Eng GCSE grade oddities

[Sausagesandpeas]

DD consistently pulled 9s in her English Language mocks but has come out with a 6 in her results yesterday. She said she’d thought the exams went well. I am requesting copies of the papers to see if there is anything glaringly odd going in. Is it worth asking for a review? It just seems so odd.
Didn't get chance to talk to school staff in the bedlam yesterday.
Thanks

Really well done to your DS @IndiganDop :) Sounds like the school found an approach that suited him.

It does seem like maybe an error. But scaling the scores does create a mess.
We had similar with the sats. Dd did much better on maths than i expected. And only scrapped exceeding for reading. So yes maybe maths affected by lockdowns more than reading.
Did the ones predicted 9 get exceeding reading and writing for y6 sats?

Yup, same here. DS got straight nines except english. We’ll get them remarked, as he had a 9 in one paper and 5 in another, and he’s never got a 5 in any practice or mock.

@immergeradeaus Can I ask how far from the grade boundary your DC was?

@Busornobus67 interestingly, DD did get Exceeding in SATS for Reading, Grammar (SPAG?) but not for Writing but has since far exceeded the results and predictions of those in her primary who did get Exceeding. Does make you wonder about using SATs so much as a basis for predictions (though I know not all schools do solely). And her school friends are at the same secondary so that hasn't changed either! Go figure...

My DC was consistently predicted 9 for Eng Lang and 8+ for lit, but came out with a 6 and a 5! All his other grades were 9, including other "writing" subjects like history and RE. His papers are going to be downloaded and checked by the school - we already know there's a definite admin issue for literature as the online check showed two of his questions were awarded zero marks.

Was also going to ask this

I've already answered that upthread. It's a data management issue in the centres not an exam board one. You'll have to ask the centre.

DD got unexpected 9 - had been getting solid 7s. SHe was in second set and they all did better than expected, top set all did worse. Interestingly it appears her set were marked harder in all mocks whereas top set were achieving higher grades. So, her class put more effort into revision which paid off.

She's at a comp and does absolutely no reading for fun so the theory above is absolutely not true in her case. What she does have is a forensic understanding of grading schema and mark expectations per paper and tailors her answers accordingly - it's so sad it's come to this but she's scored outstandingly using this method.

is he certain he didn’t miss any questions? That’s really awful if they just missed including the marks. Do you mind me asking which board?

Yes, certain. And his teacher seemed to be able to confirm that somehow - not sure if she's had sight of the paper yet. Still waiting for an update.

p.s. Edexcel

Thanks, we have had a similar surprising result but AQA.

My son got 4 mocks and 7 in exam! It's an oddity but I'm taking it!!
However he also went up 3 grades in Eng Lit too and missed a 30 mark question so I guess he just turned things around? Or they liked the way he wrote.
It all does seem very inconsistent.

This appears to shed some light. Bloody hell. What a shit show for everyone including the examiners.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeachingUK/comments/14cicvs/marking_for_aqa_nightmare_this_year/

No school can ever hand on heart give out 9s because is a normal examination year such as this one was they simply cannot tell whether their star pupil is in the top 4% of a national cohort.

It is a shame that the school hasn't managed expectations of what a normal curve distribution looks like.

Gosh!! What do they mean by seeds? Also what keeps stopping them. Is there someone double checking all the time and stopping them?

Sounds like it. I think I naively thought someone just got a bunch of papers and sat marking them through. Clearly I know nothing!

There are hundreds of thousands of candidates and thousands of examiners. We don't just get to have at it 🤣

They only get sent individual questions online, totally anonymous! My friend marks science papers and she may get 500 quesion 10s for example to mark and they are done on the computer.

Seeds are papers/questions planted by the exam board to quality check markers are marking to the mark scheme, accurately and consistently. If a marker fails a seed, they are temporally stopped from marking until their supervisor can explain why they failed that particular seed, ie, which part of the mark scheme wasn’t applied correctly.

Yes, markers will have a supervisor that will randomly check a marker’s marking in addition to monitoring the seeds.

I’m a marker for English Paper 2 with AQA. You don’t mark whole papers, just random banks of questions on line so it’s unlikely a whole paper is wrongly marked.

Each time you log on you have to mark 2/3 ‘seeds’ ~ premarked questions already assigned a mark (that you don’t know). If you are a few marks out on two questions, you are stopped from marking. You then have to revisit those seeds and have a chat with your team leader about where you went wrong. This can take hours to get back on line.

There are also random seeds scattered through your marking load. Again, if you’re out of tolerance, you get stopped.

It does aim to stop rogue marking and make sure there’s consistency.

You are not paid to mark seeds so it’s really frustrating to get stopped.

Thanks for the explanations about seeds. I had no idea about any of that. Sounds super frustrating so hats off to examiners it's not a job I could do.

Also got a lower than expected grade with AQA here - we are going to request the scripts for teacher review