Is grade 9 the new a*

[nowinhouse]

I know when they first changed the grading to 1-9 people said that 7-9 was an A. Does this still hold true? I can see more students are getting a grade 9 now so has that devalued 8's and 7's?

DD is year 10 and just sat her end of
Year exams that in her school are graded like the real thing. She got 5 9's and 5 7's. No 8's interestingly!!

She wants to be a vet so will need the highest grades and i was wondering if the 7's would be enough.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-48993830

9 is higher than A* and 7 lines up with the old A. You’d have to check what grades she needs to move onto the course she needs to become a vet but I can’t see why those grades wouldn’t be high enough.

Hmmm. 7 is more b than a although still good imo.

9 is a A**
8 is an A*

Although they're evidence of achievement, GCSE grades are secondary to A level predictions for UCAS offers.

It definitely puts pressure on the kids. My son will feel he's failed if he doesn't get all 9s (this has not come from us, it's just he has an academic peer group at school).

They've divided the two grades (A and A star) into 3 (7, 8, 9).

Roughly speaking a 7 is the bottom-middle of an old A, an 8 is the top of an old A and the bottom of an old A star, and a 9 is the top section of the old A star and is given to a small % of entries.

The same happened with the move from grades C and B to 4,5,6.

Wrong. It’s an A in old money, 8 roughly an A and 9 the equivalent of an A*

7 A
8 A*
9 A **

More students won't be getting 9s in the real exams as it is awarded to the top X% of students and the boundaries change each year.

Look at UCAS for specific uni entry requirements and your local colleges for what they require for A levels.

7-9 are all fantastic grades particularly if shes getting that in year 10 she'd be expected to increase a grade or two by the end of year 11. However, this is the problem with the new system the 5 and 6 seem quite bottom rung when a C or B was fine years ago, in fact you'd be pretty happy with a B.

Completely. My daughter looks at a 6 and thinks it's so low because there are 3 grades above it. I don't think that happened the old way as the 'stars' were more like an extra not the main grade.

Whilst these conversions are useful in helping people who grew up with the old system understand the new system, making direct comparisons is misleading.

The grade boundaries are set in response to how that cohort actually perform and are relative rather than absolute. That means that what qualified a student for an 8 one year might have been enough for a 9 the year before but would only get them a 7 the next year. Therefore saying, for example, an 8 is an old A* isn't accurate as what was needed for those grades varies significantly, especially with changes to assessment and the curriculum.

Very true. The last sentence of this is particularly important. My DC did GCSEs last year, I did O levels. Back in the 1980s an A was as high as you could achieve, and a C was perfectly acceptable. My child got from 4s to 7s, ie Cs to As. All passes, all amazing. But in today's insane world an A still isn't seen as good enough.

Iamnotthe1
I agree with you. The specifications are so different now, at least in my subjects.

The fact that the spread of students within the two old grades is now spread out over 3 new grades means it's not possible to give set equivalents. It just means that the distribution of higher attaining pupils is split into 3 buckets instead of 2.

I think the new system demoralises kids so much. Having an A at GCSE was excellent. Now it can be a 7 and kids feel deflated. Also not great when a 4/5 is a C (ie pass) but most kids think it's low because there are so many grades above it.

Completely. My daughter looks at a 6 and thinks it's so low because there are 3 grades above it. I don't think that happened the old way as the 'stars' were more like an extra not the main grade.
If it helps the way I explain it to my students is that moving from 4 grades (A star, A, B, C) to 6 grades (4 5 6 7 8 9) doesn't actually change their attainment or the value of their grades. It just offers a level of granularity.

In terms of distribution GCSEs have a bell curve. The grade boundaries are set based on the performance of the cohort in any given year. For C+/4+ instead of cutting the bell curve into 4 sections, they cut into 6. A child hasn't done any better or worse if they get a 6 vs a B because they're still at the same point in the bell curve compared to their cohort. It's why thinking of the new grades as old grades isn't too helpful now, although it was useful when the changes first came in almost 10 years ago.

All the grades are is a ranking system of a cohort.

Absolutely not true.

Please don't say things like that that are false. It leads to totally unnecessary stress in our teens when people downgrade their achievements with falsehoods.
4 is old C
5 is high C low B
6 is mid-high B
7-9 cover A and A star.
The % getting 4+ and 7+ were pegged to the old C+ and A+ percentages

Anything a 4 or above is a (level 2) pass.

And for some kids getting a 1-3 is an achievement.
For other kids even sitting the exam is an achievement.

@christmastreefarm I agree.
My oldest dc got pretty much all 9s last summer and a couple of 8s.

My younger dc is now doing his GCSESs and thinks that a 6 or even a 7 isn’t good.
Party because his brother did so well, but also definitely partly because there are now so many grades higher than what would have been a B, which is a good grade. He has even articulated this to me - “an A sounds so much better than a 7”.

If the 8 and 9 were called A and A* and the 7 and 6 called A and B, I am sure pupils wouldn’t appreciate how good 6s and 7s are.
As PP said, the and * looks like the extra achievement to the young people without seeming to bump the other grades down.

This. And 7 is an A , 6 a B, 5 a strong C and 4 a just squeaked in C.

7 is still an A

I hate the 7,8,9 nonsense

I wish they'd go back to how it was.

It's still the same for A Levels

I agree. How did it all come about anyway?

I find it odd that there are 3 levels of A, basically 1 b and 2 Cs.

But i dont think more and more will get 9s as they have been told to award a similar proportion to 2019.

I hope the school are managing those expectations.

The first year that 9s were introduced, there were a few hundred out of hundreds of thousands who achieved that. It was under 800 students in total who got 7 or more at grade 9.

Since then, with the switch to teacher assessed grades, it became more realistically possible, but I think they are moving back to the intended way of grading a 9 as a % of those getting an 8. It will only be 0.001% or something like that who could get all 9s.

Rubbish!

This is it.

9 = A **
8 = A*
7 = A

I find it odd that there are 3 levels of A, basically 1 b and 2 Cs
There isn't.

The top two old grades have been replaced with 3 grades so the distribution of pupils who 'would have' got A/A star are now spread out through the 7/8/9 grades.

The B/C grades have been replaced with grades 4/5/6 and the distribution of students who 'would have' attained in the B/C bracket are now spread through the 4/5/6 grades.

It's a totally different system. It would really be much easier if 10 years in we still weren't working in "there's 2 A grades, no wait an 8 is an A star, a 9 is an A double star, there's two different C grades etc"

It was messed up by 2020 onwards.

In 2019 it was clear that a 9 was not the 'new A' as so few pupils got all 9s. It wasn't expected that they would as it was really the top % of those who had scored an 8, the 'old' A.

In the last 3 years that completely changed so they were given out much more generously

2019 - 837 pupils got seven or more grade 9s
2020 - 2645
2021 - 3606
2022 - 2193
(and a lot getting these seven gcses at grade 9 actually took 10 or more GCSEs)

I worry for students who seem to think getting all 9s is realistic. There are hundreds of thousands ofstudents taking gcses.