The fourteenth republic - watching Scotland and ever changing DfE guidelines

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The stats I've seen on marking are shocking. However with subjective subjects I don't know how to make them more accurate. Maths is naturally pretty accurate with little room for interpretation. I have seen the rubrics used for English and it blows my mind.

The grade boundaries I don't know loads about. I know they model results compared to previous years to make the grade "worth" the same but also link in the sats scores of the cohort. Then there's the making them equivalent between exam boards. Lots of it seems to centre around the normal distribution (unsurprisingly).

It's all a statisticians' playground!

Indeed. Probably why I love it so much. Determined to try and find out more about grading now. I'm guessing most of that information is confidential.

The Lit papers are a bugger to mark. The old spec was much easier and I barely ever got stopped for being out of tolerance. In fact, I got a certificate one year for my accuracy.

Then the new spec came along and I actually give up trying to mark them. Paper 2 is impossible because it is so long and has so many AOs to address.

Well that might be hard in a few years then when they have no ks2 sats reaults for 2020.

Im wondering maybe they'll keep the ks1 sats longer than they said. As eyfs stuff not rolling out yet. I think the test itself (ks1 sat) was fine and motivated me to help dc1 but the youngest are so much younger still it's not very accurate comparing students. (Or at least dc1 would definitely have dobe better a few months later).

Theres a thread now where someone has just realised how unfair and unequal it is going to be for exams next year.
It would be interesting if they were to publish the grade differences between predicted and achieved in the resits.
I dont think anyone could predict accurately as it depends on a lot of luck unless a person is good at absolutely the whole material.
In gcse mocks i came top of the year in biology and latin. But only got a B on the actual Biology exam. And others did get As. Latin i think at least one got higher getting an A*.
Also when i sat Eng. Lit it was open book.
Even at degree level sometimes the teaching wasnt good so the uni adjusted the results. But they didnt adjust statistics where even the people doing statistics did badly but did adjust the Ethics because people did badly and the teacher was visiting from Germany and the results were low. (Yet i had actually dont ok on it).

It would be interesting if they were to publish the grade differences between predicted and achieved in the resits.

The resit cohort (bar English and maths) will be so tiny that this data would be statistically insignificant.

Scotland have released data on proportion of A-C Highers by characteristic and put prediction vs awarded. Low socio-economic groups have higher predictions than their achieved grades.

I dont think anyone could predict accurately as it depends on a lot of luck unless a person is good at absolutely the whole material.

I'm confident most teachers can predict accurately within one grade. Obviously there will be a small number of anomalies/outliers. Very rarely do students surprise me with their exam results. Luck doesn't really come into it as much as people think, and certainly not at a while cohort level. Hard work, revision, knowing your subject and the structure of the exam are what matters.

Hercwasonaroll
On the flip side fripp it is highly unlikely that this year's cohort will have done that much better than last year.

This years cohort for me is much better than last years,

Is it fair to award whatever the teacher predicted?

Yes, if it can be backed up by data/evidence

I know some SLT changed grades, I don't even know what they sent off for my qualification (frustratingly).

For my subject they stayed the same I know that others were discussed and changed.

Are the algorithms for grade boundaries on normal exams made public?

No, but they should be. Especially this year.

In previous years the difference between the raw results and ums results in my subject was 10 marks. That is just crazy,

I get what Herc is saying. Given the massive discrepancy between the 2020 estimates and the 2019 actual, they couldn’t possibly award all the kids the teacher assessed grades as the proportion of kids passing would have jumped by around 14%.

The concern about more disadvantaged kids being downgraded than well-off kids also seems to be a difficult one. If you look at each quartile, the pass rate went up for each group by about 4% from 2019 so it looks fair. What seems to have happened is that teachers were more optimistic for disadvantaged groups than previous years’ results would have predicted.

The argument was always that teachers would subjectively mark down this group due to low expectations whereas it seems to have gone the other way.

This years cohort for me is much better than last years
Pray they had better SATS scores! On a serious note there will be winners and losers from this. Kids in rapidly improving schools will be impacted unfairly. However there are winners and losers every year.

Yes, if it can be backed up by data/evidence
Very difficult to do. What evidence do you allow? What if schools haven't done mocks yet? What if kids classwork is ace but you know they haven't retained anything?

If we award the CAGs and they are 14% higher than 2019 that devalues this year groups grades. Employers will know and lookout for 2020 on exam certs.

My alevel predicted grades were bbc and actual cdd (c being accurate). I dont think i could have got the B in chemistry. But also i think the sunjects can influence each other so if you struggle with one it can bring down others.
This is 20y ago though. Dp had somehing like all b and got i think DE and N.
Dsis got abc but was predicted c in french (got A) A predicted in latin was the B.
A lot will depend on your classmates and countrywide year group. Dsis school was v good so despite her being clever she wasnt top.
Now i guess they have more data and state schools are working them towards the grades for years.
There is an element of luck if your memory isnt that good or you get a topic you dont understand.
Also even at gcse level countrywide
there is still differences between the eldest vs youngest students.
Also it is probably easier to be accurate with a bigger cohort as you would get more comparison on tests.
(Also i had gf during my finals so definitely some luck about even if it is just about ability to sit the test or revise).
I would probably have considered resitting gcses i got slightly lower in (but then until you do them you dont realise how tough alevels will be).

@FrippEnos

What has made me angry about the results is the reporting that teachers overinflated the grades.

As if anyone would now.

Besides the real issue is how little teachers are trusted in that 25% of the grades where put down. That should be what the media and parents should be questioning.

The exam boards need to put there algorithms out there so that they can be transparent about this.

I completely agree and also a little annoyed that it is not being flipped as in the exam boards who don’t know the students at all, have made these blanket decisions based on historical data at best.

So many factors have come in to play with my A Level cohort his year as opposed to the past two years’ cohorts who had a mixture of personal circumstances and having sat the previous ‘easier’ style GCSE, yet I just know my students will be downgraded despite my marking their fully finished coursework that had already been handed in before 20th March and having marked 2019 papers sat as full mocks in the school hall at the beginning of March but the exam boards aren’t interested in that evidence and will just advise them to sit the Exams this Autumn.
Sigh. I’ve resigned myself to the disappointing results though. Nothing can be fair for everyone I suppose.

How can anyone say that grades haven't been over inflated when there is a 14% difference in Scotland? If England is anything like that then they need adjusting.

To me the exam board process isn't much different from any other year. They always statistically adjust based on the exam paper scores. This year they don't have the scores so are statistically adjusting based on grades. Different data but similar process.

Also it is probably easier to be accurate with a bigger cohort as you would get more comparison on tests.

Ofqual have said small A level school cohorts are unlikely to be changed as the prior data isn't statistically significant.

That is hard, but will schools be finding the students are getting slightly better year on year as you say due to more difficult other years. As the curriculum changes fulter through. So across the board all England students are better.
I looked at the gcse maths and it has changed to more like the Additional maths i sat during my first Alevel year.
I can see too that say the reading ability in primary is far ahead of where the expectations were for reading levels a few years earlier. The grammar especially (there's no way dp could do that with dc).
And tbh this may be why many parents didnt want to /couldnt help in lockdown as some probably cant do the primary maths and english. (The yr3 comprehension wasnt far off my gcse level ones lol).

I think you are right @Keepdistance some parents think the work will be easy but when they realise how challenging it is they back away. Maybe that is the problem we need parent friendly worksheets 😂

That's a whole different debate about what they are learning and the curriculum. Equally you could argue that you learnt just as much but different stuff. Some content has moved down from A level maths. But some stuff was got rid of, less statistics included for example.

The grammar in primary is mental. Then barely referred to in secondary as there's nothing about a fronted adverbial on the gcse.

We haven't got cleverer year on year. Different years just know different stuff.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant proportion of parents couldn’t do the primary maths. Particularly when it comes to fractions and percentages.

It’s become a bit of a joke at work where in theory, everyone is supposed to have a C in maths but in practice about 1/3 don’t. Anything to do with calculating with fractions & % gets a lot of complaining.

I’d imagine it’s even worse at ks3 with a lot of parents not able to remember what they were taught at school.

And parents getting ilder having their first. If you had one at 40 gcses are 24years ago. And thats when tey are born so add maybe 6yrs to get to harder stuff.
On another thread someone said 25% of uk had dyscalculia which seems very high. High number of illiterate too, but that is understandable as i think that is reading age below something like 15?

Dyscalculia doesn’t exist as in a specific maths learning difficulty. There are children who undoubtedly struggle with learning maths but it’s generally either because they have been taught maths poorly early on and have weak foundations, or because they have other learning difficulties (e.g. slow processing speed, poor working memory) that also affect their ability to learn maths.

Perhaps they are thinking of the proportion of people who don’t pass GCSE? Although that would be more than 25%.

25% with dyscalculia seems crazily high.

Let's be honest we forget most of what we have learnt at school because we don't use it frequently. Beyond reading and writing there's very little we all use daily. We specialise and retain the information we need for work and daily life.

The children’s commissioner is back in the papers. Children don’t get ill and don’t spread it, so schools need to stay open no matter what!

Which may be difficult if there aren’t enough teachers left to teach them.

The woman's brief is not education. She has no clue.

Nick Gibb just on BBC parroting increased hygiene, bubbles and SD of adults. If they would just acknowledge that we will see an increases in cases it might, oddly, be more reassuring. At least then we would assume they had a plan.

It's like that bit on Blackadder when Haig just throws all the plastic men into his model ditch and that's his strategy.

If annoys me that journalists never seem to challenge them at all though.

Bubbles of 270? Teachers moving across all bubbles? No additional funding? No room to social distance?

It's interesting reading a discussion about how we marked/estimated in Scotland. One thing to remember is that Highers are a one year course, sat at the end of S5. Most people will have been close to finishing their course when lockdown started, but not at the revision, write lots of timed essays stage. We had prelims but they are done early. So we worked hard (multiple video meetings in my case) to determine grades based on the information we had, which in some cases was quite limited. We also have the strange phenomena of unconditional offers - so an intelligent S6 student who has performed well all year gets an unconditional uni offer in March and just stops working entirely. Estimates are difficult. I have a small class so the actual students you get each year make a big difference to results. This year's group was a big improvement on last - not to mention all the new interventions we put in. Still, downgrades all around.

Journalists don't generally understand school either though. Only Michael Rosen seems to be interrogating the declarations! And he's 'just a socialist with an axe to grind'.