I noted Scotland’s Examining Board have down graded 125,000 marks for their national exams amounting to approx one quarter of the grades given. Would be interested to know what the “teachers” on here think about that. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296 Are teachers over egging their pupils results or are the Board being too hard or a bit of both or are the prelim exams easier than the real thing? What is expected for England and Wales?
Proud to say i passed my 11+. All down hill from there though...ended up drinking pints at the Earl with Chippy and his blue doc martins talking about what might have been..
I think the trend has been consistent that Scottish schools perform worse than the national average. Hasn't that been a major and consistent criticism of the Scottish government?
It will be different in every school. As a Maths department we had 4 hour long zoom meetings discussing what grades and what order. Sad thing is though that Ofqual stated that this year's cohort results cannot be too dissimilar to your previous years which is a load of bollox as we had a much stronger cohort this year. We had a mock exam in January and 8 students got as grade 9 and 2 were close. However last year we only had two students get a grade 9 so we couldn't give all 8 the 9 which is ridiculous.
I'm surprised that that many over stated their results as ours went from in maths department to our senior leadership team to pass comment then if we made changes it went to the head teacher. In our case he thought we had been slightly over cautious and we could move a 2 or 3 up in to the grade 4 category and the grade 7 category.
My biggest disappointment was that if any student wants to actually sit the exam following the release of their results they won't have had any sort since March ghee an exam likely to be taken in November and as they will have left school who will they get that support from? In my opinion, the results should have been out end of May so as not to penalise these students and they could start revising from 1st June when support from teachers
For your school, if you’re able to say, what sort of percentage of re-grading occurs and how much of that is increased and how much decreased? I’m thinking of on course work and similar. These regradings seem to have occurred even though the original expected grades were based upon “mock” exams or something similar. It just seems a very high percentage of re-grades. If that level of re-grading happens to your pupils would your school being looking at lots of appeals and due to the time that would take would the revised results be too late anyway?
There is no coursework any more except for Art. Usually it's about 2 or 3 are regarded. The grade can increase but cannot decrease!
I never knew that coursework had gone so far out of favour. I knew the extent had been reduced but that does surprise me. On grading is England proposing something similar to Scotland? If not, what is being proposed?
Oi he is on his bloody holidays so the last thing he wants to do is a virtual grandparents evening especially as (as he loves to tell us): HE DOESN’T GET PAID FOR HIS HOLIDAYS!
I have no idea to be honest. I haven't read anything recently to indicate any changes. The government have not listened to those who actually work in education in over a decade plus we've had Michael Gove as education secretary in that time. Education is on it's knees but they are washing their hands by allowing schools 6 to become academies which will in the long run be as destructive as how the NHS had developed over the last 20 years with every increasing levels of management. My school has 900 students and this year we had 5 members of senior leadership. Next year we will have 8 members. That's a minimum of £150000 in wages yet our computers don't work and we've cut hours and staff of the teaching assistants. A pure and utter joke
My son didn't try in his mocks because he didn't think they were important. Will be interesting to see if he gets bigged up to make the school look good or properly ****ed over because he wasn't particularly liked (with good reason, he's a ****) by certain teachers.
The process DDP explained is pretty much what happened in all schools I know of. Schools will have been very diligent about trying not to over-exaggerate scores but it is difficult. I had the borderline class this year, there were 25 pupils of whom 16 I'd have put my house on passing. The other 9 have 2 I'd have guessed would fail and 7 who realistically about half would pass and half would fail but you can't really guess which ones would do it on the day (in mocks they've swapped positions a few times). It's the 7 that create the issue, as their class teacher my job was to rank them, that's tricky to do even if you can get out of your head the knowledge that this will dictate who passes and fails their exams. In a normal year I reckon 20-21 of those pupils would pass and 5 would fail (maybe it would have been 18/7 or 23/2). The idea that you can entirely objectively and accurately say which 20 is a fallacy, we ended up putting 22 of them down as passing and 3 as failing as a couple of them had passed one mock and failed 2 but by small margins it's arguable how they'd have done on the day but if it's close I suspect teachers will have predicted a pass rather than a fail. Percentage wise of our school you're looking at 1-2% of the year group (in some schools this will be MUCH higher). In my experience, the schools aren't likely to be too bothered how it makes the school look - it's not that league tables aren't important but when you've been working with a pupil for years the idea of them passing or failing being to do with "making the school look good" is a bit detached from any reality i see.- it's about failing a pupil you have taught for years who you know could have passed without them having been given the chance.
Either of those would be pretty unprofessional tbh. Schools that care how they look rather than doing the best for their pupils aren't good schools and teachers who cannot separate subjective opinions about pupils from objective evalutaion of their levels of attainment aren't good teachers. Fingers crossed he does fine, it doesn't just go off their mocks.
