The Sixteenth Republic - waiting on the GCSE results show!

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here only if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

If you are fed up with cakes and biscuits there is now a cheeseboard on offer

If you come with a stick to beat us with then please do so elsewhere and not in the staffroom

The thread with someone whittering about teachers reteaching stuff from March has made me really angry!

Have they stopped shouting about the disadvantaged now?
No regard for those kids with no internet, technology or paper in extreme cases as long as their little cherub doesn't have to sit through something twice.

Would bet a million they would still get questions wrong. Call me cynical!

Gah! So angry. Pass the vodka.

Gah! So angry. Pass the vodka.

You did well to make it to midday.

Hopefully the announcement will be made soon. Although I suspect for some students who have missed out on Uni places, it will be too little too late.

@Ickabog

Gah! So angry. Pass the vodka.

You did well to make it to midday.

Hopefully the announcement will be made soon. Although I suspect for some students who have missed out on Uni places, it will be too little too late.

I know! Its such a mess.

The BBC are reporting today that results in larger sixth forms are lower than the 3 year average. That suggests large cohorts were marked down by more than they should have been in order to counterbalance the fact that grades went up in smaller cohorts.

The FFT data lab research seems to indicate that this isn’t true. Hence music (for example) seeing a massive increase in the number of A/A*s awarded (over 15% increase from last year) as they have a lot of small cohort entries.

However, the FFT analysis also seems to indicate that historic VA scores weren’t taken in to account for each centre. So previously well performing schools (in VA terms) have seen a drop.

@MadameMinimes

The BBC are reporting today that results in larger sixth forms are lower than the 3 year average. That suggests large cohorts were marked down by more than they should have been in order to counterbalance the fact that grades went up in smaller cohorts. If it’s true it’s a scandal of epic proportions. The national grade distribution should not have been protected by lowering some schools’ results to below what they have achieved over the last 3 years, whilst schools with smaller cohorts had results that rose. I say this as someone in charge of a Sixth Form where 10/15 A Levels offered were cohorts smaller than 15. For us the difference was startling between what happened to large vs. small cohorts. Whether kids got into uni or not sometimes hinged on whether they’d chosen Chemistry or Physics, Psychology or French etc. We were very fortunate in some ways but that doesn’t make it any less unfair.

Sixth form colleges worked this out on Thursday - that they were being used as the fall guys to balance up grades overall, with their large cohorts being downgraded to make the national picture OK once small cohorts had their grades strongly based on CAGs.

So students in large 6th form colleges were downgraded twice - once by the algorithm and then again to compensate for 'higher than allowed if grade inflation is to be avoided' statistics nationally.

And it didn't seem to vary much by 6th form college quality - those with historically amazing results like Hills Road or Peter Symonds fared similarly to 6th form colleges in Special Measures.

So students in large 6th form colleges were downgraded twice - once by the algorithm and then again to compensate for 'higher than allowed if grade inflation is to be avoided' statistics nationally.

Do you have a link for this? I don’t understand how the statistical model works myself, so I’m getting my info from:

ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level-results-2020-the-main-trends-in-grades-and-entries/

ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level-results-2020-how-have-grades-been-calculated/

If it is true that large cohorts have been downgraded to offset the CAGs of small cohorts then that certainly is a national scandal.

So students in large 6th form colleges were downgraded twice - once by the algorithm and then again to compensate for 'higher than allowed if grade inflation is to be avoided' statistics nationally.

I don't think this is true.

Downgrades of 40% are in line with national average.

I was just pondering whether this would have been a fairer system: each centre told up front that they couldn't give grades which would result in them having a higher overall result of more than, say, 3%? on their 3 year average and that if they wanted to challenge this ceiling they could have done, right at the beginning, within a period of, say, a fortnight (higher PA of cohort or other change in intake etc). Then centres all allocate grades according to their own agreed ceiling of improvement. Fairer???

From the Guardian
Families across Scotland have been breaching quarantine rules by sending their children back to school within days of returning from holidays in countries on the quarantine lists.

I don’t think it’s that they’ve been downgraded twice. It’s that the algorithm by which larger cohorts were standardised rounded down. In one of the larger subjects in my school there has been very little record of very high or very low grades. 2 As and 2 Us in the past 3 years. As a % those numbers are less than 1 student per A or U grade this year. The algorithm could have been designed so that it rounded up (so that there was one A and no U), pulled towards the mean (no A and no U) or rounded down (no A* but one U). The third option is what happened. I would have been happy with the second option and think going with the first option would not have been unreasonable given the situation this year. That is why results in larger institutions are overall lower than the last 3 year’s average despite a more able national cohort. Where cohorts were less than 15 the algorithm seems to have allowed for more rounding up and where they were less than 5 there was no status standardisation at all. I don’t think it was a deliberate attempt to disadvantage larger schools but someone should have spotted the implications of this from an equality point of view.

mobile.twitter.com/queenofswords6/status/1294471488351985667

mobile.twitter.com/dianemarimartin/status/1294854455909847040

These are pretty clear examples that show that there are clearly some schools that have got a massive boost from this system whilst others have lost out... And it’s the already advantaged who have gained another leg-up on the rest of their cohort.

Wonder if GCSEs will be delayed then.

Why the heck were any students grades put up with the algorithm?

If they hadn’t done that there would have been a little more leeway to save some of those put down a grade.

Of course, we were assured under the original system that CAGs would be confidential and never divulged to parents.

How long will it be before parents start complaining,"Oh, Mr / Ms X never liked my child, so the CAG is too low"? I can see parents at my school pursuing that line with great enthusiasm. Not saying that current f**kup is sustainable, just that using CAGs will undoubtedly lead to even more teacher bashing.

The algorithm didn’t actually factor in the predictions for cohorts bigger than 15. It just decided how many of each grade there “should be” and then handed them out based on the rank order, regardless of what the school predicted. So if a school has got an average 20% As for the last 3 years and the ability of the cohort is similar to the average then 20% were given As this year. Even if three years ago it was 10%, two years ago it was 20% and last year it was 30% and the teachers predicted 25%, which would be more than realistic given their past performance. It’s totally wrong to claim that only over-generous schools have been marked down. There shouldn’t have to be a convoluted appeal process to correct what anyone can see is wrong.

I actually can’t believe how blunt the statistical model actually is. God only knows why I had such faith that they’d come up with something at least close to fair.

@Fossie

Why the heck were any students grades put up with the algorithm?

If they hadn’t done that there would have been a little more leeway to save some of those put down a grade.

Because the algorithm ignored the CAGs and that school was allocated a certain percentage of whatever grades and so had to have them.

I thought that one of the things impacting algorithm only groups was the fact that many of the total available higher grades had already been taken by the CAG only group (under 5) and the CAG considered group (15 and under). There were less available overall for the algorithm group so they weren't allocated as frequently - Ofqual didn't want the sharp rise in higher grades.

I thought that one of the things impacting algorithm only groups was the fact that many of the total available higher grades had already been taken by the CAG only group

I really don’t think this is true. There were sharp rises in high grades allocated in subjects where there were a significant number of CAG only groups. Eg, music saw a rise of over 15% from last year.

Announcement due: news.sky.com/story/gcse-results-algorithm-scrapped-in-northern-ireland-with-pupils-set-to-get-teachers-predictions-as-grades-12050857?fbclid=IwAR3Ds7Wd23WJAWtX2oRup1sAIQMMyvKdHZLaLP5UjIqK5QONouPXTm8PNz0

Saw a tweet that said 4pm and that it will be teacher grades.

@ChloeCrocodile

I thought that one of the things impacting algorithm only groups was the fact that many of the total available higher grades had already been taken by the CAG only group

I really don’t think this is true. There were sharp rises in high grades allocated in subjects where there were a significant number of CAG only groups. Eg, music saw a rise of over 15% from last year.

Yeah that would explain that. If smaller groups were given their CAGs and these tended to be higher than this would lead to significant increases in the number of As and A in subjects with a higher frequency of CAG only groups. Ofqual couldn't eliminate all of those As and A because of the small groups so they had to reduce them in algorithm only groups. That meant anyone not in a small group would be highly unlikely to get an A* in those subjects.

Or it could be that they still had spread grades in the algorithm only groups and that's what led to the rise in certain subjects. But were that the case, I'd have expected to see slightly higher rises in the vast majority of subjects.

Doesn't matter much now though - I can't see them doing anything other than throwing the algorithm out in the next announcements.

Music went up, surely because of a double whammy : small cohorts (more than any other subject, I believe), plus massively dwindling in state schools : hence , selective school small cohorts CAGing lots of A* - A (and there is no reason to believe they weren't really talented) dominate the grading.

I was most surprised by our German downgrades in a cohort of 5, given the promised uplift has allegedly been applied. This was supposed to lift top end grades, so how did our A get downgraded to a C??

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53807854

I think it was even cruder than some have suggested - that if e.g. Music could not reasonably be balanced using non-CAG only groups, they just balanced that out using the large cohorts in other subjects. After all, nobody asked them to balance each subject, the ceiling of 'as little grade inflation as possible' was national and across all subjects.