U grades in the subject in the last few years, she might well have been moved to a U. Luckily, we haven't. But if we had the algorithm might well have shifted them all in that direction. Our best student for years didn't get the A* because he's the best we've had in years. It's shit. The system was shit.

@Backintime - yes, it would have been a really hard job for the teachers to rank students who are in different classes with different teachers, with different mock grades, different homework grades. And this CAG isn't even supposed to represent continuous assessment - pupils cannot be graded based on a continuous assessment that they didn't know was taking place! How unfair on those who didn't want to crash and burn in year 10 but saved something back for the demands of year 11, for example.
The ranking of very similar pupils that many of the teachers (at a large state school) would never even have met is not ideal, can never guess how individual pupils would have done in a real-life examination (which is what the pupils would be graded on this year before coronavirus).
So mass downward moderation or algorithms based on ranking won't be fair or accurate.

The person on R4 who said they needed to "tweak the algorithm" clearly did not understand how the algorithm works. I thought the grammar head was much better and the Eton letter is very good.

It did not take a genius to work out that a statistical approach was never going to work. I have thought for ages that OFQUAL should have done centre level review of CAGs v historic as adjusted for cohort attainment and engaged with the centres which had predicted too high to get the results to a sensible level using knowledge of the professionals who knew the students.

I am still a bit baffled by where all the good grades are. There have been a few of schools talking about their historically low results, and the private schools with small numbers doing very well. Most schools are not publishing stats so I can't see where the average increase of 2% has actually gone!