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To Parents of 16 and 18 year olds

If this mess does nothing else it will unite a generation of school-leavers against the Tories, which is nice. Protests outside Parliament etc. Lots of very angry and upset people.
 
According to Sky news, the 4 UK Children’s Commissioners have written a joint letter saying, “the A level system has led to too many anomalies and a sense of hopelessness and desperation among students”
 
There was a time when a Labour leader who only got his message out via social media was missing the centre ground and open goals
 
droodzilla said:
Here he is:

https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1294885867321004032

Make of it what you will.
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Pompously demanding the government does exactly what it wants to do and has insisted it will do has got to represent a new chapter in Labour’s winning-through-capitulation strategy. Seems pretty lame to me but WTF do I know.

To accompany an article in the Mail. I don’t actually think this kind of thing is aimed at Mail readers. I think it’s aimed at the kind of centrist pundits and their followers who think that writing a posturing article in the Mail is the absolute acme of political strategy. Fair enough, you do need these numbskull wreckers on side, as we’ve seen. But building a politics around them, I don’t know. Didn’t really work for chuktig.
 
Seanm said:
Pompously demanding the government does exactly what it wants to do and has insisted it will do has got to represent a new chapter in Labour’s winning-through-capitulation strategy. Seems pretty lame to me but WTF do I know.
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I don’t get it either. I’m sure a lot of teachers and students are feeling rather exposed and vulnerable right now. Not what I expected from Labour (any Labour) at all.
 
Seanm said:
Pompously demanding the government does exactly what it wants to do and has insisted it will do has got to represent a new chapter in Labour’s winning-through-capitulation strategy. Seems pretty lame to me but WTF do I know.

To accompany an article in the Mail. I don’t actually think this kind of thing is aimed at Mail readers. I think it’s aimed at the kind of centrist pundits and their followers who think that writing a posturing article in the Mail is the absolute acme of political strategy. Fair enough, you do need these numbskull wreckers on side, as we’ve seen. But building a politics around them, I don’t know. Didn’t really work for chuktig.
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Pretty much my thoughts, but more eloquently expressed. I sometimes wish the left could do to the Labour Party what UKIP did to the Conservatives, but I know that it would not benefit from the complicity of mainstream media, as Farage did.
 
There is no answer or fix unless using mock results, but loads of "experts" suggest that they are a not a good guide, which seems lunacy to me - so why do them then?

Teacher grading will always give higher average grades, not least because of the borderline cases - "Is Tommy a B or a C?", no teacher is going to say "C" in such a case, but lots of Tommys are going to miss a B by not much in normal circumstances. The problem is that no algorithm can tell if it was Tommy, of Gill, or Andy, or whoever, who was the borderline case that would have got the lower grade, or find the students who were predicted to get a B with ease but would have scraped an A in an exam. The only way that an algorithm could get close is if teachers graded students on a continuous scale (which has been tried, apparently, but only in the form of a forced ranking, which, again, is nuts).

People, across the board, also seem to forget that EVERY YEAR this happens, just on a much smaller scale. This year, those who have low grades, have something very concrete to pin their disappointment to.

Life is total chaos at the moment so education should not be expected to be any different.
 
Vinny said:
People, across the board, also seem to forget that EVERY YEAR this happens, just on a much smaller scale. This year, those who have low grades, have something very concrete to pin their disappointment to.
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Yes, but what is new this year is students being, for example, downgraded from a decent pass grade to a U for no other reason than someone in the past 2 years got a U
 
The Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) said it looked at 65,000 exam entries in 41 subjects from sixth form colleges and found that grades were 20% lower than historic performances for similar students in those colleges.

It said that this equated to "12,048 missing grades" in those colleges alone.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53799860
 
ks.234 said:
Yes, but what is new this year is students being, for example, downgraded from a decent pass grade to a U for no other reason than someone in the past 2 years got a U
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And it would be astonishing, totally unbelievable, if an appeal did not sort the extremes, but extremes make for very bad general rules.

gavreid said:
The Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) said it looked at 65,000 exam entries in 41 subjects from sixth form colleges and found that grades were 20% lower than historic performances for similar students in those colleges.

It said that this equated to "12,048 missing grades" in those colleges alone.
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If I understood the discussion on R4, that was determined by applying the current algorithm to past teacher grades and comparing to results achieved in real exams, and comparing to this year's "results". In which case, quelle surprise - the algorithm is p-poor.
 
Vinny said:
If I understood the discussion on R4, that was determined by applying the current algorithm to past teacher grades and comparing to results achieved in real exams, and comparing to this year's "results". In which case, quelle surprise - the algorithm is p-poor.
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If you're going to raise marks for some types of schools then it follows that others have to fall to maintain to required overall distribution - that is obviously what they've done.
 
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