Has anyone know schools to totally overestimate a kids' achievement level?

[Echobelly]

I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no' and that it's not in a school's interest to overestimate how students are doing. I think my husband is less confident.

Unfortunately we got mixed messages about son's achievement in one subject and the teacher said he was doing pretty well, but then the school decided his performance wasn't strong enough to take the subject at GCSE. I had no particular problem with it, but now I fear DH, who worries too much about DS' achievement level in general, thinks the school is just bullshitting us about all his subjects. DS has ADHD and is predicted 5s and some 6s at GCSE at end Y9, which sounds both good and realistic to me. On relatively little revision, DS has got marks of 50-68 per cent on subjects, which suggests to me he's doing just fine. But I don't think secondary teachers would say nice things just for the sake of or overestimate kids' potential achievement, because that would look bad if they were way off.

It’s more complicated that it looks.

no, secondary teachers don’t say things just to be nice. And reports are generally based on stuff like class tests or assessed essays.

that having been said, all secondary teachers know kids who look confident in class, do reasonably well on the mini tests every couple of weeks/essay at the end of the topic and then absolutely bomb the end of year exam because they just don’t retain knowledge beyond the few weeks they are learning it.

your child’s predicted gcse grades will be based on sats plus some adjustment for how well they are working.

if his reports are based on end of year tests which test the whole year’s content then they’ll be good predictors for gcse. If not then less so.

Yes at a private prep school. Because they have lazy teachers who have more fun being fluffy doing the nice bits for social media than actually teaching

Ex-teacher here. Final straw came when the headteacher told me to revise predicted grades for certain students for my GCSE class because they 'weren't high enough'. Come exam results, one of their parents then queried why their golden child didn't end up with a grade as high as the predicted one that I'd been told to change 🤦🏼‍♀️

So yeah, sometimes it could be that.

Thanks, appreciate the honesty. It's a state school, they have a sort of streaming - though they're not put in separate classes other than maths - by expecting GCSE. DS is in 2nd for most, 3rd for maths although that seems to be one of his best subjects and has been since last year. Predictions are based on test results, where he seems to be doing OK.

DS will be hard to predict really, I think he's on track for 5s and 6s all going OK, but the sheer volume of knowledge and number of exams could bring him down in the actual event given the ADHD.

@Echobelly what was the subject?
It may be oversubscribed, in which case the bar for selection may be higher than just doing "pretty well". You could ask the school for more context.

IME as someone who went through schools and as a parent, over estimated no, underestimated yes.

Hmmmm
I used to predict GCSE grades realistically. I recall one class where I had said a C for student x and a D for student y (just examples) and I was called into the HT's office (shades of @ThousandCows 's experience) and asked why these PGs were so low when their target grades were higher and they had PGs of A and B in history.

In the end the one whose target in French was an A got a D (my C was optimistic) They didn't do any better in history. I'm not gleeful about this at all but I was happy that my PGs were a bit more realistic.

So yes, it can happen. But it shouldn't. A teacher with integrity should predict what a student will actually get – on a good day with revision, yes, but not an impossible target.

It can happen - especially on paper.

My DD has just finished Y11, so the proof of the pudding will come in 5 weeks time.

She has very high target grades... 8s in everything, because she has very high CAT scores (and no SATS due to Covid). But, she is also severely dyslexic and has processing issues. She would work at a grade 8 level in class, and then get a 3 in the exams.

Anything with a coursework component, she got 100% for (we have the marks) but she found it very hard to retain information.

Teach her a maths concept one week and as soon as she grasped it, everything would be correct and very high scores, teach her a second maths concept the following week and the same would happen. However if you chucked in a couple of questions on the first concept, not only would they be wrong, but she would question whether she had ever been taught it, despite having high scores only a week earlier. It was a complete nightmare and nobody really knew what to do bar a lot of past papers and a lot of tutoring inside and out of school.

Huge discussions about whether she should sit Foundation or Higher... what do you do with a child who can do the really hard questions at the end of the paper and is utterly stumped by the easier ones at the beginning. I did feel for the poor teacher.

We ended up choosing to reduce down to 6 GCSEs and a BTEC to try and give her the best chance of getting grades in line with her targets. And sat the Higher papers.

I had to have a lot of individual meetings with teachers to actually try and work out what on earth she was actually likely to get this year - and I still would not be able to predict her grades with any real confidence. Even the teachers were pretty lost as to what she is likely to get... we are all hoping for nice surprises on the 21st!

Happily we do not have to try and deal with A levels as she is off to a specialist college next year for her main area of interest.