Predicted grades - should we move away from aspirational, and move towards realistic

[Aragog]

I get the impression every year that the aspirational UCAS (and to a lesser extend gcse) grades cause issues for pupils, and lead to far more disappointment than the actual grades awarded do.

This year has really highlighted that.

To a 16-18y a predicted grade is just that - they believe them to be the grade they'll get. The fact that in most cases they are 'aspirational' totally bypasses most of these young people in my experience. A hugely,high number of young people achieve lower grades than their UCAS predictions.

I believe they can do more harm than good, and ultimately leads to a feeling of disappointment and failure in results day.

Should we be looking at giving students either:

(a) realistic predictions - ones they are 'most likely' to achieve based on their performance in year 12 (or 10 if gcse) and updated after mocks/coursework during the year if need be.

Or

(B) both realistic and aspirational grades - at A level this might help with selecting their firm choice (usually aspirational) and their insurance (usually realistic)

At the very least we need to do these young people a favour and explain much more clearly that the grades given are aspirational and they only have a chance of achieving them IF they pull out all the stops on the day.

On MN every year, as well as in real life, we see teens and parents alike commenting that the child didn't achieve their predicted grades, and how the child feels like they've 'failed' even if their actual grades are good ones,

Is it time for a change of approach?

I don’t know. I feel the word, ‘predicted’, is self explanatory and so rather than doing away with them, it should be emphasised more that they are based on what the student could potentially achieve based on their potential and IF they do XYZ but will not happen if they don’t.

I also think for A’levels in particular it is largely driven by overinflated university entry requirements. Many universities asking for grades much higher than what they historically accepted for a particular course. Why? I actually spoke to 2 universities last yr who actually told me, ‘well, we have to put something”. It’s almost like a competition between universities to be seen as the most selective, then it all comes out in the wash during Clearing.
Schools already know this, so they have to predict generously in order that their students don’t miss out.

Forgot to add, I think there might be some value in option 2, i.e both realistic and aspirational grades. Realistic grades based on what they will achieve if they carry working as they are with no improvement, and then projected ones based increased effort.

Do schools regularly make 'aspirational' predictions? That's not been my experience at all.

Ds's predicted grades for his ucas form were lower than he wanted. His teachers were clear that they thought he could do better but hadn't demonstrated this yet. He worked his arse off until lockdown and his CAGs were a grade higher than his predicted grade in every subject.

It’s best to be as realistic as possible.

A lot of university will match the predicted grades in their offer, so you really don’t want them inflated.

Reallybadidea:Something like only 16% of students achieve their UCAS predictions.

Pretty much every thread regarding grades on MN state that UCAS predictions are aspirational.

To me the word 'prediction' ought to mean what someone is 'likely' to achieve, not what they could achieve if everything goes right with maximum work done.

And the upsets are seen every single year surrounding 'failure' of achieving these predicted grades.

I would prefer option b - both realistic (or current perhaps) and aspirational.

@CraftyGin

It’s best to be as realistic as possible.

A lot of university will match the predicted grades in their offer, so you really don’t want them inflated.

The point with universities and their offers as I said above is that too many of them over inflate their entry requirements. They know very well they aren’t going to get the inflated AAB they asked for and schools know this. So they inflate the predicted grades to match the offers knowing fully well a lot of such universities will go into Clearing.

For predicted grades to be more realistic, university offers and entry requirements also need to be much more realistic.

It doesn’t help that unis then allow pupils in with lower grades when they don’t meet their offer on the day.

How can you argue that a school should predict ABB for a kid who wants AAB to apply for a uni, knowing that the uni might accept ABB in the end?

Some schools give several sets and are clear about what they mean.

• UCAS predictions -purely for uni entrance purposes
• Likely grade if you carry on working the way you are now
• Potential grade if you really knuckle down

Some of the disappointment this year was caused by the press referring to “teacher assessed grades” as “predicted grades” and mixing them up with UCAS predictions. (Obviously most of the disappointment was caused by the government being incompetent arses)

I’m a Head of Sixth Form. UCAS predictions are a farce but, as an individual school, you just can’t give realistic predictions if you want your kids to secure university places. There are some universities that we know will take kids on results day with BBB or less but who set their typical offer at AAA. If you predict a kid BBB they won’t get an offer and lose out. If you predict AAA they’ll get an offer and then, as long as they get BBB or better on results day, we know they’ll get in.

Universities are actively incentivising schools to over predict. It really winds me up when they then complain about how inaccurate we are. If their typical offer had to be in line with what they actually take on results day then schools wouldn’t need to over predict and play this absurd game.
Whatever they may tell their parents, our students fully understand that their UCAS prediction is not a “real” predicted grade. They are told this very clearly and get reports home with true professional predictions on a regular basis that are lower than their UCAS grades. I’d really rather not inflate the grades but if you don’t play the game your students lose out.

We tell the kids who want a bumped up UCAS prediction to get their foot in the door of a uni that they must have a more realistic insurance offer. That covers all bases.

@noblegiraffe

It doesn’t help that unis then allow pupils in with lower grades when they don’t meet their offer on the day.

How can you argue that a school should predict ABB for a kid who wants AAB to apply for a uni, knowing that the uni might accept ABB in the end?

Exactly! This has been our experience.

@noblegiraffe That’s exactly the sort of deal we strike with them. They can have the aspirational prediction if they have other more realistic choices.
I’m also more likely to over predict for universities that I know inflate their offer grades (who shall remain nameless) than for universities that I know don’t. There’s less than zero point over-predicting AAA for an ABB kid so that they can apply to Oxford (who ask for AAA in humanities even though their typical entry tariff is much higher) but some of the other universities at the mid to upper end of the rankings will give offers of AAA (sometimes higher ) and then take them with ABB. Its such a frustrating process.

Case in point, Sussex university. Asking for AAB for BSC Artificial Intelligence. For the last 3 yrs, they’ve been in Clearing asking for BBC. If a potential BBC student had been accurately predicted, they would have either not bothered applying at all or rejected their AAB offer because it’s too high. They wouldn’t know SUssex were going to drastically reduce their offer as far down as BBC.Why does SUssex continue to advertise this course with such high entry requirements when they have not been able to achieve it for the last 3yrs?

My understanding is that US schools use both "working at" and "target" grades. They don't seem to have had the issues we have regarding grades (though this is because they have a fundamentally different exam system). I would support this sort of target card system for our oldest pupils. Or, ideally, a system which didn't lead to teenagers on average having better mental health during lock down than they do normally...

@Aragog

Reallybadidea:Something like only 16% of students achieve their UCAS predictions.

Pretty much every thread regarding grades on MN state that UCAS predictions are aspirational.

To me the word 'prediction' ought to mean what someone is 'likely' to achieve, not what they could achieve if everything goes right with maximum work done.

And the upsets are seen every single year surrounding 'failure' of achieving these predicted grades.

I would prefer option b - both realistic (or current perhaps) and aspirational.

Do you have a source for that?

Worse than that Shimy. If they’d applied with BBC predictions they would likely have been rejected and not made an offer at all because their predictions weren’t in line with the typical offer. But a kid in another school who was predicted AAB would have got the offer and will get in as long as their grades are somewhere close to BBC. These universities have some nerve complaining that schools over-inflate grades when they are the ones driving the inflation with practices like this.

It's the wording. We HAD to put Grade 4 as everyone's target grade on our online visual tracker (FE so re-sits) which caused real issues with grading this year as students and parents assumed they were predicted grades.

Farlow - no, hence why saying 'something like' and this year will be different anyway, as normal rules didn't apply.

But we do know it's very low usually. Without searching I know that other people have posted various sources over the years with similar figures.

Can only speak for GCSEs but my DS's predicted grades were all lower than his mocks and levels he was working at. That is due to the school only giving computer-generated predicted grades based mainly on y6 SATs (FFT, I believe, an institution that I now despise). This led to several of his CAGs being lower than what he was working at and achieving in year 11.
I really hope that now DS is in sixth form, his school will finally stop basing their predictions for a pupil on their performance in a glorified test that no-one was taking seriously 5 years ago and start basing their predictions on the teacher's knowledge of a pupil.
Also applies to sets, which saw underperforming pupils remain in set 1 despite consistently get lower grades than set 2 because FFT predictions based on them being very good at primary school style tests meant that their GCSE predictions were overly high,, so many in set 2 were never properly got taught grade 9 material because they were being taught with pupils working at a grade 6. No doubt the set 1 pupils also got inflated CAGs also based on the fact that they were good at primary school. Their potential may have been high, but their achievement in real life didn't match up to it, but FFT predictions rule in some schools.

The lifting of the cap on student numbers - trace back to 2012 after 2011 white paper - continued to shape HE as a market. It began with a lift on the cap for students gaining AAB - then ABB - then onwards. This reset the entry requirements. A lot of unis are competing for students, not the other way round. I agree it is a farce and drives me nuts as someone teaching UGs. But we need a whole policy change on HE.

@MadameMinimes Some nerve indeed.
Another culprit, Leicester university demanding AAA for bsc Computer science. If I were capable of that will be applying to Leicester? That’s the same entry requirement for the likes of Birmingham, Southampton etc. Leicester is a very good university but it’s not on par with eg Southampton for Computer science, so why the overinflated entry requirements? No surprise they’re always in Clearing too.

It’s seems to be a lot of these mid tier universities that do this.

But then you would still get schools overinflating it on UCAS, so all that would mean is that the children whose schools don't would get worse offers undeservedly.

@Shimy

I think the reasoning behind putting a higher offer on their lists than they want is to try and attract the higher applicants, to drive their standards up.

If you are realistically going to get BBB you want a place where people broadly similar. If you end up at a place with A*AA you may be out of your depth, if you end up where people have EE then you may be bored and just covering what you did at A-level. I know someone who the latter happened to.

Although Leicester gave me a EE offer (maths) by return of post-I got it even before the "UCAS form received" postcard! It immediately went down to the bottom of my list because I felt if they were that desperate to have me I should be able to do better.

The whole system is broken isn’t it? No wonder all the calls to move to a post-results application system.

Pretty spot on again from Collini
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/31/english-universities-peril-10-years-calamitous-reform-higher-education