Will this GCSE result impact on A’level predictions? Really worried

[GCSESbegone]

My DS has received a mark a couple of grades lower than he was expecting for a subject he is taking at A’level. It was a real shock as it has always been a subject he’s excelled in and even his teacher has said he would have expected him to do much better and has no worries about him taking the subject at A’level or doing well in it. The exams were marked externally and his teacher had no input. We’ve looked into appealing but are pretty sure it will get us nowhere. I’ve now started a spiral of worrying that this is going to have a big impact on predicted grades and subsequently getting university offers as he needs high grades for the course he wants to do. Can anyone reassure me as I really am worried. All other grades were very good.

I got lost by Latin… do schools actually teach Latin?!!

There’s no way I would want my students grades given by a teacher in another school. I can’t believe this was allowed to happen.

No but marking was done within your school. OP needs to know he'd DSs school were confident another school had robust marking procedures, which were fair and as accurate as possible. That's the grounds for appeal.

OPs school is different to what you did. You saw the marks for the cohort and then used that to inform grades. OPs school didn't. We had entire papers marked by one staff member for consistency. Easier to do in maths. We also moderated within our centre, then across the MAT. However we, as a school, marked and graded our own students.

I'm sure JCQ were happy. We all worked extremely hard last term to TAG students.

Honestly ,mum , you are taking this personally. I have never criticised your school's processes

Not many state schools do Latin user, but some do!

I massively appreciate the input from you teachers it is incredibly useful. It’s all so confusing. If we were to appeal what grounds do you think we could cite? The school implied that I’d get nowhere if I did.

To quote Mandy Rice -Davies 'well they would, wouldn't they?'

The bit you copied before is about their QA processes which sound standard. The issues are outsourcing all marking to another school and apparently only applying grade boundaries rather than descriptors (useless as all teachers know they were). That's why I asked if it was a MAT as they may have staff who work across schools and their marking may be standardised across the MAT.

I'd want to query whether anyone on your DS's own school ever scrutinised the evidence. I know this is not what happens in a normal school year but, in a normal school year, there is grounds for appeal. It sound s liek they were trying to treat the TAGs as close as they could as full, normal exams.

I know parents appealing is a pain for schools but they can't strongarm parents into not doing it.

To answer your original Q : yes, his grade might affect internal tracking and predictions, but his work at A Level will be more important. My DS1's GCSE results suggested a CCC outcome as a minimum and he got CCD . DS2 is on track for AAA and has tracking grades(based on 2020 CAGs so equally arbitrary) of BBB. But if you can get the grade appealed , go for it!

@GCSESbegone Re grades, Ds sat his GCSEs in 2019, for sixth form they added all his GCSE grades together and divided it by the number of grades. For Ds he got 5 x 9s, 3 x 8 and one 7 which gives 76 divided by 9 subjects gave him 8.4. So his predicted grades for all subjects was A*/A which is the GCSE equivalent grades.

The subjects he did for sixth form were all his grade 9s. However if he had more grade range in his GCSEs he could well have been sitting an A level where he achieved a 6 at GCSE with a predicted A level grade of A.

At the end of the day it is just a guide as to their ability for the sixth form. UCAS predicted grades for university that will make the difference to the courses they can apply for either go on the UCAS 15th October deadline 2022 which is "early entry" for Oxbridge, medicine, dentistry or veterinary. All other courses have a 15th January 2023 deadline so there is plenty of time to prove higher grades.

I should have said that Ds was constantly tested as they sat end of topic tests and had homework set which was graded. They told them all the time whether they are on track or not. So they were in no doubt as to what their effort was achieving. For one subject there was even an online class grid which was filled in by the teacher so everyone could see who had done the homework and who hadn't.

Ds did get 4 x A*s this year for his A levels.

I'd appeal after checking their grading (not QA) process matched policy.
And yes, state schools do Latin. Some of us also have Ancient Greek as an option.

We’re in a similar position with computer science (also a 7) and wondering whether to appeal. I’ve sent off an email to school this morning asking for the marks on all of the pieces of evidence. I know he had a 9 on his November mock and a high 8 on his year 10 exam (both full papers) and he’s pretty convinced he got close to full marks on one of the May exams.

He’s fine with the 7 but really confused. He was predicted a 9 throughout.

@Piggywaspushed

Oooh, pretty sure you can appeal that. They are supposed to be teacher assessed grades. Class teachers should have had input and grade boundaries were not meant to be applied. Exam boards sent out useless grade descriptors.

no, class teachers should have no input into assessment, as they will find it hard to be impartial.

Schools had to take steps to iron out any bias in marking exams.

WE set and marked the exams, but there were no names on the papers, and the papers were mixed with those from other schools in the academy, so we had no way of knowing who's paper we were marking.

That is absolutely how it should have been

@Hercisback

mums I'm shocked by your process. They were teacher assessed and supposed to be awarded by class teachers. They shouldn't have just come from one assessment either.

no, they were not supposed to be awarded by class teachers!

They were supposed to be awarded impartially.

And no, they didn't come from just one assessment, many assessments went into the formula, but there was one main one.

The difference between this year and previous years is the exam board did not set and mark the exam, the teachers did, and we were allowed to leave out huge chunks of the specification, which had not been covered.

But it was an exam, same as usual, and the marking had to be totally impartial, same as usual, and that was done in most schools either by removing all names, or by sending to partner schools, or by doing both

@Hercisback

I haven't heard of that happening anywhere else either including our large MAT and a number of schools country wise. Most schools knew the names of the students they were grading!! Removing bias is one thing but some students needed positive bias. It was important we knew who we were talking about when deciding final grades.

no, it was important that you did NOT know who you were talking about when grading, if you did, then these are the grades that are likely to be challenged as unfair

@54321nought
Please show me the guidance that says any of what you have just spouted as truth?

I'm a teacher, I have read the guidance and it didn't say that grades should be anyonymised and data based only.

Loved to have seen my rare one teacher subject marked like that...

Many pieces of evidence were marked like that. Then they dispassionately assigned grades. Then we discussed and looked at all the students to check there wasn't something we hadn't considered. The grades were meant to be holistic using a variety of evidence and knowledge of the students.!

It sounds like there was a massive amount of variation in what happened.

Update on DSs grade. I contacted school and was told that his mock exam evidence was downgraded as part of the evidence collation by two grades and his year 10 exam was also downgraded by one grade.

In the two papers this year he got a 9 and a 6 so that would indeed average at the seven he was awarded but if they had used his other evidence without downgrading he’d have had an 8 average.

We decided to leave it and informed school but then I’ve now received an email back from them saying we should actually consider an exam board appeal.

I’m taking this to mean they think they probably shouldn’t have downgraded his other exams (which were past papers and were originally marked using the actual grade boundaries for those years.

Now I’m completely confused. Any update on yours op?

There was lots of variation : it wasn't a one size fits all approach . Generally , each school thought very carefully about the evidence they were using, and how to gather it. The DfE gave no 'rules' - that is indeed one of the thorns.

Posters saying there are 'rules' such as anonymisation are not correct (this is not to say they couldn't use it as a way of removing bias). that may have been a rule developed in their school, or trust, or for their subject. (In my school we did use a blind marking approach for English for one paper). A range of evidence should have been considered , definitely. Some schools (most , in effect) used exam style assessments to create consistency within the school. But this idea that anonymising everything was the most 'correct' approach cannot come from anyone with any experience of a small, niche subject, or, indeed, a subject with coursework.

If your school says you should appeal hasa, they are giving you a green light, I'd say! It seems clear in your case that the result won't go down?

Reading between the lines, I suspect they downgraded earlier papers because they felt they had 'too many' top grades. Lots of schools tried to et grades to more or less fit distribution curves,. They may have tinkered with evidence to achieve this, which (unless in hindsight by moderation they agreed the marking was too generous) sounds like your grounds for appeal.

If your school says you should appeal hasa, they are giving you a green light, I'd say! It seems clear in your case that the result won't go down?

I think this is what I need to try to establish first. Ds1 might consider an oxbridge application and so doesn’t want to risk ending up with a six.

The problem for schools comes here when they have clearly (and probably foolishly!) told students 'grades' throughout a course. My school has not been doing this. It's frustrating for parents and students but more accurate as one piece of work cannot equate meaningfully to a grade. Then students get results that don't match their averaging out of grades. The school might also have applied weightings to things so grades of , say 5,6,7,8 may not come out as expected because that 5, for example, might have been worth more than 25%.

That said, your school probably would have told you that if that was the case.

My own DS was shafted last year by rank ordering, ending up with lower grades than any of his evidence for two subjects - this was because of prior data for the subject and rank ordering because of algorithm (I definitely wish we had appealed). This is definitely not what was supposed to dominate as a method this year, and yet it's what lots of big schools did. Maybe just contact your school again and ask them to be really clear about how exactly they reached the evidence for your DS's grade and clarify that there is no evidence to bring his grade down. The whole system of appeals sucks : it relies on parental jitteriness about the grade being reduced.

@HasaDigaEebowai
Update on DSs grade. I contacted school and was told that his mock exam evidence was downgraded as part of the evidence collation by two grades

That’s exactly what happened to my DS. I wonder if they’re at the same school.

But what's the explanation as to why the mock results were downgraded? Why is that considered to be a sensible decision? So the weighting is on the set pieces of work which were done Apirl/May?

@Marmaladeagain I assume they downgraded mocks so the could get the students to fit their grade boundaries.