School not giving any context around exam scores.

[PenceyPrep]

DD is in Year 7 and has just taken a set of year-end exams. She has been coming home with exam results, but in most cases, this is just a standalone number, eg. "75%", with no indication of what this means.

I really don't feel the need to know how every other child did, but it would be good to have something to contextualise it.

Kids are told not to discuss their results to other pupils, and when they have asked for the class average, they have been told they are not supposed to be given this anymore.

Is this normal?

Median is a useful benchmark - then you know if your child is near the middle, top half or bottom half. It's not really giving away information about other pupils, or telling kids that they came bottom.
When giving test results back to a class, I would usually tell them the median, the top mark and "not many people got below...". For a subject taught in sets, the latter gave pupils due warning that they were in the relegation zone when we came to reviewing the setting, and sometimes it was the impetus they needed.

It's not about caring how your child did against other children, it's finding out how THEY did.

So if your child comes back and says "I got 46 in the exam". Surely you'd ask out of what? Because 46/50 sounds really good. 46/200 doesn't.

But by finding out other scores that can also show how well they've performed.
46/50 when nearly everyone else got 50/50 suddenly doesn't sound as good.
46/200 looks a lot better when you find that no one else got about 32/200.

A number on it's own is as useless as a class position on it's own.
In year 8 I got 55% in my geography exam. In year 9 I got 82%. Was that an improvement? Actually I went down from 3rd in my class to 15th. If you'd had either of those numbers in isolation then you would have got a totally different view.

I was speaking to someone whose dc is year 9. They are picking options. The school has a policy of not saying how well they're doing against others-nor even at this point what level they are aiming at for GCSEs. Their dc wants to be a vet ideally. She has no idea whether this is a reasonable aim for her dc or a pie in the sky dream. She has an alternative thought, but that would require her to take a particular option for GCSE, but it means dropping something else she really likes.

For her Range and median would be helpful to give an idea as to whether she needs to take the option for GCSE that would give her a better chance in the second ambition.

It’s the only meaningful measure of whether something is a good mark or a poor one. As the OP said, 75% means as much as “purple” otherwise. My DD is 10. If she scored 75% on the Further Maths A Level paper, she’d be a genius. On the Reception class test, not so much! It’s just getting context from the population data, rather than wanting to know that Emily did better than Susan.

Our school gives 'working at grade 3' or 6 or whatever. They're separate to tests. So if they're working at grade 3 in year 7, they're on track to get a 7 in the GCSEs.

I trust the school to set ability appropriate tests.

I've taught at state schools in the UK and independent schools abroad. None gave reports on the last day of term. The UK schools I taught had a line on the reports encouraging parents to get in contact if they have questions about their child's report. Giving it on the last day sounds like an unusual system.

You're right that percentages are meaningless without context. For example I was stunned when I learnt that you "only" need 70% for a 1st class degree in the UK. But it's a lot harder to get 70 in the UK than in my country, where 70 is a C. It's not about comparing children. It's about knowing how your DC is doing compared to what's expected. I would definitely send an email.

This is nonsense for an independent - we get the score then translated to an equivalent 1-9 Grade. We have the median/mean and upper and lower quartile together with the MidYis. The report is then colour coded for your child as to where they are performing against the year group and their own MidYis score. Without the context both against their own expectation and the year - it is impossible to work out how they are doing.

I wish DD was at your school @Hosum. I'm a data person. It's how my mind works.

So, egged on by you lot, I emailed school and got an email back with a load of waffle about exam results being 'discussed' in the report. Nothing about any data...

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

My DD is in a very similar position to your friend's @MargaretThursday. She's only 12, so there's time yet, but she's got her eyes on a ferociously competitive profession and it would be good to know if this was vaguely realistic...

Curious to hear that sending reports on the last day is not standard... I do sometimes suspect this school is run for the benefit of the staff rather than the pupils.😖

No, sending reports on the last day is a deliberate choice to avoid parental complaints.

I know because my school did something like that once and for that reason!

😡

I suspected as much.

Our indie always sends our school reports out on the last day - sometimes even the first Monday of the school holidays! It's not brilliant. Having said that there should never be surprises in a school report and ours is good at picking up the phone if there are issues.

In our school the percentage equates to a level ( the level description of all levels of all subjects is shared with parents ) and this is tracked against the pupil’s target level , which is also known to the parent since the start of the year .

Glad it’s not just me! I’m also frustrated at DD’s arbitrary exam results percentages which are utterly meaningless in isolation. We do get a year end report, usually in the first week of the holidays, which includes the class mean and year mean. None of these data points give any indication of whether DD is performing to her potential, making meaningful progress or where she sits on the ‘bell curve’. The median would be useful if you want to consider where your child sits in their year group, if you consider that a representative sample but it’s all feels so arbitrary to me. They do MidYis at her school too so really shouldn’t be too difficult to correlate her exam results … sometimes I feel they do these things just to say they do rather than harness the potential benefits …