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

So far there have been a couple up in Drama at my school, in addition to our English rises. In English we usually have by far the most changes, to the point where it's become a school joke that there's no point asking the department about results until 3 weeks into September. I have a distinct sense of humour failure here.

Just heard my DC's Eng Lit is going up from a 5 to an 8. (Edexcel). 🥳

Congratulations to your DC! That is a crazy jump, really knocks your confidence in the marking.

Wow! Any explanation of the disparity?

Two questions hadn't been scored at all - they were just given 0 for no reason.

That's really bad. Very happy for your DC but that shouldn't be happening.

Which questions were these, please? Written exam questions or the coursework?

Exam questions.

Was it typed?

No, written.

Weird!

I’m glad you got it sorted.

Just got my child's paper back to look at because he had a very different mark in one paper compared to the two other papers for the subject and there is a whole 15 marker that hasn't been marked/ been given 0.

It's so sad and unfair that this can happen. Children deserve to have their exams properly marked after all their hard work.

At least you've spotted it now. Really not good though. Harsh marking is one thing but no marking at all...🙁

This is the year the gov. mandated a return to pre pandemic grade distribution. This means that students will have to fit into set percentages of grades in line with 2019 to maintain standards. Of course this is disingenuous as the marks needed each year for a certain grade vary according to the difficulty of exam questions and the numbers of students gaining higher marks - if lots of students got 8s this year, to achieve the % from 2019, students at the lower end of the grade 8 boundary may have been pushed into 7s, and so on. This is the inherent unfairness of our exam system - a grade is not always representative of the skill required to achieve it if lots of bright students ‘ace’ a paper one year. The more students gain higher grades the more the boundaries shift upwards as well to maintain the grade distribution from year to year.

Just got my child's paper back to look at because he had a very different mark in one paper compared to the two other papers for the subject and there is a whole 15 marker that hasn't been marked/ been given 0.
This should have been picked up by the centre. We can see question marks on results day.

@Hmmph what happens now with his grade?

Ive just checked DD’s marks for her 2 lit papers, one scored 69 and the other 27. We have submitted the lower one for a review.

How long are people typically waiting for results of a review? We submitted ours on 28th August and no results yet.

Ours came very quickly - we submitted on Aug 29th and the result came a week later.

Did yours change @RayonSunrise ?

You do need to be careful with literature and look at % rather than raw marks. With AQA paper 1 has 64 marks and paper 2 96.

Thank you @lazysummer I’ve just checked, dd said she got a 4 for paper 1 and a 7 for paper 2. I presume poetry was in paper 1? Even allowing for dd being less strong in poetry, she has never got a 4 in her life!

It depends on the exam board. I only know AQA, where poetry is paper 2.

Thank you @lazysummer dd was AQA English so I’m very surprised at her paper 1 mark. This is the we have submitted for a review.

I agree that the papers are inconsistent.
Good luck with the review!