GCSEs 2021- do you think your dc would have had the same results if they’d been marked by a different school?

[Luandem]

Struggling to get my head around this. I’ve a friend who’s DS has had a string of great GCSES. She’s been very vocal and smug about this. My DD sat a completely different style of assessments to her DS (DDs were very formal and long covering multiple topics whereas her DS sat multiple tests on one topic only in more relaxed conditions and knew the topic they were going to be tested on.) I’m very pleased for her DS but wonder if he’d have had the same grades if been assessed like my DD and vice versa.

This is just impossible to answer. The lack of any structured guidance from the DfE and the exam boards about how teachers were expected to arrive at the grades given made it impossible for us to know how what we were doing would align with what other schools were doing. All we can hope is that each school acted with absolute integrity but I'm sure there will be ones that didn't. Exam board sampling was meant to address that but if it led to any changes in any TAGs in any school, I haven't heard.

100%

Dd was predicted 8 maths got 6
Her mate predicted 4 maths got 7

That’s in same school as well

My mates kid is in set 5 maths of another school and scored 7! In set 5 I find that hard to believe given many of our set 1 and 2 got a 5/6

Who knows? DD's school said none of the samples they sent for moderation had been changed by the exam board but that isn't the same as knowing that marks were consistent across the board. DD ended up sitting what were in effect GCSEs, just with a slimmer curriculum - she did two two hour exams in almost all her courses, which she said were structured just like past papers, albeit that some topics weren't there. Both papers counted and there was no course work, inclusion of previous test scores or anything other than those papers that they sat. So on that basis, I think she probably did have something as close to a GCSE experience as she would have had in other years, albeit marked by the school not an examiner.

The sets will be a reflection of how academic the school or cohort is. If
A kid in set 7 in school A received a 7 grade and a person in set 1 in school B got a 5, what that means is school B is weaker academically than school A. Sets across schools are not equal they mirror how bright the kids are at each school.

@Watapalava

100%

Dd was predicted 8 maths got 6
Her mate predicted 4 maths got 7

That’s in same school as well

My mates kid is in set 5 maths of another school and scored 7! In set 5 I find that hard to believe given many of our set 1 and 2 got a 5/6

The ones that are in the same school will have taken the same assessments though so they would have been through the same grading process with the Head of Maths signing the grades as correct absed on the evidence.

Is your mate's kid at a selective school? If so, then it is not unusual for bottom set students to get 7s or even 8/9s in such schools.

DD got grades that almost exactly mirrored her previous assessments/exams, her mocks, her predictions and her "working at" grades. So I'm confident that her results were a fair reflection of the level she is at with no inflation nor detriment.

Given that all schools were moderated, I would assume that all schools given marks would reasonably accurately reflect the level that their students were working at, so on that basis, yes, I think she would have got the same marks had she been marked by a different school.

I don't think so- and I don't think it's fair to assume that grades from one school were harder to achieve than the same grades at another school. I have a friend who insists that her dd got lower grades because of the school's 'harsh marking'. I don't think this can possibly be the case when all schools were expected to have results which were broadly in line with previous years. What school would award lower marks than usual when they know it will reflect on their league tables and be published in the press? Schools are moderated by exam boards.

I don't see how they can possibly be consistent wben different schools have uswd different methods

It seems to be so variable between schools - but their fault they weren't given a standard structure to follow.

My DDs school appears to have been pretty rigid, small amount of coursework & two sets of proper exams, with the kids getting more or less what they were expecting/predicted/grades they'd been getting all year.

But DD has a friend at another local (private) school. Said friend had mock results of 4s/5s/6s maybe the odd 7 and was struggling to understand a lot of the work. She would FaceTime DD a lot to ask questions.
.... She got all 9s except one 8!!

But NOT their fault

I would take what other children say about how they're doing and mock results with a pinch of salt. In my experience teens are notorious for downplaying things and pretending to be thick- a lot of DDs friends always claim they've done no studying or revision, which I don't believe when they are getting high grades.