Ofqual - you can’t appeal CAGS or use mocks

[noblegiraffe]

Updated info just out from Ofqual because there has been obvious confusion after last weekend.

Students will not be able to appeal on the basis that they think their CAG was unfair, and they will not be able to appeal on the basis of a higher mock grade.

Appeals will be allowed from schools only for admin errors, such as data entry errors.

If there are concerns about bias or discrimination, they should be raised with the school in the first instance.

The autumn exam series will be available for anyone unhappy with their result.

schoolsweek.co.uk/results-2020-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-years-appeals-and-autumn-resits/

inews.co.uk/opinion/gcse-a-level-results-2020-downgrade-students-algorithm-quit-teaching-582789

If squeezing a set of children into preallocated grades - you can give out this many 9s, this many 8s etc happened - then I hope some parents bother to lawyer up. You cannot compare different cohorts like that or make blanket statements on the quality of teaching year to year never changing. It's absurd.

School apparently getting back to me today on how my son dropped from a 5-6 to two 1s.

I have spent some time this weekend researching ofquals guidance to schools on CAGs and also the equalities act, because I think this stems from him being signed off school sick.

Oh my goodness @SusanWalker that is awful. Good luck, I hope it's a positive outcome.

Gosh @SusanWalker surely you have a case there! That is a huge difference. I hope the school have some answers for you.

I have written to my MP to ask they push the government to implement a fair appeals process. Our school sent us a letter saying they had made grades fit the profile of last year’s results before submitting CAGs. Feeling somewhat cheated ☹️

Do you still look at key stage 2 SATS- yes these produce our non changeable minimum target grades for each child. We don’t share these with the student, as we can make our own predicted grades.

Do you still have CATS and key stage 3 indicators? All year 7s in our school do CATS tests and we use these scores to create our seating plans for classroom lessons but they weren’t used for CAGS.

When submitting estimated grades from mocks etc does SLT still go on about negative and positive residuals? SLT has to approve all our CAGS, this years cohort were similar ability to lasts years so yes did look at residuals

How much stock is given to pupil premium and progress 8? What do you mean by this?

Thanks for the reply - In terms of the last question, I wondered whether in some secondaries with very good number-crunching SLTs - positive discrimination had been shown in ranking two similar pupils with different backgrounds in order to boost the positive residuals for disadvantaged students. As for progress 8, whether some SLTS had ignored how many pupils per grade from last three cohorts and instead looked at how many grades overall compared with end of KS2 would enhance their progress 8 score? (Note: sounds like too much hard work and I hate stats but in theory those centres who advocated overinflation and will see what happens wrt moderation/marks being pulled down were able to rig the system as there was no system I just wondered how far some may have taken it).

I’m in a school where 84% of the year 11 children were pupil premium this year so we didn’t take it into account at all. Our school results were far better from the CAGS, even though this cohort was similar with previous few years, so we were really marked down until it was agreed to use CAGS. We didn’t inflate either, we were following the guidelines to a T aw have spent 6 years going from special measures to good ( we had a major child protection breach).

A lot of our students are new to the country so don’t have SATS so they aren’t included in our progress 8, So i guess we place less emphasis on progress 8. But yes I can imagine some SLT spending a few months getting their heads around the Numbers to suit.

Can I ask please, what were the basic requirements for the CAGs? We have all seen bandied about that the grades were meant to reflect how an individual student might do on their 'best day' in an exam. Along with looking at mocks and past performance. Is this actually correct?

Yes, on a good day, mocks, past papers, we do end of unit tests after each unit in exam conditions, with their access arrangements , e.g those with a scribe, smaller room, extra time get all those arrangements, we also had to rank the whole cohort, so those we wanted to give 5s to we ended up having 51, 52, 53 etc . Honestly , a whole lots of time and effort went into them, whole departments spent hours together to do the cohort ranking, SLT checked and approved and questions grading..

The Ofqual guidance from April is here.

Schools were asked to give a "fair and objective judgement of the grade they believed a student would have achieved had they sat the exams this year". Then rank within the grades.

There is no need for SLTs to show any positive discrimination to spuriously boost group data as it was announced that no performance measures would be calculated or published.

School apparently getting back to me today on how my son dropped from a 5-6 to two 1s.
Is this for Combined Science (formerly known as Double Science) @SusanWalker ?
I am wondering if this an admin error and marks entered for Foundation tier when it should have been Higher tier. You can't get a grade 1 if you are taking Higher tier!

No it was for English lit and lang. I think it's because he was signed off school sick a year and a half ago and the school paid for tutors because the community education service was full.

When the GCSEs were cancelled the tutoring company collated all the work and sent it to the school. I don't think they've looked at it. That's the only thing I can think of.

His tutor said the lowest she thought he would get was a 5. She does exam marking usually so no reason to doubt her. She said ds had the most work to send in because he'd done do much outside of lessons.

DS is feeling a bit better today. We've talked about him doing a level 2 btec and his resits this year and a levels next. But I'm worried about him losing ground on his maths and frankly I don't really see why he should have to waste a year.

Thank you both. I can't see anything on the Ofqual guidance that says on a good day. Where did that come from?

There isn't anything about a good day. There is no requirement to be optimistic. Just realistic. But there is no objective way you can accurately predict the results of an exam not taken.

The bit about a "good day" comes I suspect from this sort of reasoning... I might have a child who is borderline 3/4. Genuinely could go either way and neither would surprise me. So I might have put a 4, but ranked low.

Thank you @TheFallenMadonna that's what I'm trying to understand. Our school have said they would only give the higher grade if they felt there was more than a 50% probability of them having achieved that grade in an exam. I would have assumed that if that teacher felt that the child had the capability of passing it, even if that was 25% probability, you would award the higher grade and rank them low in the order.

And then leave Ofqaul to do their moderating accordingly.

@SusanWalker I don’t know if this helps

Thanks @FAQs I've noted that down, plus I've looked up about the grounds to appeal on discrimination if they didn't use his work because he wasn't in school.

They still haven't phoned. I'm hoping it's because they've realised they've made a mistake and are trying to work out how to fix it before calling me.

25% doesn't really meet the Ofqual criteria. It means they would be less likely to meet the higher grade than the lower grade. I mean, I'm actually not sure you can put a value on it like that, but if you are...

yes agree with Fallenmadonna, if a student had a 1 in 4 chance of getting a higher grade, I would grade them at the lower one.

I would only go optimistic if I genuinely thought it was a 50/50 case - on a good day higher grade, on a bad day lower. 25% (yes, always supposing such specific assessment were reasonable) would always go towards lower, surely.

@clary even though they had a few weeks study leave and many students pulled a grade or so higher in final exams?

The guidance was to give the grade you thought they would get if everything had gone ahead as normal. So study leave etc was taken into account.