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This has to be the ultimate lose-lose scenario.

Mark results down based on the schools' overall previous performances and the political point-scorers are all over you accusing you of discriminating against less affluent areas; accept them as the teachers put forward and be accused of having the overall pass rates inflated to cover up for your lamentable failure to tackle the issues in the Scottish education system, etc, etc.

Not a decision I'd like to be anywhere near.  I just hope those pupils adversely affected can have their appeals upheld.

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8 minutes ago, daviebee said:

This has to be the ultimate lose-lose scenario.

Mark results down based on the schools' overall previous performances and the political point-scorers are all over you accusing you of discriminating against less affluent areas; accept them as the teachers put forward and be accused of having the overall pass rates inflated to cover up for your lamentable failure to tackle the issues in the Scottish education system, etc, etc.

Not a decision I'd like to be anywhere near.  I just hope those pupils adversely affected can have their appeals upheld.

Nail, head, hit on

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I've not followed this as much as some other posters but I'm pretty much with aaid on this.  It also worth remembering that under normal circumstances that there's a fair number of teachers/parents/pupils who feel unhappy about the results they receive.

If I've read this correctly some students have been marked down due to bring from socially disadvantaged areas. My understanding is that they have been downgraded, not because they are from poor areas but because SQA have made a judgment, based on those school's prior attainment against an objective/external standard (i.e national exams). The issue of why students from poorer backgrounds don't do as well obviously needs to be addressed and the SNP need to be held accountable for that but it's not the issue here. daviebee is correct that if these teacher assessments hadn't been downgraded them the SQA and SNP would have also been criticised. 

As far as trusting teachers, I've done over 30 years, and most of my colleagues have been professional and conscientious. However they are human and some of them, because they want their students to do well will give them the benefit of the doubt. More cynically a minority because of career reasons may inflate grades. No teacher is going to undermine a whole cohort as that would just reflect badly on their teaching!

TDYER63 commented on her daughter (?) who has marked exam papers and is understandably upset about her students not receiving the grades they deserve. When A level results come out next week and then GCSE results I may find myself in the same position however I'm still at a loss it how it can be any fairer. It isn't necessarily a fair way of doing things but it may be the least unfair (similar to deciding who wins the league or gets relegated).

In Scotland students will have the chance to appeal. My understanding, last time I looked, is that there will be no appeals in England. It is true that re-sits will be allowed in the autumn, that sounds great but realistically it is highly impractical and virtually no one will do them.

Some people have mentioned prelim results. Excuse my ignorance, if they are the same as what in England are mocks, then they would only have limited value. In England both GCSE and A level mocks are internal exams and usually sat sometime between late November to February, schools and individual subjects may be looking for different things from those exams and they may be marked very differently as well. Given such variation they could not be used to determine summative grades. If prelims are totally different, thank you for reading and sorry!

Apologies for such a lengthy post. I hope there will be some flexibility, everyone knows this year has not been normal. I know that if I have GCSE students who miss out on the necessary grades for studying my subject at A level I'll argue their case and I'm confident that they'll be okay. In that regard its good to see that universities are taking a no detriment approach.

Final point, if the system in England and Scotland are virtually the same then it seems thatTory,  Labour and LibDem critics at Holyrood are being disingenuous as their Westminster colleagues have not complained about the same system (teacher predictions then moderated in basis of previous overall school performance) being used in England.o

 

 

 

Edited by Hertsscot
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You can Appeal in England and sit an exam as well.

"According to new clarification from the exam watchdog Ofqual, schools in England will be able to lodge appeals if they can show that grades are lower than expected because previous cohorts are not “representative” of this year’s students."

 

 

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18 minutes ago, phart said:

You can Appeal in England and sit an exam as well.

"According to new clarification from the exam watchdog Ofqual, schools in England will be able to lodge appeals if they can show that grades are lower than expected because previous cohorts are not “representative” of this year’s students."

 

 

They've only just brought the appeals in in the last 24 hours because of the issues in Scotland, it'll be interesting to see how set up and resourced they are to deliver it.  Probably outsource it to Serco or Capita knowing the UKG. 

In Scotland they announced that there would be free appeals at the same time as they announced that the exams wouldn't take place so there's a big difference there.  

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On 8/6/2020 at 6:50 PM, scotlad said:

I think these exams are usually marked by people who don't know the students personally, but yeah, robust evidence, such as prelim results, results of testing throughout the year etc.

Yeah. Exams are marked by people they don't know. This year people they don't know just made the results up. 

Bit of a difference. Robust evidence required to changed a guesses grade 😂

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9 minutes ago, Parklife said:

Yeah. Exams are marked by people they don't know. This year people they don't know just made the results up. 

Bit of a difference. Robust evidence required to changed a guesses grade 😂

They didn't just make the results up though, did they?

The starting point was teacher's assessments. 75% of those were accepted unmoderated.  Where there was a disparity between those assessments and previous data they required to be moderated.

suggesting they were made up or guessed at is a total misrepresentation. 

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4 minutes ago, aaid said:

They didn't just make the results up though, did they?

The starting point was teacher's assessments. 75% of those were accepted unmoderated.  Where there was a disparity between those assessments and previous data they required to be moderated.

suggesting they were made up or guessed at is a total misrepresentation. 

"Disparity between those and previous data"

You mean "he's at a shit school, Mark him down". 

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4 minutes ago, Parklife said:

"Disparity between those and previous data"

You mean "he's at a shit school, Mark him down". 

If you want to engage with the argument then deal in facts not bullshit hyperbole.

if pupils at a "shit school" as you put it, had assessments that reflected how that school had *actually* performed in the past then they wouldn't be marked down, they would be part of the 75% of assessments that were unmoderated.

The fact that a much higher number of "shit schools" have had their results marked down is problematic but that has its roots in the inherent inequality in schooling and society in Scotland, not the SQA's computer.

No-one is suggesting that this is a perfect solution, I've yet to see anyone come up with a better one though.

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They chose to moderate them, and they chose to moderate so that it showed a slight increase from the year before.

They had a result they wanted and then adjusted everything to fit the result they wanted.

They had to throw out a lot of (imperfect) measurements they did have to achieve this.

They wanted the road to measure a mile so they changed the stride length of a lot of folk who had paced the distance.

This system has always been deeply flawed even when you could run an exam. Now it doesn't have the authority of an exam backing it up (in exam format they just adjust the pass mark of the exam to create the effect which mitigates expectations as without it you know before hand what the expectation is) it is highlighted a lot more.

Logically it doesn't even make sense, citing credibility of measurement a measurement that wasn't even measured.. That's why you know it;s just dumbfuck rhetoric.

Straight up hard edged cynic politics doesn't make sense. The sense of an absolute shafting by the demograph with the highest support for independence.

As a measurement system it doesn't make sense. A relative measuring system, it doesn't say what people know it says what mark they can achieve relative to their peer group. What percentlie you're in, not what actually know. Absolute measurment would state what your competencies are not a "ranking"

The only folk who seem fine with it are political partisans and who respects them? They're an absolute poison to society, a roadblock to open discourse , sychophantic cheerleaders who respond to who makes arguments as opposed to the content of the argument. Enables and excusers.

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If you want to see a very good example of the inequality in schooling and outcomes in Scotland then look at Mearns Castle in East Renfrewshire and Castlemilk High in Glasgow City.   The two schools are 5 miles apart.   Mearns Castle was ranked #3 in Scotland last year, Castlemilk #247.

Mearns Castle had 75% of pupils attaining five or more Highers, Castlemilk by comparison had 26%.   Whether that means that Mearns Castle is a "better" school or has "better" teachers is another subject completely, but it does demonstrate that they are three times more likely to have pupils capable of getting five highers.

Teachers already provide predicted grades for the following years exams in order to feed into the UCAS system, so that the Universities have an idea of what's coming down the path and can plan accordingly.   These are done in the summer and so would have been carried out before anyone had ever heard of COVID.

They have done this for decades and so a body like the SQA will have lots of historic data for individual schools broken down by exam level and subject which shows how close to the predicted grades the actual results are.   Put bluntly, if Mearns Castle consistently achieved 75% over say the last 5 years, then its safe to assume that this year they'd probably had been at that level this year and similarly if Castlemilk had consistently achieved 26%, then that's likely what they'd have done this year.

If the teacher assessments for both Mearns Castle and Castlemilk had reflected that historic performance then they would have been accepted and unmoderated - no-one would have been "marked down".

However we know that there was a massive disparity across the country between teacher assessments and historic results as that would've seen a huge jump in the pass rate - so we know there's some kind of problem there.

Here's one reason why high-performing schools haven't seen their assessments marked down as much as lower-performing schools.    If a school already has a very high pass rate then it's very difficult to actually over estimate what those results will be.   If a high proportion of your students achieve the highest grade possible, it's physically impossible to predict they will get a grade in excess of that.   Its therefore much more likely that high-performing schools are accurate in their predicted grades and so - in the current circumstances - much more likely those teacher assessments would be unmoderated.

On the other hand, the scope for a lower performing school to have a tendency to over-estimate is much higher.   There's lots of reasons why that might happen and I wouldn't presume that its teachers gaming the system or being bad at what they do.   Teacher's may genuinely believe in the summer that a particular student may achieve a result of 'X' and then it all goes wrong during the year.

As I said before, if the assessments from Castlemilk were showing a pass rate consistent with what they previously attained, they'd go through unchallenged.   Lets say for argument's sake that they'd actually submitted assessments that would show a rate of 50%.   What would you do then?   Let's then say that historic data for predicted grades showed a similar over-estimate, then the conclusion would be that that school tended to overestimate its actual attainment and so the obvious result in these circumstances would be to then reduce the grades for that school accordingly.

Does that screw over a genuinely talented student at that school who would most likely have over-achieved, it absolutely does but that is what the appeals should sort out.

Does this mean that students are being judged not on their own merits but on those of their predecessors, yes it does but in the absence of having actual exams then there is no way of independently measuring individual performance.

I go back to to my original point which is that this is an imperfect solution to unprecedented and unforeseen circumstances but given those circumstances I can't see any possible better solution.  

While people from deprived backgrounds are disproportionately impacted by this approach, they are disproportionately impacted by the education system in general and the exam system in particular.   

It's probably worth having a debate about how the exam system - or to be exact, how students are assessed and awards made - but don't pretend that somehow fixing the results this year would change any of the underlying problems.

 

 

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2 hours ago, aaid said:

If you want to engage with the argument then deal in facts not bullshit hyperbole.

if pupils at a "shit school" as you put it, had assessments that reflected how that school had *actually* performed in the past then they wouldn't be marked down, they would be part of the 75% of assessments that were unmoderated.

The fact that a much higher number of "shit schools" have had their results marked down is problematic but that has its roots in the inherent inequality in schooling and society in Scotland, not the SQA's computer.

No-one is suggesting that this is a perfect solution, I've yet to see anyone come up with a better one though.

How do you explain pupils going from A's to C's then if it's not just a guess from the SQA based on historical results of that school?

Sadly the SNP are going to feel the effects of this next year at Holyrood unless they somehow manager to sort this mess. Getting a competent Education Secretary would be a start.

 

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1 minute ago, aaid said:

Read my post above yours

All of that puts trust in the appeals process, which is going to be swamped this year.

Also doesn't rectify those in less deprived areas who've had their results bumped up for no reason other than what a computer says. They won't have their results rectified and as a result, many of these appeals will fail as a consequence of the SQA not want to by their own admission a pass rate so high.

 

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We will see what happens this week but there will be a lot of repercussions I am sure.  Teachers and PT's if they appeal will go through a nightmare of finding 'robust' evidence of why they predicted the grade that they did.  Prelims to me are nothing more than a kick up the arse for kids.  So if SQA are basing their downgrades on that as well as the past three years statistics on how the school predicted before then that is wrong.  I have worked in education for 30 years now and also worked for SQA up until last year.  My hope is that the universities and colleges take all of this in to consideration for entry.  Hopefully, common sense will prevail.

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10 minutes ago, Squirrelhumper said:

All of that puts trust in the appeals process, which is going to be swamped this year.

Also doesn't rectify those in less deprived areas who've had their results bumped up for no reason other than what a computer says. They won't have their results rectified and as a result, many of these appeals will fail as a consequence of the SQA not want to by their own admission a pass rate so high.

 

Lets see what happens with the appeals process - they will have known this was coming and apparently they are set up and resourced for it - despite the misinformation that the Daily Record and Labour are spreading about.

To answer your last point.  What has happened this year that would justify a 20% increase in the pass rate?

Edited by aaid
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3 hours ago, Parklife said:

Yeah. Exams are marked by people they don't know. This year people they don't know just made the results up. 

Bit of a difference. Robust evidence required to changed a guesses grade 😂

That's a massive oversimplification, and you know it!

The fact is, the only way to for anyone - including their teachers - to know for definite how those people would have performed in those exams would have been if they'd actually sat the exams. Obviously, though, that wasn't possible this year. So this system was brought in as a "quick fix". No one - anywhere - is saying it is a great system - but alternative solutions were were thin on the ground.

(Incidentally I assume it was put forward  as a solution by the people with the most experience of actually marking exams, i.e the SQA, as well as there being input from teacher's unions).

2 hours ago, aaid said:

If you want to engage with the argument then deal in facts not bullshit hyperbole.

if pupils at a "shit school" as you put it, had assessments that reflected how that school had *actually* performed in the past then they wouldn't be marked down, they would be part of the 75% of assessments that were unmoderated.

The fact that a much higher number of "shit schools" have had their results marked down is problematic but that has its roots in the inherent inequality in schooling and society in Scotland, not the SQA's computer.

No-one is suggesting that this is a perfect solution, I've yet to see anyone come up with a better one though.

Good luck with that...

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You run the 100 meter semi finals then a catastrophe happens so you can't run the Final.

You then give the gold medal to the Jamaican runner who had a time outside the top 3 cause his country historically runs fast 100M. Folk who did run inside the top 3 lose out on a medal cause they come from countries that historically run slow 100M.

It isn't a defensible system.

You had options to run exams later, a no detriment system that universities run. a cap on band movement (so no huge jumps), just let the results stand cause it's a crazy year. However since the culture is to have a slight increase in exam results it's decided to fuck about with results to achieve this, under the auspices of mainting the credibility of the measuring system, which actually never measured anything.

Pointing out random educational facts about school rankings is irrelevant rhetoric and sophistry. Just going round the houses on this again.

 

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1 hour ago, scotlad said:

That's a massive oversimplification, and you know it!

The fact is, the only way to for anyone - including their teachers - to know for definite how those people would have performed in those exams would have been if they'd actually sat the exams. Obviously, though, that wasn't possible this year. So this system was brought in as a "quick fix". No one - anywhere - is saying it is a great system - but alternative solutions were were thin on the ground.

(Incidentally I assume it was put forward  as a solution by the people with the most experience of actually marking exams, i.e the SQA, as well as there being input from teacher's unions).

 

What consultation was done on problem solving he issue, cause they just implemented a system that gave them the result they always want, a slight increase in results...

Weird that after all the turmoil and upheavel the same result came in. Almost as if the system is gamed to provide it.

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2 minutes ago, phart said:

You run the 100 meter semi finals then a catastrophe happens so you can't run the Final.

You then give the gold medal to the Jamaican runner who had a time outside the top 3 cause his country historically runs fast 100M. Folk who did run inside the top 3 lose out on a medal cause they come from countries that historically run slow 100M.

It isn't a defensible system.

You had options to run exams later, a no detriment system that universities run. a cap on band movement (so no huge jumps), just let the results stand cause it's a crazy year. However since the culture is to have a slight increase in exam results it's decided to fuck about with results to achieve this, under the auspices of mainting the credibility of the measuring system, which actually never measured anything.

Pointing out random educational facts about school rankings is irrelevant rhetoric and sophistry. Just going round the houses on this again.

 

Aye, that argument should work with irate parents.

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It's the difference between absolute ranking and relative rankings. This is a general point and not directly related to the fiasco this year, just to illustrate the inherent problem exasperated by no exam.

I know a guy who won silver medal in the 800M Scottish Championships. In other Championships he never medalled. Using the relative method his most "succesful" participation was the year he won the silver. However that year he ran 4 seconds slower than he did coming 4th in a previous year.

Now using the school system he would get to study Medicine the year he got the Silver Medal but not get in the year he came 4th, even though we know that the year he came 4th he was actually a considerably better runner.

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6 minutes ago, Rolling hIlls said:

Aye, that argument should work with irate parents.

Really Bright/hardworking folk are getting fucked over by the system cause of where they went to school. The SNP acting like "Tories for Indepedence" on this issue.

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1 minute ago, phart said:

It's the difference between absolute ranking and relative rankings. This is a general point and not directly related to the fiasco this year, just to illustrate the inherent problem exasperated by no exam.

I know a guy who won silver medal in the 800M Scottish Championships. In other Championships he never medalled. Using the relative method his most "succesful" participation was the year he won the silver. However that year he ran 4 seconds slower than he did coming 4th in a previous year.

Now using the school system he would get to study Medicine the year he got the Silver Medal but not get in the year he came 4th, even though we know that the year he came 4th he was actually a considerably better runner.

Apples and pears.

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