Grade boundaries at grammar school

[helpinghetty]

My dc (year 12 and year 10) have just had end of unit tests. The grade boundaries are calculated using rank order for the year and then representing them as A’level and GCSE grades. My question is, are these grades really indicative of how they’re doing A’level and GCSE wise bearing in mind the school is selective?

They'll do it with reference to what their pupils normally get, not the whole population, and probably won't be using the lower grades at all. It's a good starting point for any school with a fairly stable intake.

Are they ‘current working at’ grades, or predicted grades?

If they’ve ranked and graded the kids they should have used the typical distribution for the school so I wouldn’t expect to see many (any) kids on very low grades

It’s the working at grade - not predicted grades.

Bobbins then. No way can you say what grade a student is currently working at 3 months into a two year course.

"Working at" is even more complicated, when it's an end-of-topic test, rather than a test on the whole syllabus. Does it mean "their score on this unit suggests they are working at grade 6 on this topic", or "if they took the whole GCSE tomorrow, they would get grade 6 overall, despite the stuff they haven't covered yet"?

I don’t know. They have a mark for the test which has been given a corresponding GCSE or A’level grade eg. 75% grade 7.

The marks can't possibly correspond to anything. They're speculative.