Y11 2023/24 thread 5 - results!

[Techno56]

New thread as no 4 is nearly full

Thanks @Newlittlerescue that's really helpful. I'm happy to risk the money for just the one paper. DS was down from his predicted grade for this one and if it goes up (which I know it may not) I think this might help his confidence generally going forward.

We were 1 mark away. we gambled and paid the £150 or so. Came back with 3-4 marks in one of the papers. So got a grade boost and also will get all of our money back. So it's a gamble but one i think will pay off.

Some people just don't have a spare £150 to gamble with unfortunately, AQA papers are free to request aren't they? I guess that is the way forward for those who feel their grade is not what they expected so then the school can review first, although that's not really something that is feasible if loads of people are asking for them.

Our school are being helpful to a point but no one seems willing to review the papers and advise us. So we are just sending in the papers from the subjects close to the grade boundaries and crossing our fingers. It’s not cheap but when it is one mark and a bit unexpected we have decided it is worth it.

School have told Dd they have tons of science papers to go through.

Is it next Weds that a review request has to be submitted? I guess if they’ve not looked at it early next week I need to make a decision on whether to pay for the papers to be reviewed anyway, in the hope of finding 2 marks.

I think the deadline they quoted to us was 26th September.

DS flat out "forbade" me for asking for scripts or reviews. He said he was pleased with his results and "it is in the past and we are not wasting money".

My DS1 was the same, all his papers were 1-3 marks from the grade above but they were 6s and 7s so he said there was absolutely no point, he had one significantly below predicted but we when we checked the marks he got for each section it was the school that had messed up the practical (marking him as a low 3 even though he played regional/County level sport for the PE practical) he got as predicted/slightly higher in the exam but the rest dragged his grade down.

We have been fairly lucky in that school haven't asked us to pay, they will cover it but they are also fairly confident that the marking is very wrong - DS has 8/9s in everything except English Language which he was predicted an 8 in and got a 9 in his mock, he felt he did well in his exam and didn't miss anything so to get a 4 was a bit of a surprise
If it was any other subject I'm not sure we'd bother but English Lang is a key subject that will get asked about.
He's also doing 4 a-levels (all subjects he got a 9 in) and college technically require a 5 in English language in order to do this, you can have a 4 if only doing 3 a levels - they only accepted him because it's gone to remark and school stated they thought it an anomaly.
I just wish it hadn't been so stressful for DS

It's obvious that the marking this year has been chaotic and it's getting me a bit angry. Its simply unfair for teen to experience stress and anxiety only for their grade to be wrong - and some will never know!

I totally agree with this, so many college places are on the line and its one thing if the child didn't work hard enough revising or if they knew they did badly on the day but it is awful that there has been so many mistakes with it.

There are a lot of predicted grades that were much higher than the actual mark, many kids I know were predicted 6/7s or higher and ended up with 3/4/5s.

The colleges are struggling to fit in the maths and english resits, our DSs GF lives with us and we are trying to help her sort her course and college have now said she can't do the one they said she could as it now clashes with the maths class (she is 2nd year but only starting her L1 this year). The college said they have over 40 people on the waiting list for the foundation learning courses due to so many not having the grades for the higher courses.

I do wonder if there has been any equality impact assessment on reviews of marking. For my son with asd, 2 years ago, we paid over £100 to get his literature papers reviewed (I knew he had answered questions on texts he had not studied and he was a few marks off a pass) One paper did come back with 13 extra marks giving him that 4, which for him also gave him the 5 9-4 passes which matters for life. But what if we hadn’t had that cash to spare? This time around although my second son is a few marks off the higher grades in a couple of subjects, it hasn’t affected his pathway so it doesn’t seem worth the bother and he has no interest in it whatsoever.

I do wonder if there has been any equality impact assessment on reviews of marking.

The reason it's a review and not a remark is to address the inequality which existed when grade protection and remarks meant that schools with money were able to buy increased grades.

@MrsHamlet i understand the focus changed. But the outcome is still the same: you can buy a review of marking and in a significant proportion of cases that review will change the grade. Around one in four grades change?

“In the majority of cases (76.5% of all GCSE grades challenged), grades were not changed following review. When grades were changed at GCSE, they were most commonly changed by 1 grade (97.8% of grades changed)”

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reviews-of-marking-and-moderation-for-gcse-as-and-a-level-summer-2022-exam-series/reviews-of-marking-and-moderation-for-gcse-as-and-a-level-summer-2022-exam-series#number-of-reviews-qualification-grades-challenged-and-changed-by-service-type

Yes there is definitely an inequality there. I guess being able to access the paper for free to see if there was an obvious admin error does help but even then you have to find the money for the review no matter how likely you think it will be returned if the grade goes up. Also those of us chancing our arm for one or two marks - we wouldn’t be doing that unless we could afford to and a proportion will be rewarded with a better grade.

I am relieved that I read on here about the process, I’m not sure I would have even considered to ask for a remark if I hadn’t read it on here. Although school shared information on the process, I just assumed there wouldn’t be any need. Dd has always got an 8 or 9 in one of her subjects so was surprised to scrape a 7. School have looked at it and thinks that her additional 5 pages weren’t marked so it’s gone for a remark

The Guardian reports on English AQA "Across both papers, it moved up 41 marks from a grade 6 to a 9."
"https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/sep/13/unreliable-marking-gcse-english

It really is awful that there is that much of a problem with the marking, we only put in for a review on the off chance as DS was a mark away, I didn't really consider that there would be such huge issues. Lots of DSs friends did a grade or 2 worse on the AQA English Lit paper (their school does Cambridge language) but I think most of us just assumed that it was due to harder papers/marking this year as they were trying to get back to normal. I don't think many put in for reviews, perhaps they should have!

Presumably the exam board can just do nothing and leave thousands of kids with incorrect grades?

At the meta level, though, it’s a wait and see situation.

it might turn out that marking is more or less accurate or variable than previous years, but until you can see the full range of grades, remarks, and final grades/ percentage of revised-upward/ downward grades, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

it’s easy to exteapolate from a few cases or your own personal experience, but 600,000 pupils or more take GCSE English exams. You’d need more than a handful of wrong results to throw the whole lot on the fire.

While I agree with you, I'm wondering whether the data will be affected by people who couldn't afford to pay for review/remarks.

My confidence in the exam boards isn't nearly as strong as it used to be after the results DS got vs. what he was predicted/consistently performing at in mocks. Looking at forced retakes of English and/or Maths also makes me wonder what sort of profit certain exam boards are pulling in. Anyhow, anecdotal evidence. I hope we get to see proper data because I'll be watching with interest.

There will always be:

• some kids who have incorrect marks on the exams
• some kids who did worse than expectations because they didn’t do enough work
• some kids who did worse than expected because of bad luck on the questions that came up
• Some kids that did worse than expected because their teachers marked them too generously during y10 and y1.
• Sone kids who have incorrect marks and it favours them
• some kids who did better than expectations because they worked their socks off
• some kids who did better than expected because they got their perfect questions
• some kids that blew their predicted grades out of the water because they were under predicted by teachers who missed kids’actual ability

You need system-wide data to prove anything. It’s important for fairness that standards are consistent but there is always an element of human error, plus natural variation between cohorts. For each child who feels they didn’t get what they should have, might be a child who is pleasantly surprised by what they did get. Until the full data is out then it’s all a bit of a fools’ errand.

Exam regulator Ofqual is responsible for maintaining standards and rigour. It has acted in the past when it detected unfairness in grading, see modern languages this summer.

Greater than normal statistical ‘noise’ and incongruence between GCSE outcomes and KS2 pupil attainment in English/maths, you’d expect to be picked up. Ofqual and the Dfe have the data to track this stuff using pupil level data.

Something is lacking in the systems and controls if 20+ marks can go missing on a paper. Academic judgments in level marking are one thing; whole chunks of marks missing because an answer has been overlooked entirely are another. Back in the analogue years of the 1980s I was one of the hordes of Oxford undergraduates who used to earn summer beer money by performing manual checks on the local exam board’s GCSE marking (had every question been marked; had the marks been correctly added up etc). I wonder how that process is done now.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

Are 20- mark undermarks more or less common than previously?

How relatively frequent are 20- mark under or over marks?

Regarding the ‘analogue days’, we don’t know whether there were proper statistical controls either then. Tempting to hark back to the good old days but is just hearsay to say the statistical controls were better then.

@Messen No I don’t think it is the point, or at least not my point. Whether this year is an outlier in the context of recent years is yet to be seen. My point is a different one - where papers were in physical form it was easy (if you had enough people) to leaf through them and check whether every question had been marked and to do a clerical check on the adding of the marks. I said that I wonder how that check is carried out now that they are digitised. Can it be improved, regardless of whether 2024 has been a “bad” year?

If you read my post again you’ll see that I didn’t claim that statistical controls were better in the past. I would expect statistical analysis to be much better now than in the 1980s, especially as GCSEs were brand new when I was totting up the marks in 1988 and 1989.