Will GCSE grades be consistent between schools this year?

[Tonylepony]

The more I read on here and hear from DS’s friends who are at different schools, GCSEs are being approached completely differently depending on the school. This seems ridiculous and has made me wonder if the grades will be completely inconsistent and a dc who does well at one school could do less well at another and vice versa. Some schools seem to be spoon feeding their year 11s information so they know exactly what they will be tested on. How is this fair when other schools are giving absolutely nothing away. As my ds is at a school that seems to be taking a no nonsense approach and not taking a soft approach at all I’m feeling increasingly annoyed. Is it a massive cock up or will dc get fair results?

No idea.
Provided they get enough to get them onto their chosen course that's what matters.
Definitely isn't an issue for me if all the borderline 3/4s are given 4s this year.

Schools who normally have a range from grade 3-9 aren't suddenly going to get away with submitting everyone with a 6+ presumably.

It’s a massive scandal. The govt couldn’t figure out a solution to the problem so they’ve just dumped it on schools and teachers, who will get the blame when the shit hits the fan.

However, we also have to manage the stress for the pupils, so remind your child that they are not competing against the other schools for grades. If the school down the road is giving their kids the answers, they’ll have to figure out how to award a range of grades when everyone scores highly. The school that sets a harder exam will be giving top grades to the kids who did best on those exams, even if their raw scores are much lower than the school down the road.

I suspect it will be like last year when lots of the fee paying schools around us announced on social media with great pride that it was their best ever set of results!!!!!

Thanks @noblegiraffe. I do keep telling him not to compare what he’s doing with others and also that he’ll hopefully be in a better position when starting his A’levels, but he’s not finding it much consolation at the moment whilst revising the entire syllabus contents whereas his friends knows exactly what they tests are on! At the end of the day nobody will know which schools went easy on their students and which schools didn’t and so which results were hard earned and which weren’t.

I feel so sorry for the teachers. Every teacher I know (secondary and primary) is stressed to the point of breakdown and seriously rethinking their career. They all feel so let down and unsupported. What a total cockup by the government. Last year at least was unprecedented. This year was definitely predictable.

Teachers have been put in a dreadful situation and it seems given no guidance at all on dealing with this. I know dss school is doing what they think best long term for the dc and have be admirable throughout. It’s definitely a scandal.

The kids are being measured on so much more than just this set of assessments.

Also the JCQ rigour around grading, consistency and fairness is apparent.

The teaching staff have to ensure that the grades are largely the same distribution as previous years for that school. Outliers might be looked into by JCQ.

Indie schools do often have a distribution of higher grades so they aren't fiddling, they will have evidence to support.

I am an exams officer so slightly involved.

total shambles.

some schools doing 100% coursework. some doing 100% exams. some doing the whole syllabus and some only parts of it.

while there will be some random sampling in an effort to ensure acccuracy, we really aren't comparing apples to apples if we start comparing kids at different schools.

For the A levels, this is a massive massive issue....

The kids are being measured on so much more than just this set of assessments.

Which is an example of inconsistency because in my school they’re not.

DP is a teacher and he tutors a lot. None of his tuttees are at his school, they go to different ones in the County. They all got a list of what to revise, from the list, DP has figured out every single one of their papers. He has then walked them through it. That’s what parents pay for, I guess. It’s highly unfair for the disadvantaged.

@noblegiraffe

The kids are being measured on so much more than just this set of assessments.

Which is an example of inconsistency because in my school they’re not.

Similar to noblegiraffe except some subjects are 100% on these assessments now, and others include some previous work, but students don't yet know which previous work. Total shambles- not the fault of teachers at all but chaos nevertheless.

Basically instead of all taking the same exams and being graded on a national curve each school is using the evidence they feel is appropriate to grade on an internal curve, which will be matched to their results from previous years.

It's not equivalent, but that's the point, some pupils have had more time isolating/poorer online provision/not got as far through the course.

I imagine they'll come out with what they would have got or very close to it in most cases.

I imagine they'll come out with what they would have got

That depends on whether you mean ‘what they would have got if covid hadn’t happened and they’d done the course as expected’ or ‘what they would have got had they sat national exams and were graded against kids who had never had to isolate, full remote teaching etc’.

Neither of which is what they are supposed to get according to the guidance, of course.

It's such a mess and cannot possibly be done consistently when there are as many different approaches as there are schools. I do have faith that individual teachers will try their very best to give marks that are as fair and accurate as possible under the circumstances, but it's far from ideal and the government seem to have washed their hands of the whole thing. I guess it will be easy for them to blame teachers if it all goes wrong.

It's frustrating for pupils like dd, who were on track to do really well, because their grades will be devalued and nobody will take them seriously. It must be incredibly worrying for kids who are on the borderline of getting the grades that they need for the next stage - ours don't even know what data will be used for their assessments yet. As @TeenMinusTests has suggested, I think it would be fair to push any child on the border between a 3 and a 4 up into the 4 this year. These kids have had such a tough year.

The teachers must be exhausted. Ours have been absolutely fabulous this year, without a single exception - there is usually a dud one in amongst the mix, but they have all been brilliant. Would it be weird to send in a box of biscuits or something for staff, safely after the deadline for submitting any teacher assessed grades? I am already planning a letter to the head teacher.

@Lionsdinner

DP is a teacher and he tutors a lot. None of his tuttees are at his school, they go to different ones in the County. They all got a list of what to revise, from the list, DP has figured out every single one of their papers. He has then walked them through it. That’s what parents pay for, I guess. It’s highly unfair for the disadvantaged.

That seems somewhat unethical to me, but maybe I am naive.

I agree it's totally unethical @TeenMinusTests, but I think the government has to take responsibility for creating this situation and publishing the assessments online. It's incredibly unfair for those students who don't get that kind of help. I can only hope that the schools attended by @Lionsdinner's tutees decide not to use the assessments provided and produce their own instead.

Otherwise, we are essentially encouraging the kids with savvy, well informed parents to cheat. And as always, it is the disadvantaged kids without support who get left at the bottom of the pile. Frankly, I hope that schools are spoonfeeding those kids in order to level the playing field a bit.

@Lionsdinner

DP is a teacher and he tutors a lot. None of his tuttees are at his school, they go to different ones in the County. They all got a list of what to revise, from the list, DP has figured out every single one of their papers. He has then walked them through it. That’s what parents pay for, I guess. It’s highly unfair for the disadvantaged.

Every exam board in all subjects has released to all pupils, on their website, the questions from all their papers including ones still under lock and key, so all pupils could do this.

There are no new questions produced by the exam boards for schools to use to keep them secret.
Yet the exam boards still waited until the end of March to then release these publicly instead of the ‘new questions’ teachers were expecting.
Keeping teachers in the dark last term that there would be no new questions to fairly assess their pupils was shameful.
Exam board training (last minute webinars) has also included the need to inform pupils of topics beforehand.
Of course, not every school is putting together assessments from these questions and I can understand why they would choose not to.

Genuine honest questions though:

What did anyone think would be done, when the DforE scrapped exams in England (and elsewhere months and months before that) with no plan?
Did people really think no exams meant no assessment/work produced at all and teachers would just magically know what to award?
Did anyone think the DforE, when they were holding off for months telling schools what the guidance would be, (leaving it till Easter), did that because they were working hard to produce thoughtful, clear and fair solutions?

Of course not, the DforE just washed their hands of it like they did last summer and happy for people to be annoyed at schools and blaming different procedures schools/departments use, rather than the gov, Ofqual and JCQ’s laughable grade descriptors that are pure nonsense.

The thing that makes me so sad is that people will read these threads and threads like these, and assume all pupils from Year 11 and 13 do not deserve their grades that they do end up with and despite their hard work during a pandemic for pretty much the entirety of their qualification, whatever they get, it won’t mean much to the adults in their world.

The adults that matter (parents) will know how hard their children worked.
Once they are on the next stage the grades won't really matter longer term.

I personally think it would have been less of a mess to have more option questions in proper formal exams. But given that they had to make the call ahead of time and some areas have had massive disruption, I can see why they didn't.

Nothing's fair in a pandemic.

There's a list of exam questions that the schools are using, that they've seen before and the kids could also see them before the exam? Have I understood that correctly?

Send a fruit basket, paralysed! We're all maxed out on biscuits. Thanks lockdown.

@actiongirl1978
The kids are being measured on so much more than just this set of assessments
We’ve been told that the bulk of their grades will come from the assessments they’re currently sitting (full on GCSES with nothing removed from the syllabus, not the mini assessments in the classroom his friends are doing)

We’ve been told that the bulk of their grades will come from the assessments they’re currently sitting

Same here. Had a frustrating parents evening last week where the only thing they were allowed to say was to keep working hard! No performance measurements allowed in case the parents interpret them into grades...

@Candleabra

There's a list of exam questions that the schools are using, that they've seen before and the kids could also see them before the exam? Have I understood that correctly?

Yes. This is nothing to do with schools or teachers. Please note that this has come from the DforE and the exam boards specifically. I cannot stress that enough.