The Fifteenth Republic - A Level and GCSE Results storm coming!

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Here it is twitter.com/robotmaths/status/1291028589715038214?s=21

It’s not even a 23% refund, it’s credit against future exams.

AQA claimmto have refunded £42m to schools.

Better than a poke with a stick sharpened at both ends, I suppose.

At least pearson did pay something to their examiners. Did AQA give nothing?

Nope. Not a penny.

This is all bonkers-I don’t think my DS’s school even did one set of ‘mocks‘-Where does that leave us?

When do you a secondary teachers see the actual grades allocated is that today or tomorrow? Are your HT as baffled as we all are??

Results embargoed until the morning however some staff will have seen them.

Whoever said about this being an announcement without changing much is right. In very few cases will the mock grade be above the awarded grade.

AQA paid APEs but nothing below that. The shit thing is I'm going to have to continue to work for them because I can't afford not to.

We can log on from 5am tomorrow, I think. Normally we'd see them in school but there is no "in school" results day for us. They're being emailed out.

(NEAs??)

I didn't have any exam classes this year so I'm out of the loop, but I don't think any of my department would have predicted a result below a mock grade. We were specifically told not to predict more than a full grade above the mock unless very special circumstances. We generally hope for a grade improvement between December/Jan mock and the real thing.

So the pupils this will apply to will be those where the teacher has predicted modest/no improvement for whatever reason and then the algorithm has downgraded them to below their mock grade.

Also, we usually use the grade boundaries from the year the paper we use for the mock - but occasionally we make up our own based on the spread of results in that year group. On one occasion I've told them both grades.

What counts as a valid mock? What about the one they did at the end of year 9 that covered 1/6th of the content?

How on earth are the resits supposed to work as well?

Kids haven’t done a thing since the exams were cancelled in March and Boris told them no student would be disadvantaged . They hadn’t finished the course, let alone done all the last bits of revision where you’re at your ‘exam ready’ best? The secondary teachers won’t be teaching them as they’ll/you’ll be teaching the rest of the school, so how on earth will they do any better in resits-the results will be worse??

There probably won’t be room for them in the school?!

A girl in my film GCSE class stands to gain. She got a 9 in her mock. I awarded her an 8 because she certainly was not guaranteed to repeat this (and her NEA was meh). She is quids in now!

Sadly, my boy who got full marks in his NEA got a 7 in his mock because he ran out of time. So this is why it is silly - and unfair- to overlook NEAs

A couple of my 4/5s if they got marked down could now get a 5 , so that's nice.

No advantage to bottom end, as predicted!

A Level class all did worse/the same as CAG in mocks. But really Ofqual would have no good reason to change those CAGs.

That's in a press release appu : the DfE is going to help schools to find other spaces for those exams, and have bank of invigilators. It does actually sound like they are funding this.

NEAs are coursework , neuro :Non Examined Assessment.

@Appuskidu I've asked SLT this question but specifically in relation to teaching them. We don't have space for extra classes. We don't have staff for extra classes. I fear it will be pushed to after school sessions

@Piggywaspushed I hope that promise of funding is better than their promise of providing laptops

We usually do have a resit class but they always forget to timetable it! It falls to a person with a light timetable, which none of us has because we are understaffed.

Don't know why this has only just occurred to me, but we were told by school that we couldn't go anywhere that would require quarantine if it meant we wouldn't be back at school. I wonder if schools and employers in general will start trying to stipulate that staff can't go to pubs, restaurants and other venues. A busy pub near me has just closed for a deep clean after a customer tested positive, so presumably anyone who might have been within 2m of them for any length of time will have to self isolate. The logical extension of that is that workers will be expected not to go out socially ...

I'm starting to realised how far-reaching the limitations on our freedoms might be.

@Piggywaspushed

That's in a press release appu : the DfE is going to help schools to find other spaces for those exams, and have bank of invigilators. It does actually sound like they are funding this.

Right, ok-that’s interesting. It wouldn’t be a good option where they haven’t finished the course, though-let alone not done any work in it for ages.

Two of my DS’s subjects had big chunks of coursework which he did really well in-presume nothing will take those into account?

The whole point of a mock though (isn’t it?) that it’s practice, and shows up what mistakes you’ve made eg you didn’t finish because you weren’t quick enough etc, so you can learn from it. To say that’s your final mark is bonkers. DS is at work so I can’t ask him but I’m sure he didn’t actually do mocks, so what would they use in that situation?

When I was at school, I’m pretty sure my mocks were at the end of Y12, from which they did our predicted grades for university? That’s going to be very different to schools who did them in March of year 13?

Also, some schools will probably mark you down in order to get you to work harder whereas other schools might mark more aspirationally, to boost confidence and encourage??

Stressing out here-and breathe....

Still hoping the universities will be flexible tomorrow...

In The Guardian

*This just in, from a teacher of 15 years experience. She is also an A-level exam board examiner:
I am utterly horrified by the government’s announcement of the so-called ‘triple lock’ for A level results. It is utterly unworkable and hugely unfair to allow students to ask for their mock grade to be made their outcome. Gavin Williamson clearly has no idea how schools operate and has not consulted with teachers regarding this announcement.

Mock exams are not rigorous nor a level playing field. They are taken at different times of the year - sometimes November, sometimes January, sometimes March. Some schools will have shut before the mocks were sat or marked. This means that they aren’t comparable between centres. They aren’t even necessarily comparable between subjects within the same school as some departments might use last year’s embargoed paper so will be very close to exam conditions where others may have very different exam papers, particularly when mocks are sat before the course ended. Additionally, some papers and results will have been thoroughly moderated to check marking, but others might not have been. This is utterly unfair to candidates - it is, I feel, against natural justice to have such a completely arbitrary system. Mocks are not a fair metric to judge students by as they are simply not comparable.

The most important thing to note is that we already factored in those inconsistencies with regards to mocks, and then used other data such as assessment, coursework (which otherwise would be completely ignored this year), AS outcomes and a comparison against historic data to give the centre assessed grade. The allocation of centre assessed grades took weeks of work - it doesn’t reflect the way UCAS predicted grades are made in any way and the inconsistencies in those is one of the reasons I have seen quoted as to why teachers’ predictions are suspected.

The government seem determined to ignore the incredibly detailed and thorough work teachers did in submitting centre assessed grades. I note that Scotland has come round to accepting our professional judgement and I implore the government to abandon this unfair and unworkable shoddy compromise and instead reinstate the professional judgement of teachers*

They will struggle to argue with any of that.

We should have been submitting predicted grades over the years. She is right that saying we overpredicted UCAS grades and, therefore, don't know what we are doing is a nonsense.

We normally do resit as we have a sixth form. But it's definitely last on the priority list and is usually after school and a split class. I don't think many students will resit.

We spend a lot of time worrying about the under ambitious. The students who settle, who just go 'that'll do' tend not to be the affluent middle classes. This system of needing to be assertive really embeds that kind of situation too.

That guardian article could have been lifted from any number of MN posts back when people were suggesting using mock results.

Who on earth did Gav run this past because it doesn’t appear to be anyone in education? His wife was primary.

It's not Gav, though, is it? It's the paid lackeys at Ofqual who were in a classroom for maybe two years before being handpicked for being a Tory teacherstrategy and Nick Gibb.