A level grade inflation - consequences?

[Skneesrgud]

For the schools that were named this weekend as having considerably inflated A level grades last summer, are there to be any consequences?

OFSTED and ISI presumably won’t address the issue in their inspections.

Will governors or existing / prospective parents even view it as a negative?

Ultimately, did their headteachers take a gamble that paid off? Did they actually do anything wrong?

Yes 2020 was a total mess. Absolutely shambolic. That week of the Williamson U turn on results was one of the most stressful in my working life. I'll never forget it.

I had kids who had been downgraded from a B to a D according to the algorithm at A level. The same algorithm gave some kids higher results in further maths than in maths (by 2 or 3 grades in some cases).

Yeah I get the concept of normal distribution, bell curves etc veg, I get why that has to happen, or what the prevailing answer is - because some year's exam papers may be harder/have harder questions than others so it is to normalise against that. Top x% get A*, next y% get A etc. But I don't understand how that can lead to so much variation within year - clearly that's yet another failure in our government backed exam systems. As PP said, it's Ofqual that need hauled over the coals here, not the individual schools with overloaded teachers that were doing their best for their students and flailing with lack of guidance. Though I wouldn't send my children to the top ten schools as here they've clearly done their pupils a disservice in reality.

I'm sure in O levels we were told very clearly, x% or above is an A, y% to x% is a B etc and my O level certificate has my percentage scores on it (last year of O levels). Why did that change? Why do we need to normalise an easy year exam paper against a hard year exam paper - surely it's the job of the exam boards to stop that happening? The specifications are so detailed and presumably the papers are assessed and tweaked by multiple, experiences examiners before they go out?

Anyway, much sympathy to the teachers on hear, it all sounds like a nightmare. What do uni admissions people make of it all I wonder?

Yes, the school in question ended up with lower predicted grades because they were more circumspect with the grade distribution rather than have the blunt instrument of moderation by the exam boards. They also kept going with two months of assessments and online exams when other local schools stopped once lockdown started.

It's not just about 2021. Percentage gains are also influenced by the underlying absolute number. That's not to say there isn't a point but statistics have to be treated with some caution too.

God I forgot all that about 2020 no wonder it was such a mess. interesting mitigation as well - some schools knew the algorithm might downgrade and so inflated TAGs in anticipation then that didn't happen.

How is it working out now? Is everything supposedly back to normal?

Even with the school having to send work samples to back up their grades, it wasn’t a level playing field.

At DS’s (state grammar) school they said no work completed after lockdown would be considered & they virtually stopped working. A private school peer continued to do work, re-submit, sit further test, all to create evidence to support the better grades.

Or to support the lower grades of course.

They weren’t supposed to use work completed after schools closed, and if they did it was meant to be treated with extreme caution given the context. That’s why most schools didn’t continue with assessments, it wasn’t best practice.

@Chewbecca in 2020 schools were told no evidence after 23rd March could be considered for the grading. There was no requirement to submit any evidence at all in 2020 so not sure why private schools were asking students to produce it.

We gave preparatory work for a level.

This is the dichotomy. Is that an advantage or a disadvantage? It's not necessarily clear-cut.

For those kids doing well in the mocks, it was a disadvantage. With the normal distribution used, there were a fixed number of 9s etc. so the extra exams were downside rather than upside.

They weren’t supposed to use work completed after schools closed, and if they did it was meant to be treated with extreme caution given the context. That’s why most schools didn’t continue with assessments, it wasn’t best practice.

That wasn't the case in terms of not being supposed/allowed to use work post the lockdown. It wasn't obligatory (and caution was to be applied) but it could be used. I'd argue that best practice was to get as many data points as possible.

My son's friends, as you say, did absolutely sod all during COVID. They pretty much gave up. They spent their time paying football in the park and on their Playstations. I had to take DS phone off him in the period so he didn't keep getting distracted by his mates asking him to come on and play FIFA at 11.00 in the morning, when they'd just got up. The line from their schools was, well we can't do online learning because not every kid will have a laptop or a room to work quietly in. True in some cases I'm sure but it felt wrong that they didn't even try. People and businesses would have rallied round and donated laptops etc. These kids must be finding A levels tough now (although most of his friends went into trade apprenticeships).

But equally would you really expect a school where the parents pay not to provide home learning? And it was tough on those kids as well, stuck indoors with daily monotony, parents trying to work downstairs while all their mates were in the park or playing video games.

Cuts both ways I think.

This was 2021 btw so, as I understand it, the continuous assessment and exams my DS did during lockdown right up to the end of each term was used to provide his GCSE grades because it was entirely teacher assessed?

So when that fell off due to many of them suffering with mental health issues, lockdown fatigue, extreme boredom etc you could argue that continuing to home learn and submit weekly assessments in that case was a disadvantage.

The kids at my local independent school didn’t miss a single lesson. They went home on Friday from face to face lessons and started at 8.30 on Monday with the full timetable of Teams lessons using school-issue laptops. All students had their own copies of textbooks. Homework was required as normal. Attendance was monitored and if a child missed a lesson, the parents got a phone call asking why. So when it came to the tests which fed into the teacher-assessed grades, they had covered the whole course and had plenty of exam technique teaching. By contrast, the local comprehensive sent home limited packs of work with some tutor support by Zoom or phone. Because they dished out shared textbooks in each lesson at school, kids didn’t have textbooks at home. The school found it much harder to monitor how much work, if any, students were doing. The independent school’s results were fully supported by work students produced during lockdown. The comp’s results were inspired guesswork based on what teachers thought they might have got from work they did before lockdown.

So the inequality, indeed unfairness, had little to do with Ofsted or the exam boards, and a lot to do with the different resources available in the two schools.

@BadGranny which year are you taking about? In 2020, as @noblegiraffe has said, schools were told not to use any work produced after 23rd March as evidence.

In 2021, results were not based on "inspired guesswork", schools had to produce portfolios of evidence for each student.

That was the same across the board in the independent sector. Would you pay for nothing? Their only alternative would have been to issue fee refunds, which they mostly did partially for 1 term.

Multiple data points was clearly best practice, but the state schools stopped gathering data points months and months before the independent ones did who went all the way as per a normal exam year. Great for a low achievers in state - they probably got better than they would have done without the effort of attendance and revision. Not great for people that would have gone on to massively improve and do really well in the exams. But equally, more chance for the independent school kids to have a couple of dodgy data points, possibly achieved under bored or depressed circumstances, to justify dropping a grade. If you were at a school that was being more rigorous of course.

So back to my original point, it was luck of the draw. Some kids were unfairly advantaged. Some were unfairly disadvantaged, across both sectors. How can that be acceptable across public examinations? It was extremely poorly administered and I'm not surprised Gavin Williamson got sacked.

And then knighted...

Multiple data points was clearly best practice, but the state schools stopped gathering data points months and months before the independent ones did who went all the way as per a normal exam year.

But my understanding is that this was expressly against the guidance issued to schools, which stated evidence gathered after 23rd March 2020 should not be used.

Yes, if you are paying, you'd expect them to continue to provide an education and there is no reason why they shouldn't have carried on with lessons, but work produced in them was not to contribute to the final grade. Private schools who did use evidence gathered in this period were not following best practice. This needed to be decoupled from carrying on with lessons. Education is valuable in its own right not just as a means to exam success.

True, true and I don't actually know what work was used or submitted. But this was 2021 where they actually sat school assessed exams. Surely they wouldn't have done that if it didn't count for anything?

You're right though. Overall I'm glad they kept going as I think it has made the transition into A levels smoother. And my younger child that was in y8/9 during the period would have just given up entirely if not made to do work from home.

Did he really get knighted? Jesus.

This was the Ofqual wording for 2020

"There is no requirement to set additional mock exams or homework tasks for the purposes of determining a centre assessment grade, and no student should be disadvantaged if they are unable to complete any work set after schools were closed. Where additional work has been completed after schools and colleges were closed on 20 March, Heads of Centre should exercise caution where that evidence suggests a change in performance. In many cases this is likely to reflect the circumstances and context in which the work is done."

No requirement is not the same as not allowed. I remember this because there was a parental uproar at our school as to why kids were being given another two months' of exams when some of their friends weren't.

Ah ok, 2021 all schools had to submit portfolios of work, but by early March students were back in school, not at home and between March and June we (in my state school) assessed them pretty much constantly so that we could generate evidence for TAGs

That’s not accurate, see above guidance, & they absolutely did use evidence created after 23 March.

Our school also went to a lot of effort to try to make remote assessment as 'fair ' as possible in 2020. Foreign language orals were done by video calls. Exams had to be downloaded at a particular time, completed, scanned and email back by 2 hours' later. One maths exam was done by video supervision. Science exams were more application-based than the type of knowledge you could Google the answer to.

Honestly, the teachers worked tirelessly to compile their list of evidence by pupil and allocate exactly the same proportion of grades across the year group as the previous years. Above all, they wanted to avoid arbitrary moderation where every pupil was downgraded by x% by the exam board as the results looked inflated. Whereas plenty of state and private schools benefited from the last-minute scrapping of moderation as they'd put in more optimistic grades.

@Chewbecca but in the Vast majority of schools "no requirement" was interpreted as "don't do it" as there was NO way of ensuring it was done fairly.

Exams had to be downloaded at a particular time, completed, scanned and email back by 2 hours' later.

But how did they ensure that during this time students could not ask parents, look things up online etc?

There was no way to ensure this could be done fairly. In school we have full time exams officers to ensure rigorous guidance is followed. They are inspected, there are strict rules about storage of papers, exam start times, who is and is not allowed into the exam hall. There was no way this could be replicated when students were at home.