advertisement


To Parents of 16 and 18 year olds

Simon Vess said:
That is exactly the sort of cynical politics proposed by Nicola Sturgeon , Kier Starmer, etc

Yeah......give everyone a prize ......everyone can be a winner!

everybody gets what they want!

Unfortunately it is the deserving students who would see the value of their award wiped out

Would you be happy, say, to be treated by a medic who had been given their qualification out of kindness, rather than any real evidence that it was deserved?


simon
Click to expand...

Feel free to miss the point. This year, none of the results are ‘real’ whatever system is used.

I assume a medic will have to pass a fair few extra exams before they operate on me.

What professions rely on A-levels alone?

I teach undergraduates. I understand that A levels are not the be all and end all of education.

Not just me thinking this either.

A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”

Stephen
 
I’d also like to add I also teach foundation-year students.

These do a four year course, the first year of which is very academic-skills focussed. They come in with grades one or two lower than the others on their proposed degree course but when they ultimately join the three year course they are treated exactly like the students who come in with higher tariffs. They get the same qualification on graduation.

We have data to suggest that these foundation students have degree outcomes that are as good (and often better) as those coming in with straight As.

Gove and Cummings’ exam based A-levels are no real preparation for university. We usually need to spend a year de-programming even the straight A students. The foundation students hit year one running with the skills they need for university study. Exams are easy to mark and provide simple metrics for the Government, but are poor indicators of a student's performance at university.

State pupils come in from a prescriptive fact-based learning system where they are basically fed what they need to know to pass the exams. Some find it very hard to transition from this to a self-learning, critical thinking, paradigm required of university study. It is much harder now for students to make this transition than it was before the Conservative reforms.

Stephen
 
Simon Vess said:
Sorry but it is....clearly so because teachers’ estimates produce a massive, incredible rise in results over recent years

That is not to suggest that every teacher boosted their students’ grades
But many, many did......clearly so as the evidence suggests

And this is not just my speculation; I have hard evidence of widespread boosting of grades from first hand experience; confidentiality prevents me giving more details on this

Why do you think that BTEC has grown into an alternative route into university, for which it was never initially intended?......clearly because it relies on teachers who teach the material, write and mark the assignments, and give feedback on the work which allows the student to resubmit the improved assignment to achieve a better grade..........hardly objective in my opinion
Setting aside any scrutiny of writing of assignments( at home ) so no checks on help given, no time constraints, and nowadays easy to cut and paste chunks from the internet
In my experience, cases of plagiarism arising from this rarely find against the student
The pressures on teachers to give good grades are difficult to resist

Sure there are ( so called ) checks and balances in the system, but any teacher with experience can easily navigate around these....

I personally know teachers who awarded higher grades to students who really had little chance of succeeding but were given a better estimated grade for a range of reasons.....good attendance, hard work, sympathy for having personal difficulties etc etc
All “deserving” cases

The basic problem remains

Teachers cannot be objective because they have a vested interest in producing high grades
Any court of law would reject their judgements as being unavoidably biased

simon
Click to expand...

Simon Vess said:
https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/14/misleading-a-level-claims-debunked/

May be of interest

simon
Click to expand...


https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-ofqual-missed-level-private-school-bonus
https://www.tes.com/news/A-levels-private-schools-get-far-larger-aa-rise
https://www.tes.com/news/dfe-admits-disadvantaged-level-students-lost-out


Try reading some of those and then tell us the algorithm was fair, instead of posting some government belchpiece.

In a normal year teacher predictions play no part in assigning grades, and the person tracking student performance would be looking very critically at any teacher whose predictions were whiffy. I know, I did that job, and worked at a national level to help other schools do that. Don’t give us that bollocks that you can’t reveal your sources.
 
lordsummit said:




https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-ofqual-missed-level-private-school-bonus
https://www.tes.com/news/A-levels-private-schools-get-far-larger-aa-rise
https://www.tes.com/news/dfe-admits-disadvantaged-level-students-lost-out


Try reading some of those and then tell us the algorithm was fair, instead of posting some government belchpiece.

In a normal year teacher predictions play no part in assigning grades, and the person tracking student performance would be looking very critically at any teacher whose predictions were whiffy. I know, I did that job, and worked at a national level to help other schools do that. Don’t give us that bollocks that you can’t reveal your sources.
Click to expand...
And even the government belchpiece said it trusted teachers assessments!
 
lordsummit said:
In a normal year teacher predictions play no part in assigning grades,
Click to expand...

Slightly OT but ISTR being given a set of predicted A-level results ahead of university applications (late 80s). My memory could be playing tricks but if I remember correctly, does that still happen?
 
Seeker_UK said:
I wonder how many of the approx 800K children (@ A and GCSE level) this affects will remember come next election.
Click to expand...
My daughter has a diary like memory that has documented every time I ever did anything that in her opinion was wrong. She can reel them off for fun. If the rest of them are like her - and I think they are - then they won't ever forget.

Easy Labour party recruitment drive.
 
This government clearly has an anti teacher agenda which many in the media and a few on pfm seem happy to adopt without critical thought

First we had the headlines saying that teacher unions were trying to stop schools reopening, which they were not.

Then we had Michael Wilshaw suggesting that teachers lacked a certain moral fibre. They do not

Then the Boris followed up with his baseless moral duty lies

More recently weave had this government trying to blame their own ineptitude on A level results on teachers inflating predicted grades, which is more nonsense.

In the last few days the focus has switch from predicted grades to centre assessed grades on the assumption that they too are ‘over generous’

As has been shown, a teacher has no motive to over predict because the final exam result would tend to fall short of any over-prediction and will likely be used a measure of teacher underperformance.

Centre Assessed Marks are different in that the teacher is (in normal times) marking actual exam material. While it is true that there will be an obvious desire for the teacher to be as generous as possible with CAMs, the exam board will look at a random selection of those marks for moderation purposes, and if the marks given by the teacher for a given band is (in the case of AQA at least) more than 2% out, the exam board will mark down every other pupil in that band in proportion to the over marking.

The belief that teacher estimates produce a massive, incredible rise in results is massive lie to deflect from equally massive government incompetence.

And if actual evidence are not enough to convince people of this governments incompetence, just look at Gavin Williamson, the man is clearly not fit for purpose
 
Seeker_UK said:
Slightly OT but ISTR being given a set of predicted A-level results ahead of university applications (late 80s). My memory could be playing tricks but if I remember correctly, does that still happen?
Click to expand...
I think ls’s point is that predictions don’t feed into results. Though they might be looked at in the event of an appeal after the exam
 
Seeker_UK said:
Slightly OT but ISTR being given a set of predicted A-level results ahead of university applications (late 80s). My memory could be playing tricks but if I remember correctly, does that still happen?
Click to expand...


There was an estimated grade section to UCAS if I recall. I was always working up to Yr 11, so I’m not really au fait with the workings of university applications. I can pretty much guarantee that every student in every school will know what their exam estimate is based on prior attainment. At KS5 there’s even more triangulation possible due to two sets of test results. They’ll also be aware of how their performance rates against this prediction, even if it’s only in basic terms, working beyond, at or below. They should have done mocks, there’s a huge amount of data collected on students, and teachers should be across it. Schools have also put a huge amount of effort into making best professional estimates of pupil likely attainment, they have spent hour upon hour at the start of lockdown creating rank orders and suggesting likely grades. My wife did it and it took her and a colleague three days to sort out twenty kids. I’ve provided feedback to schools about likely performance outcomes of the kids I teach now, what score were they likely to achieve in the performance section?
It seems though a crude algorithm based on prior attainment of the school/sixth form has been applied, the rank order has been used, but an average range of results applied, then the rank order has been shoe-horned into the predicted range. Let’s be honest here, considering the small number of students taking many subjects this process is statistically unreliable. There’s no guarantee that this years cohort of six history students matches the ability profiles of other years. However unless the number of students is five or less in a cohort, teacher assessment has been ignored.

Teacher appraisal for performance management should be determined from student prior attainment, not blanket percentages. It should include the confidence interval that that subject has in terms of prior attainment reliability. Unfortunately some schools still extrapolate likely performance from KS2 SATs across the secondary curriculum. No school should be using this years results to assess teacher performance, so there is no reason for teachers to inflate results. If that pressure has been applied, that is a failure of the system, and the creators of a system that forces teachers to inflate grades to preserve their own careers need to hang their heads in shame. It seems this fiasco is the final acknowledgement that teachers aren’t to be treated as professionals any more, and that they aren’t to be trusted in this governments eyes.
 
This post from a teacher is doing the rounds on Facebook. I found it helpful for getting my head around what's happened. Of course, the government will continue to blame teachers: the logic of the far-right demands a never-ending series of scapegoats, since it has nothing positive to offer most people:
I just wanted to explain what has happen with A-level results as the media (certain outlets of course) are now pushing the blame of students being downgraded onto teachers. The same thing will happen next Thursday on GCSE results day on a much wider scale so let me explain what actually happened.

In March teachers were asked to submit a centre assessed grade (CAG) CAGs are NOT mock results. They a cumulative and holistic assessment of that student over time taking into consideration their mock exam (which many schools would have done in January) their marked assignments, work ethic and a number of other factors, it is not based on one single assessment like a mock exam. So if you have a student who got a B in their mock you may say that student will get an A as they improve over the next 5 months based on their marked work and other contributing factors. This is standard teacher prediction we do it every year for hundred of students to predict our school performance and implement intervention where needed. It’s a very accurate form of prediction with the majority of schools performing within 1% of their predictions (unless something goes very wrong), so very small margins of inaccuracy.

On this occasion because the stakes were high these teacher assessed grades were submitted to the head of department who moderated them (this is the process that happened at my school and most other schools I know). After this the senior team analysed the data and corrected/questioned any anomalies. For example if a child has been predicted grade C in other subjects and grade A in one we would ask what evidence that member of staff had for that prediction. Moderation again is a standard teacher practice and something that middle and senior leaders will be expert at. Once we were happy with the grades awarded to students we then had to rank them within their grades, so for example if you had 10 students all predicted a C you would have to say who is your number 1 C and who is your number 10 and rank all those in between. You had to do this for every grade. This was the part we assumed would be where students were ‘cut’. If students take an exam the grade boundaries are adjusted according to a variety of factors meaning that those at the top of the grade are often boosted and those at the bottom are often dropped into the next grade. If a child is dropped close to a grade boundary they are able to see how close they were to that grade, if it were a couple of marks it is worth them requesting a remark on their paper as it is likely they could go up ( exam marking is again done by teachers who will always have a degree of human differentiation).

What actually happened is the grades we submitted were put into an ‘algorithm’ that applied a number of factors in determining the students grade. Some of these factors included:

Where the child lives ( if they are from an area of social deprivation or an affluent area)
The post code of the school (as above)
The schools overall historical performance
Students historical performance in that subject
Size of school ( smaller schools/colleges performing better due to small class size, mainly applicable to independent schools who have a high staff to student ratio)

Using student X as an example. He was predicted 2 A* and 1 A grade at A-level which were sent off as his CAGs. His first choice uni being Cambridge which after an extensive application process (including the submission of assignments) he was accepted to. The grades he received are BBC meaning he dropped 2 grades in every subject. Why? Well his postcode is in an area of low income. The school is in one of the most socially deprived post codes in the country. Last year the cohort taking the subject were not as academic ( their gcse grades were lower) so grades were not as high as they would have been this year which is in line with normal trajectory.

So what will happen now? He gets rejected from Cambridge. He can appeal and request his mock grade be used, a less reliable source than teacher assessment, but it is likely that Cambridge will not hold his place or defer it until next year. Who will the top universities be filled with? Those from independent schools who the algorithm was written to benefit; affluent, small, history of above average results.

The handling of this has further widened the gap in education between the haves and have nots. A student in an independent school who was predicted a B will have secured that grade, whereas a student from a state school who was predicted an A can end up with a C. It’s not just the most academic, low income students that are affected. Students predicted Cs have ended up with U grades due to spreading the rank over the model curve ( I won’t explain this hear but happy to discuss further if anyone wants the info). This will mean that any students with conditional offers won’t get their place even at non Russell group uni.

So to summarise, no it is not the teachers, it’s not even the exam boards. It is the government who instructed the system. In a cabinet filled with public school boys they’ve literally screwed over poor kids in the most crude of ways in a system already designed to favour the ‘elite’.

To conclude, if any parents or young people you know need some support with appeals or uni application please let me know.
Click to expand...
 
IF School = posh THEN Mark = mark + 10, would give the game away ;)

They need to explain why some kids are as many as three grades down...

Simranjit Hussain, 19, Burton-on-Trent: ‘The way they dealt with the whole situation was wrong’

“I have been completely disregarded during this whole process, after taking a year out to improve my grades. It’s so disheartening. I was predicted AAB but received BBD. I think it was all wrong from the beginning, the way they dealt with the whole situation. If you’re from a certain area, you’re more likely to come away with grades you’ve never received in your life."

https://www.theguardian.com/educati...s-on-ofqual-review-of-a-level-appeal-criteria
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top