Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
An impressive level of optimism about what we can expect from 2021, 22, 23...
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
Grade inflation normally would affect the allocation of University places. Universities would either have to raise the entry requirements, or they'd have a harder time picking and choosing between students with similar grades. This means they may end up going for the more "extra curricular" wealthy student who does after school and weekend activities, but this would disadvantage the straight A inner city student who doesn't have the opportunity to do those activities.
However, when it comes to this year as a one off, I'd be happy to let the grade inflation slide, as long as the University system doesn't use the circumstances as an excuse to dramatically change their requirements next year.
It's not a great point at all, since it feeds into a delusion that the same (or similar) options may be appropriate in one circumstance and not another circumstance, instead by implication suggesting we judge the actions as if proposed in a vaccuum. Criticising an opponent for plans that would increase the debt massively, then pointing out the debt is increasingly massively due to an extremely unusual emergency situation is not to say that the criticisms fo the first were somehow invalid. The government is making plenty of mistakes, but that it has increased the debt does not seem one of them when everyone agreed in principle to the actions which led to it.
Boris (and hence the government) was committed before the pandemic. Boris lifted Labour's 2017 platform and implicitly opposed Cameron and May.
Certainly there were elements, it was to be high spending time, but people are taking the comparison way too far.
Is that real "England" or the usual "England = UK"
How is North England today malc?
(I hope that is not the case of the chart, as they is pretty dumb).
It was a serious question , it happens all the time, especially by UK people but foreigners as well as they are conditioned to it by how the UK is portrayed ( ie as England), they at least have an excuse. You only need look at NHS where they portray the English NHS as the de facto UK Health Service on a daily basis.
Oh I know it happens all the time, and it shouldn't.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
An impressive level of optimism about what we can expect from 2021, 22, 23...
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
Gove and Cummings didnt like young'uns having better grades than them.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
The levels of incompetence really are spellbinding. To be treating young people in this way - unless they are privately educated, of course - shows just how much contempt the government has for them and reveals levelling up to be no more than a clever electoral slogan. If Cummings were serious about it, he would not be doing what he is.
These jibes at privately educated children are getting a bit tiresome, to be honest. My daughter goes to a private school and I can assure you they these pupils - and their parents - are as concerned as anyone.
The fact is that privately educated kids have not been downgraded in the way state school pupils have. That’s not their fault, but it’s what has happened. It’s not levelling up. A government that cared about such an agenda would have spotted the issue and done all it could to mitigate it. But Boris Johnson put Gavin Williamson in charge of education, which tells you exactly what priority he gives it.
No-one has been "downgraded". You make it sound that the centre assessed grades were final grades in the first place. They were always to be subject to moderation.
This is incorrect. On Ofqual's own assessment, about 50% of the grades are accurate, which means a quarter of students have been given grades less than they should have been.
At the same time a quarter have been given grades that are too high. They are not complaining about this, but it does mean that the English government's "solution" fails even on its claimed plus points of avoiding grade inflation and maintaining a gold standard.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
The levels of incompetence really are spellbinding. To be treating young people in this way - unless they are privately educated, of course - shows just how much contempt the government has for them and reveals levelling up to be no more than a clever electoral slogan. If Cummings were serious about it, he would not be doing what he is.
These jibes at privately educated children are getting a bit tiresome, to be honest. My daughter goes to a private school and I can assure you they these pupils - and their parents - are as concerned as anyone.
The fact is that privately educated kids have not been downgraded in the way state school pupils have. That’s not their fault, but it’s what has happened. It’s not levelling up. A government that cared about such an agenda would have spotted the issue and done all it could to mitigate it. But Boris Johnson put Gavin Williamson in charge of education, which tells you exactly what priority he gives it.
No-one has been "downgraded". You make it sound that the centre assessed grades were final grades in the first place. They were always to be subject to moderation.
This is incorrect. On Ofqual's own assessment, about 50% of the grades are accurate, which means a quarter of students have been given grades less than they should have been.
At the same time a quarter have been given grades that are too high. They are not complaining about this, but it does mean that the English government's "solution" fails even on its claimed plus points of avoiding grade inflation and maintaining a gold standard.
Precisely.
Giving people a lower grade than they deserve is not the solution to inflation. You don't solve wage inflation by randomly slashing a quarter of the population's wages while dramatically increasing another quarter's.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
The levels of incompetence really are spellbinding. To be treating young people in this way - unless they are privately educated, of course - shows just how much contempt the government has for them and reveals levelling up to be no more than a clever electoral slogan. If Cummings were serious about it, he would not be doing what he is.
These jibes at privately educated children are getting a bit tiresome, to be honest. My daughter goes to a private school and I can assure you they these pupils - and their parents - are as concerned as anyone.
The fact is that privately educated kids have not been downgraded in the way state school pupils have. That’s not their fault, but it’s what has happened. It’s not levelling up. A government that cared about such an agenda would have spotted the issue and done all it could to mitigate it. But Boris Johnson put Gavin Williamson in charge of education, which tells you exactly what priority he gives it.
No-one has been "downgraded". You make it sound that the centre assessed grades were final grades in the first place. They were always to be subject to moderation.
This is incorrect. On Ofqual's own assessment, about 50% of the grades are accurate, which means a quarter of students have been given grades less than they should have been.
At the same time a quarter have been given grades that are too high. They are not complaining about this, but it does mean that the English government's "solution" fails even on its claimed plus points of avoiding grade inflation and maintaining a gold standard.
No. 39% are lower than the inflated teacher assessments went for. 1% are higher. 60% are the same.
More are lower than higher because Ofqual - as they said right from the start - think that the overall grades should be broadly consistent with previous years. This is an arguable premise to start out with, as other posters have opined.
Labour's membership was ultra Remain. And on top of that there was the PV crowd, the Campbells etc, and the MPs who were so Remain they defected and formed the Tiggers. It was Corbyn who held out against all this for a period of time before caving in and going with Ref2. Even that was not enough for many. So any letting of the Brexit deal through, actually facilitating the evil event, would have had to have been done on the sly. He would have had to secretly encourage a backbench leave "revolt" by the likes of Flynn & Co. Seems a bit far-fetched.
Arguably he could have got away with it if he'd taken the position early, before the prospect of the government losing the initial vote was being seriously discussed. The Remainers would have been frustrated and some of them would have rebelled but they weren't really in a position to challenge him.
If the Tories had got behind the May Brexit - yes maybe. But they didn't.
I think Corbyn Labour part one (2015/17) worked well. They brought down a Tory government and removed its majority. Came close to replacing it.
But part two (2017/2019) was a disaster. They should have continued to frustrate Brexit but not have collaborated with the Benn Act. Forced Johnson to own the choice of No Deal or extension.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Not much talk of BTecs, but that sounds even worse:
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
"In the last two years, Sweden had fewer all-cause mortalities than their Nordic neighbors."
Sweden had the lowest number of deaths since 1977 in 2019. A mild flu season partly.
This paper argues that what they call "this dry tinder" of people, old, ill and frail, may help explain why Sweden virus death/100K is higher than Denmark and Finland despite the light lockdown.
The core problem with assessments without exams is that you discriminate in a way that is not objective.
The purpose of exam marks is to discriminate: students with A grades are offered opportunities that are not given to those with a C. Exams are somewhat arbitrary;you can get good results with a superficial knowledge of the subject and poor results with a good knowledge. But they are objective. They test what they test. People accept the results because they are objectively arrived at.
The problem with the current situation is that people have As that should have Cs and Cs that should have As but they are going to discriminate anyway. There is no solution to the problem; you can only mitigate it a bit, eg by offering more university places. The English government appears not to have intention of doing so.
Is that real "England" or the usual "England = UK"
I think it will be England, as the statistics will have been collected for England, not the UK. You can read the paper if you want to check (I might get around to it..).
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Not much talk of BTecs, but that sounds even worse:
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
The levels of incompetence really are spellbinding. To be treating young people in this way - unless they are privately educated, of course - shows just how much contempt the government has for them and reveals levelling up to be no more than a clever electoral slogan. If Cummings were serious about it, he would not be doing what he is.
These jibes at privately educated children are getting a bit tiresome, to be honest. My daughter goes to a private school and I can assure you they these pupils - and their parents - are as concerned as anyone.
The fact is that privately educated kids have not been downgraded in the way state school pupils have. That’s not their fault, but it’s what has happened. It’s not levelling up. A government that cared about such an agenda would have spotted the issue and done all it could to mitigate it. But Boris Johnson put Gavin Williamson in charge of education, which tells you exactly what priority he gives it.
No-one has been "downgraded". You make it sound that the centre assessed grades were final grades in the first place. They were always to be subject to moderation.
This is incorrect. On Ofqual's own assessment, about 50% of the grades are accurate, which means a quarter of students have been given grades less than they should have been.
At the same time a quarter have been given grades that are too high. They are not complaining about this, but it does mean that the English government's "solution" fails even on its claimed plus points of avoiding grade inflation and maintaining a gold standard.
No. 39% are lower than the inflated teacher assessments went for. 1% are higher. 60% are the same.
More are lower than higher because Ofqual - as they said right from the start - think that the overall grades should be broadly consistent with previous years. This is an arguable premise to start out with, as other posters have opined.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
An impressive level of optimism about what we can expect from 2021, 22, 23...
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
I agree. It was much harder to get an 'A' at A level in my day. So what. I don't lose sleep over it. And this is the essence of my point. What we have here - thousands of individual kids receiving poorer results than they might reasonably have got if the pandemic had not led to no exams - is worse than allowing the pandemic year to have higher than usual overall grade inflation.
The core problem with assessments without exams is that you discriminate in a way that is not objective.
The purpose of exam marks is to discriminate: students with A grades are offered opportunities that are not given to those with a C. Exams are somewhat arbitrary;you can get good results with a superficial knowledge of the subject and poor results with a good knowledge. But they are objective. They test what they test. People accept the results because they are objectively arrived at.
The problem with the current situation is that people have As that should have Cs and Cs that should have As but they are going to discriminate anyway. There is no solution to the problem; you can only mitigate it a bit, eg by offering more university places. The English government appears not to have intention of doing so.
Good post, though I doubt that there are many (if any) As that should have been Cs. The teacher rankings have been adhered to, remember. They are key.
The hospital data at NHS England website on the number of people in hospital with Covid really does demonstrate that we are no longer in a pandemic. There are so many hospital trusts with less than 5 beds occupied with people who have tested positive with Covid. The growth in cases is really having no effect on the NHS and the number of people in hospital with Covid continues to fall
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
I mostly agree with this, but I am struck by how many non-teachers seem to think that the “had they sat the exams” bit is the correct answer; I’ve seen far too many cock-ups by exam boards to have any faith in that. The exam process itself is least worst one at best and in many cases cruelly capricious.
I would say that in the example you give it is just as valid to say that the exam results and the algorithm are each out by one.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
Agreed. Rather than trying to apply standardisation of individual marks within the year, they have arrived at individual marks by a very roundabout route with the potential to introduce anomalies from each set of operations. While they justify this statistically for individual measures (eg rank order versus individual predictions), they don’t really consider the effect on individuals of the errors introduced cumulatively - they’re only really interested in overall group comparisons. And the strong priority given to year versus year standardisation exacerbates the number of likely individual anomalies.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
The issue is that teachers systematically overestimate results from year to year
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
I'm not so sure about this. If you have candidates for job X who both have 2:1 degrees from one of the new universities, but one has ABC at A level and the other one has BCD, the former would have a clear edge. In my experience of employing graduates, A levels still count, especially when degrees are from, shall we say, less famous universities.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
An impressive level of optimism about what we can expect from 2021, 22, 23...
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
There's no problem in accepting grade inflation as long as we are honest about it and acknowledge that a grade now is worth less than the equivalent of previous years.
But instead we have the pretence that grades are higher now because of better schools or hard working pupils or the wonder or the government's education policy.
The hospital data at NHS England website on the number of people in hospital with Covid really does demonstrate that we are no longer in a pandemic. There are so many hospital trusts with less than 5 beds occupied with people who have tested positive with Covid. The growth in cases is really having no effect on the NHS and the number of people in hospital with Covid continues to fall
Of course you are right. I`m long convinced that some want us to still be in a pandemic - or at least maintaining that level of fear - for ideological or party political reasons. It disgusts me.
My understanding (I could be wrong) is that new covid hospitalisations are falling generally, perhaps universally - even in Leicester which is still in lockdown.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Although in 1/3 of choke scenarios (which are a minority) the algorithm would - albeit by chance - have given the correct grade to the choker
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
Yet we're told that fairness within a year is vital.
That goes if you accept the over predictions along with the accurate predictions.
Aside from encouraging further over predictions in future years.
The approach taken prioritizes the integrity of the 2020 results as a whole - compared to previous years - at the expense of integrity and fairness for individual kids in 2020. It elevates the macro over the micro. The price of this is the individual injustices and the plans wrecked this year. The benefit is that the 2020 results are not in aggregate devalued by above trend inflation. I'm saying that imo the price exceeds the benefit.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
The issue is that teachers systematically overestimate results from year to year
They do not over-estimate, they say what they think pupils should get based on the work they have done. Then some pupils do not perform as well as expected.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Nope, Johnson is much more pragmatic, electorally speaking. In fact, he's the opposite - largely unprincipled.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
Great post. The psyche of the hard left: "the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us".
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Not much talk of BTecs, but that sounds even worse:
That’s odd: the students who did BTechs at my school have had their results, indeed I think they got them on Thursday.
That is probably Pearson fouling up.
Were the results out of line with expectations? Not heard much about it.
PB bias to tertiary educated, I guess.
I don’t what the expectations were.
Speaking of which, I’m fairly certain (though I could be wrong) that we did not tell our students what grades we had sent off for them because we assumed that they would be adjusted. When students are talking about the grades they got versus predictions are they the actual predictions the school sent to the boards or are they the UCAS predictions that they should have known about (and which tend to be “what’s the highest grade this student could realistically get” rather than “what grade do you expect this student to get”)?
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
I mostly agree with this, but I am struck by how many non-teachers seem to think that the “had they sat the exams” bit is the correct answer; I’ve seen far too many cock-ups by exam boards to have any faith in that. The exam process itself is least worst one at best and in many cases cruelly capricious.
I would say that in the example you give it is just as valid to say that the exam results and the algorithm are each out by one.
True. An A student does not become a B student because they get a B.
Something should have been done about grade inflation many years ago.
In general yes. Not this year.
Is grade inflation improved by lowering the WRONG people's grades?
The system should be seeking to give every pupil the right grade with the benefit of the doubt going to the pupils.
Unless there was zero doubt that would inevitably lead to inflation. The only way to avoid inflation is to give as many incorrectly lower grades as incorrectly higher ones are given out. How is that fair to those who get the incorrectly lower ones?
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
Great post. The psyche of the hard left: "the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us".
It's not just the psyche. Lenin is supposed to have stated it explicitly - the worse, the better, or chem khuzhe tem luchshe, in my rusty Russian. I think John Adams also used it to refer to the American revolution. Such people regard revolution as an end in itself, even if their means can be achieved by peaceful reform.
Something should have been done about grade inflation many years ago.
In general yes. Not this year.
Is grade inflation improved by lowering the WRONG people's grades?
The system should be seeking to give every pupil the right grade with the benefit of the doubt going to the pupils.
Unless there was zero doubt that would inevitably lead to inflation. The only way to avoid inflation is to give as many incorrectly lower grades as incorrectly higher ones are given out. How is that fair to those who get the incorrectly lower ones?
I agree with you completely. By not doing anything about it for many years there was always the risk that something would eventually be done in one particular year which is very unfair to the students in that year. Those who allowed it to happen in the first place are heavily to blame for this mess. I'd like to understand the mindset that led them to start the process of grade inflation in the first place.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Nope, Johnson is much more pragmatic, electorally speaking. In fact, he's the opposite - largely unprincipled.
There is definitely a cult around Johnson, see Twitter for a start.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
Is there anything you accept the Tories have failed on?
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Which defeats of Johnson's are celebrated? Which battles did Johnson lose?
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
I mostly agree with this, but I am struck by how many non-teachers seem to think that the “had they sat the exams” bit is the correct answer; I’ve seen far too many cock-ups by exam boards to have any faith in that. The exam process itself is least worst one at best and in many cases cruelly capricious.
I would say that in the example you give it is just as valid to say that the exam results and the algorithm are each out by one.
True. An A student does not become a B student because they get a B.
I think the biggest problem is that there is not a huge difference between an A student and a B one. In a normal year if everyone gets within one of what I was expecting then I think that I have done pretty well with my predictions.
The reason this becomes a big deal is that the grade inflation means that university offers are much less forgiving: not many students are sitting on a CC offer from UCL that means if they drop a grade it doesn’t matter.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
Is there anything you accept the Tories have failed on?
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
I mostly agree with this, but I am struck by how many non-teachers seem to think that the “had they sat the exams” bit is the correct answer; I’ve seen far too many cock-ups by exam boards to have any faith in that. The exam process itself is least worst one at best and in many cases cruelly capricious.
I would say that in the example you give it is just as valid to say that the exam results and the algorithm are each out by one.
Yes, and I think that confidence in the system has dropped since re-marking and re-grading have become the norm, and often with significant changes in grades. When I was at Sixth form getting the answers reviewed didn't seem permitted. The whole culture of appeals has shown a light on what was always a capricious system. Grade inflation matters less to me than confidence in the exam system itself.
So says Carl Gardner "replying to Carl Gardner". A sad, one-person echo chamber better left in obscurity. You're doing him a disservice by exposing him to daylight on here.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Nope, Johnson is much more pragmatic, electorally speaking. In fact, he's the opposite - largely unprincipled.
There is definitely a cult around Johnson, see Twitter for a start.
That is one thing I will never, ever do, because I don't have the patience to shower for half an hour after bathing myself in the sewer of the internet.
But anyway I don't think Johnsonism is a cult. There is no real guiding ideology, except staying in power, and there is a realism about electoral defeats that is totally lacking in the Corbynite left.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
Is there anything you accept the Tories have failed on?
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
He is a real Tory plant , obviously works for them.
The hospital data at NHS England website on the number of people in hospital with Covid really does demonstrate that we are no longer in a pandemic. There are so many hospital trusts with less than 5 beds occupied with people who have tested positive with Covid. The growth in cases is really having no effect on the NHS and the number of people in hospital with Covid continues to fall
Of course you are right. I`m long convinced that some want us to still be in a pandemic - or at least maintaining that level of fear - for ideological or party political reasons. It disgusts me.
My understanding (I could be wrong) is that new covid hospitalisations are falling generally, perhaps universally - even in Leicester which is still in lockdown.
Last time I was updated we had 11 Covid-19 inpatients in the supposed hotspot of Leicester.
Mind you, when I was running errands in town yesterday it seemed as busy as most Saturdays. Some shops etc were still closed, but not a lockdown in a meaningful sense.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
One of the reasons for the high pass rate is that most schools will discourage anyone likely to fail from continuing with the course, but I take the rest of your point.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And those who got AAA back in the day were a class act.
I feel like this is a really very bad way to respond to this.
I am half in horror half in a strange sort of morbid admiration for his determination not to inflate grades in all this. As I said before this blew up, the politics of this demands everyone gets a nice grade and have done with it. So we have a year when some thickies get in to better universities than they should. Who cares?
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Which defeats of Johnson's are celebrated? Which battles did Johnson lose?
Etc
There are people that come out to defend him whatever he does, whatever position he takes, some of the comments on Twitter are like a cult, it's genuinely terrifying.
There is absolutely a cult that surrounds him.
Honestly in many cases the comments under a Corbyn Tweet are just as mad as those under a Johnson Tweet.
I feel like this is a really very bad way to respond to this.
I am half in horror half in a strange sort of morbid admiration for his determination not to inflate grades in all this. As I said before this blew up, the politics of this demands everyone gets a nice grade and have done with it. So we have a year when some thickies get in to better universities than they should. Who cares?
We rarely ever agree but I completely agree with you here.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And those who got AAA back in the day were a class act.
Are we about to have a repeat of the first week of university where everyone tells everyone else what their A-level results are?
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
The issue is that teachers systematically overestimate results from year to year
I wouldn't put it that way. They look at each child and estimate the best grade that they can reasonably hope to achieve based on the info and perception they have. Of course in aggregate that will constitute an overestimate as compared to real results in real exams.
As for grade inflation in general, the only way to stop that is to award results in a purely relative way. The top 10% in the country get As, the next 25% Bs etc. I'm quite attracted to that idea myself although I know there are downsides.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
Yet we're told that fairness within a year is vital.
That goes if you accept the over predictions along with the accurate predictions.
Aside from encouraging further over predictions in future years.
The approach taken prioritizes the integrity of the 2020 results as a whole - compared to previous years - at the expense of integrity and fairness for individual kids in 2020. It elevates the macro over the micro. The price of this is the individual injustices and the plans wrecked this year. The benefit is that the 2020 results are not in aggregate devalued by above trend inflation. I'm saying that imo the price exceeds the benefit.
The number of plans being wrecked this year I suspect will turn out to be minimal.
The universities have places to fill and filled they will be.
Now if you're willing to accept a huge dollop of grade inflation ** then lets be honest about it and continue it for future years.
Because its the pupils of 2021 onwards who are losing out in their education far more than the pupils of 2020.
** I sense you believe higher grades for all would be a step on the road to the New Jerusalem.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And those who got AAA back in the day were a class act.
Are we about to have a repeat of the first week of university where everyone tells everyone else what their A-level results are?
My A-Levels were terrible, I see no need to talk about them as they have no impact on my life now.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
Standard offer at my Medical School in 1983 was BBC, but in practice the average was probably AAB or so. It meant that dropping a grade once one had an offer wasn't a catastrophe.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
He is a real Tory plant , obviously works for them.
Don't know to be honest, on certain things he is quite interesting to talk to but on others he just goes into denial and deflection mode.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
The issue is that teachers systematically overestimate results from year to year
I wouldn't put it that way. They look at each child and estimate the best grade that they can reasonably hope to achieve based on the info and perception they have. Of course in aggregate that will constitute an overestimate as compared to real results in real exams.
As for grade inflation in general, the only way to stop that is to award results in a purely relative way. The top 10% in the country get As, the next 25% Bs etc. I'm quite attracted to that idea myself although I know there are downsides.
The biggest problem is that for subjects with only a small entry each year the grade you get would be highly dependent on who else was doing the exam that year. Fine if all you want it for is university entrance to a strictly limited number of places, less good if you want to be able to compare students from different years at any time (like on a CV).
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Not for this year but one good idea would be to embrace what happened in Australia when I was there (Victoria at least I don't know the other states). There aren't any "grades" there instead everyone is given a percentile ranking. A top grade there then is 99.95 which means you are in the top 0.05 percentile and did better than 99.95% of the other pupils in the State that year. The ranking then goes down in steps of 0.05 to 30.00 (below 30 is unpublished fail).
Under this system there aren't five letter grades there are thousands of possible ranking grades to get between 30.00 and 99.95
It's also literally impossible to have inflation under this system since every percentile must have (apart from rounding) the same number of people in it.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And those who got AAA back in the day were a class act.
A guy I was at school with got AAAA in Maths, Further Maths (is that still a thing?), Physics and Chemistry. He went to Cambridge and then spent his adult life on the dole and cheating at dominoes in various pubs.
I got ABBD in 1985 which i reckon was a good effort. The D was English as I had no formal education in written English until I was 13 and struggled mightily with it.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
Standard offer at my Medical School in 1983 was BBC, but in practice the average was probably AAB or so. It meant that dropping a grade once one had an offer wasn't a catastrophe.
Whereas a lot of students now are sitting on offers that they might have made on a really good day if exactly the right questions came up in the exam. For Oxbridge and medicine (which we lump together as being of equal difficulty) dropping one grade can be catastrophic.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
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.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Yep. C'est ca.
Actually worse than that. If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
I'm hearing about Cs instead of As in some such scenarios. You can't go doing that. Prefer Sturgeon's call on this. Not sure what is the best thing now if we don't want to look like Scotland followers - encourage and fund appeals and take a speedy and accommodating approach to them? But maybe that's stable door and bolted horse territory.
Which is bad, and made worse by the absurdly high offers that universities are making these days.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
The higher offers are a response to the higher grades.
The offers I received from Russel Group unis required only Cs and Ds.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
I suppose it depends on the job you go into but I must say that much of what I learned in terms of Maths and Computer Science has helped me very little in my day to day job. I tend to think Computer Science sets you up quite badly for a career in Software Engineering, which many go into.
Quite bemused by the condemnation here of the somewhat pejoratively labelled “grade inflation”. Being a Governor of a maintained, non-selective school I spend many a happy hour working to hold our Headteacher to account on objectives which, primarily, focus on genuine* improvement of outcomes as measured by progress. It would be a funny old world if we declared that year-on-year improvement is to be frowned upon.
* to be fair to the Gove reforms, they did drive out some of the more spurious improvements achieved by gaming the system...
- defeats are actually victories in disguise - we won the argument though we lost the battle - everything is always somebody else's fault - we know what's good for people better than they do - the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us - our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
This is spot on. Johnson also has the same problem.
Which defeats of Johnson's are celebrated? Which battles did Johnson lose?
Etc
There are people that come out to defend him whatever he does, whatever position he takes, some of the comments on Twitter are like a cult, it's genuinely terrifying.
There is absolutely a cult that surrounds him.
Honestly in many cases the comments under a Corbyn Tweet are just as mad as those under a Johnson Tweet.
Twitter is insane and an echo chamber. You'll find the same under anyone. FBPE is another cult etc
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
For the A-level course itself you are correct, but for University? My highest offer was CC. The only people I knew who needed As were those foolish enough to try for Cambridge.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
The point I was getting at, was that I suspect nowadays you'd likely achieve a higher set of results but at the same time the entry requirements are higher.
Southampton was AAA from recollection (might be higher now), Cambridge was A*AA.
Comments
And Gromit.
However, when it comes to this year as a one off, I'd be happy to let the grade inflation slide, as long as the University system doesn't use the circumstances as an excuse to dramatically change their requirements next year.
At the same time a quarter have been given grades that are too high. They are not complaining about this, but it does mean that the English government's "solution" fails even on its claimed plus points of avoiding grade inflation and maintaining a gold standard.
Giving people a lower grade than they deserve is not the solution to inflation. You don't solve wage inflation by randomly slashing a quarter of the population's wages while dramatically increasing another quarter's.
More are lower than higher because Ofqual - as they said right from the start - think that the overall grades should be broadly consistent with previous years. This is an arguable premise to start out with, as other posters have opined.
See:
https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/14/misleading-a-level-claims-debunked/
I think Corbyn Labour part one (2015/17) worked well. They brought down a Tory government and removed its majority. Came close to replacing it.
But part two (2017/2019) was a disaster. They should have continued to frustrate Brexit but not have collaborated with the Benn Act. Forced Johnson to own the choice of No Deal or extension.
These counterfactuals ...
That is probably Pearson fouling up.
Sweden had the lowest number of deaths since 1977 in 2019. A mild flu season partly.
This paper argues that what they call "this dry tinder" of people, old, ill and frail, may help explain why Sweden virus death/100K is higher than Denmark and Finland despite the light lockdown.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3674138
A Mr Cummings has done a quick video looking closely at this low peak in all cause deaths in 2018/19.
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1280095800392122373
The purpose of exam marks is to discriminate: students with A grades are offered opportunities that are not given to those with a C. Exams are somewhat arbitrary;you can get good results with a superficial knowledge of the subject and poor results with a good knowledge. But they are objective. They test what they test. People accept the results because they are objectively arrived at.
The problem with the current situation is that people have As that should have Cs and Cs that should have As but they are going to discriminate anyway. There is no solution to the problem; you can only mitigate it a bit, eg by offering more university places. The English government appears not to have intention of doing so.
You can read the paper if you want to check (I might get around to it..).
PB bias to tertiary educated, I guess.
I would say that in the example you give it is just as valid to say that the exam results and the algorithm are each out by one.
Rather than trying to apply standardisation of individual marks within the year, they have arrived at individual marks by a very roundabout route with the potential to introduce anomalies from each set of operations.
While they justify this statistically for individual measures (eg rank order versus individual predictions), they don’t really consider the effect on individuals of the errors introduced cumulatively - they’re only really interested in overall group comparisons.
And the strong priority given to year versus year standardisation exacerbates the number of likely individual anomalies.
But instead we have the pretence that grades are higher now because of better schools or hard working pupils or the wonder or the government's education policy.
This still would not be a Labour win, not even close. We're in real trouble.
My understanding (I could be wrong) is that new covid hospitalisations are falling generally, perhaps universally - even in Leicester which is still in lockdown.
- defeats are actually victories in disguise
- we won the argument though we lost the battle
- everything is always somebody else's fault
- we know what's good for people better than they do
- the worse things get for the people we say we represent, the better for us
- our time will come.
Welcome to the world of the Corbynistas.
If for example you’re in an poor school and this year you happen to have two very bright kids rather than the usual one, the chances of one if them getting statistically stuffed are relatively high, as the individual prediction data wasn’t taken into account - just the ranking order, and marks extrapolated from the group data, normalised to match prior years.
But if you want Labour to do something then they need to be developing some general policies rather than jumping onto passing bandwagons.
Speaking of which, I’m fairly certain (though I could be wrong) that we did not tell our students what grades we had sent off for them because we assumed that they would be adjusted. When students are talking about the grades they got versus predictions are they the actual predictions the school sent to the boards or are they the UCAS predictions that they should have known about (and which tend to be “what’s the highest grade this student could realistically get” rather than “what grade do you expect this student to get”)?
Is grade inflation improved by lowering the WRONG people's grades?
The system should be seeking to give every pupil the right grade with the benefit of the doubt going to the pupils.
Unless there was zero doubt that would inevitably lead to inflation. The only way to avoid inflation is to give as many incorrectly lower grades as incorrectly higher ones are given out. How is that fair to those who get the incorrectly lower ones?
https://twitter.com/jamesdoleman/status/1294956139130519554?s=20
Which battles did Johnson lose?
Etc
The reason this becomes a big deal is that the grade inflation means that university offers are much less forgiving: not many students are sitting on a CC offer from UCL that means if they drop a grade it doesn’t matter.
With much whining and fury resulting - much of it on PB.
But anyway I don't think Johnsonism is a cult. There is no real guiding ideology, except staying in power, and there is a realism about electoral defeats that is totally lacking in the Corbynite left.
If I had got Cs instead of As it would have been embarrassing, but it would not have affected my university place.
I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Embarrassing drivel.
Mind you, when I was running errands in town yesterday it seemed as busy as most Saturdays. Some shops etc were still closed, but not a lockdown in a meaningful sense.
There is absolutely a cult that surrounds him.
Honestly in many cases the comments under a Corbyn Tweet are just as mad as those under a Johnson Tweet.
As for grade inflation in general, the only way to stop that is to award results in a purely relative way. The top 10% in the country get As, the next 25% Bs etc. I'm quite attracted to that idea myself although I know there are downsides.
The universities have places to fill and filled they will be.
Now if you're willing to accept a huge dollop of grade inflation ** then lets be honest about it and continue it for future years.
Because its the pupils of 2021 onwards who are losing out in their education far more than the pupils of 2020.
** I sense you believe higher grades for all would be a step on the road to the New Jerusalem.
Under this system there aren't five letter grades there are thousands of possible ranking grades to get between 30.00 and 99.95
It's also literally impossible to have inflation under this system since every percentile must have (apart from rounding) the same number of people in it.
I got ABBD in 1985 which i reckon was a good effort. The D was English as I had no formal education in written English until I was 13 and struggled mightily with it.
Discuss...
I am not suggesting we tomorrow get rid of Eton at all, I am just saying that in principle I oppose its existence, as I do all private schools.
The solution though - unlike the cultists on Twitter - is to make state schools better, not pull private schools down.
The offers I received from Russel Group unis required only Cs and Ds.
* to be fair to the Gove reforms, they did drive out some of the more spurious improvements achieved by gaming the system...
Twitter lends itself to cults.
Southampton was AAA from recollection (might be higher now), Cambridge was A*AA.