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

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Nearly a fifth of our grades have been standardised to below their mock grade....

Wow. You’ll be waiting to hear what Ofqual count as valid then. Do you think you’ll be ok?

Maybe a bit of both. Pressure from Scotland and perhaps a realisation that the English algorithm might actually be worse for disadvantage and large adjustments. In Scotland I think just under a quarter of grades were adjusted. News today suggests that figure is 40% in England. I think in Scotland the number of entries that went down by more than one grade was vanishingly tiny (I think I read somewhere that it was in low-ish double figures) but it sounds like that is not the case in England. I should have known better than to trust this government to handle something so complex competently in the face of such clear evidence of their incompetence thus far. Lesson learned!

@noblegiraffe

Nearly a fifth of our grades have been standardised to below their mock grade....

Wow. You’ll be waiting to hear what Ofqual count as valid then. Do you think you’ll be ok?

Who knows? The model seems to be placing lots of emphasis on historic performance, and we only have quite small cohorts so lots of variance from year to year anyway - so in a subject with a couple of Us 2 years ago (because the students in question didn't turn up for all their papers) we have Us awarded by standardisation this year, even though our current cohort in that subject are much stronger and harder working and were really unlikely to have have been ungraded - the lowest ranked had a CAG several grades higher than a U. We have experienced teachers, usually quite accurate in their data/predictions.... and who had spent hours agonising over these grades... It's all just such a mess....

@noblegiraffe

The thing about teachers predicting grades that I’ve not seen mentioned while we’re all being berated for being bad at it is that:

Grades don’t describe anything. There is no way of accurately saying ‘this kid is working a grade 4 and this one is working at a grade 5’ because which kid gets a grade 4 and which gets a grade 5 is decided by their ranked position nationally. We set grade boundaries on a bell curve that is decided after the exams are sat, according not to the standards met by each child, but by how the cohort performed on the exam, and to ensure that the same proportion of kids pass each year.

We use mocks based on past papers, especially at GCSE using grade boundaries that applied to the previous cohort to get an idea, and also gut feeling and experience from having taught the kid and having taught other kids like them.

But there is no right answer that teachers have somehow ‘got wrong’. Teachers can’t possibly grade kids according to a national picture that they are unaware of.

And that gets right to the heart of it (sorry, it'll be a few pages back. I haven't kept up.)

Good luck Blankety

And fingers crossed for everyone tomorrow. I’m also feeling remarkably meh about logging on to see what my class got. Not having seen them since March, not having taken them through revision, not having talked to them after the papers has left me weirdly disengaged.

Whatever fudge happens to put this right, imagine the punch to the guts, receiving A level results lower - in some cases much lower - than expected. Results day is a rite of passage. I don't teach A Level but am so sad for them.

That link to Georgia (I think) with 900+ students and 40-odd staff having to self isolate. It's occuring to me that when if I have to SI then so will my children. So the children of school staff are going to be yet more disadvantaged than all the others as presumably online learning won't be available. There won't be another sector whose children are at anything like the risk of missing as much teaching as ours. I'm so fucked off with this.

Right, going to try to get some sleep now-we’ll know more in the morning at least. I wasn’t anywhere near this stressed for my own A level results!

Just want to say I hope tomorrow goes "okay". It must be very odd for you all.

Especially when you know it’s nothing you’ve done salty. It’s the fault of a stupid algorithm.

At least if you know you haven’t done as much revision as you should have or you screwed up a paper cos the wrong questions came up you have an inkling by results day.

@SaltyAndFresh

That link to Georgia (I think) with 900+ students and 40-odd staff having to self isolate. It's occuring to me that when if I have to SI then so will my children. So the children of school staff are going to be yet more disadvantaged than all the others as presumably online learning won't be available. There won't be another sector whose children are at anything like the risk of missing as much teaching as ours. I'm so fucked off with this.

I think they only have to self isolate if you have symptoms.

Good luck for tomorrow everyone.

Any French and German teachers on here? Be interested to see if the promised uplift still happens!

Ofqual were pretty clear that teachers should predict as normal and they would deal with this.

So, German could feasibly get the uplift AND do well out of low entries?

www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-A-levels-teacher-grades-odds-stay

Never has choosing an 'unpopular' subject been such a wise move!

One for noble and herc. Apparently Ofqual's algorithm , to be published today, runs to 150 pages!!

@Piggywaspushed

Any French and German teachers on here? Be interested to see if the promised uplift still happens!

Ofqual were pretty clear that teachers should predict as normal and they would deal with this.

I’m MFL - we don’t have a 6th form, but we do have low numbers at GCSE 20-odd entries this year, fewer last year and 2018 was even fewer. We’re completely optional so our cohort changes each year.

The only stat they seem happy to share is that we will see an increase of 2% in A and A*. That actually isn't much? They do seem to determined to not only have scaled back any grade inflation but to really prevent it.
I though prediction were, now new specs are bedded in, that results had been expected to go up a fair amount this year? (presumably they would have had an algorithm to prevent that in exam grading!)

This does remind me quite a lot of the first year of English Lit GCSE when virtually every middle class parent appealed the results and loads went up.

Apparently, Ofqual have pulled out of a scheduled 8.15 press conference..

Amused by the fact that UCAS are working from home, university clearing staff are WFH, all speaking to teachers and Exams Officers who patently aren't!!

Gav on BBC just now...

So frustrating: Naga presses him really hard on the A level sit'n (kind of fair enough, but refuses to understand that moderation did have to be done; not fair on next or last year's students, or current students in non-inflating schools if none...) but totally fails to press him on his non-answer to whether schools are safe.

He also said schools go back on 7th Sept? Eh? Not in most places, it's 3th. And a whole week earlier for Leics!

It'll be 7th for his own kids and he doesn't know about anywhere else.

We go back on the 1st 😣

Ohh piggy that's my afternoon sorted!!

We're back on 1st, but 3rd for the kids.

Our pupils back on the 2nd. Going to be a LONG first half term for a variety of reasons.

Not sure I can watch any news today, feel very anxious!

Our kids are back on 7th.

4 days of inset, I can't help feel most of it will be wasted and we'll have to use time within the year to deal with new guidance etc. I'd prefer 2 days inset so we could bank some time for later on.