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Its not Swinney that should be investigated it is the SQA.  As someone who worked them I know the system and a lot of the people.  Power mad and don't rate teachers estimates in any year never mind this.  This has been a really worrying time for teaching staff and now relief that their judgments are being heard.  Swinney has made the right call.  Universities have asked for more money to accommodate this seemingly.  

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Hadn't intended to post on this subject again but the 'English' Government has announced a massive U  turn today by allowing mock results to be the official grade if higher than the exam board guesstimate. 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of what has happened in Scotland no Conservative or LibDem should criticise the Scots Govt for allowing higher grades to stand as that is essentially what is happening here (of course next year they'll probably be criticising schools for inevitable drop in grades!)

Keir Starmer is also being disingenuous in his criticisms as I can't recall any criticism from Labour when Ofqual, the exam board regulator, were preparing this system in England. Tomorrow I break the habit of a life time and actually go in for A level results day!

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It seems that Williamson is defending the system they will use in advance of the results by emphasising the ability to appeal. Looks very likely that the same situation is about to emerge, where a statistical model will downgrade a large percentage of results based on a school's previous performance. Be interesting to see Scottish Tories defend this while voting no confidence in Swinney.

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2 hours ago, killiefaetheferry said:

It seems that Williamson is defending the system they will use in advance of the results by emphasising the ability to appeal. Looks very likely that the same situation is about to emerge, where a statistical model will downgrade a large percentage of results based on a school's previous performance. Be interesting to see Scottish Tories defend this while voting no confidence in Swinney.

From what I know the Scottish Tories will have the brass neck to do exactly that. Someone needs to point out their double standards.

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It will be interesting to see double standards exposed, not only the politicians but the media, will they give the Tories in England and Labour in Wales an easy ride, or force U turns there? Looks as if the Daily Mail calling the UK Govt Dunces, and even the Telegraph is wavering. What if Williamson *is* forced to resign?

Expect Labour and Tories in Scotland to keep silent on England & Wales as it's not their remit, at least until they see the ultimate outcome there. 

Edited by exile
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2 hours ago, exile said:

It will be interesting to see double standards exposed, not only the politicians but the media, will they give the Tories in England and Labour in Wales an easy ride, or force U turns there? Looks as if the Daily Mail calling the UK Govt Dunces, and even the Telegraph is wavering. What if Williamson *is* forced to resign?

Expect Labour and Tories in Scotland to keep silent on England & Wales as it's not their remit, at least until they see the ultimate outcome there. 

The folk affected are going as mental as they did up here. Seems to be even crazier results than up here in some cases, although larger sample size so more chance for outliers i guess.

Top media tweet for me (i know it will change on which broweser is viewing it)

Least Scottish education is essentially fee free.

Edited by phart
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3 hours ago, exile said:

It will be interesting to see double standards exposed, not only the politicians but the media, will they give the Tories in England and Labour in Wales an easy ride, or force U turns there? Looks as if the Daily Mail calling the UK Govt Dunces, and even the Telegraph is wavering. What if Williamson *is* forced to resign?

Expect Labour and Tories in Scotland to keep silent on England & Wales as it's not their remit, at least until they see the ultimate outcome there. 

Nah, come on, I'm sure Monica Lennon will be winging her way to Cardiff to show her solidarity with protesting Welsh students.

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1 hour ago, phart said:

The folk affected are going as mental as they did up here. Seems to be even crazier results than up here in some cases, although larger sample size so more chance for outliers i guess.

Top media tweet for me (i know it will change on which broweser is viewing it)

Least Scottish education is essentially fee free.

Yeah saw a couple of things earlier, you would think after seeing what happened up here they might try and fix it before making a cunt of it

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2 hours ago, Kirk said:

Yeah saw a couple of things earlier, you would think after seeing what happened up here they might try and fix it before making a cunt of it

It's not a good look for the ermine clad, dark money grabbing slug demanding Swinney's head on a day where her compatriots down south have thrown a generation under a bus by adopting the same grading system that the Scottish Government has just abandoned. While private schools there, quelle surprise, see a surge in A grades. And you can bet you're arse Blowjob and Gavin Williamson won't even say sorry to those pupils from poorer areas who have seen their hopes for the future in tatters.

Swinney has his flaws and accepts he should handled this a lot better, but watching the political grandstanding from, Davidson, Rennie and Richard Whatsisname without waiting to see how England's grades panned out was utterly nauseous. You can bet Davidson will pop up in the media slavishly defending her paymasters in London of their handling of that fiasco

Edited by King Of Paisley
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12 hours ago, killiefaetheferry said:

It seems that Williamson is defending the system they will use in advance of the results by emphasising the ability to appeal. Looks very likely that the same situation is about to emerge, where a statistical model will downgrade a large percentage of results based on a school's previous performance. Be interesting to see Scottish Tories defend this while voting no confidence in Swinney.

From what I know the Scottish Tories will have the brass neck to do exactly that. Someone needs to point out their double standards.

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19 minutes ago, Hertsscot said:

From what I know the Scottish Tories will have the brass neck to do exactly that. Someone needs to point out their double standards.

Not sure how I posted that again! Colleague in my dept declared it an "utter shambles". A levels can be unpredictable, two years of study determined by end of course exams in most subjects. It was better when they could take AS levels half way through the course, made it all a bit more predictable but the infinitely unwise Michael Gove got rid of them. Whoever is dealing with appeals is going to be very busy. 40% of students grades marked down, students in public schools doing disproportionately better and state schools doing worse. GCSE results will be the second wave. words like scandal and postcode lottery seem to have gone AWOL from the journalists lexicon

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4 hours ago, King Of Paisley said:

It's not a good look for the ermine clad, dark money grabbing slug demanding Swinney's head on a day where her compatriots down south have thrown a generation under a bus by adopting the same grading system that the Scottish Government has just abandoned. While private schools there, quelle surprise, see a surge in A grades. And you can bet you're arse Blowjob and Gavin Williamson won't even say sorry to those pupils from poorer areas who have seen their hopes for the future in tatters.

Swinney has his flaws and accepts he should handled this a lot better, but watching the political grandstanding from, Davidson, Rennie and Richard Whatsisname without waiting to see how England's grades panned out was utterly nauseous. You can bet Davidson will pop up in the media slavishly defending her paymasters in London of their handling of that fiasco

Spot on, will be interesting to see what any of them say tomorrow. I'd imagine they will be silent. I see that cunt ross bas already spouted nonsense onnit

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On ‎8‎/‎11‎/‎2020 at 11:34 AM, phart said:

SISO being shit in shit out?

Yeah all that is reasonable. That's why i've been focussing on gifted pupils getting marked down cause of where they lived as opposed to above average folk getting historically great grades.

It's the age old social problem, the biggest predictor of success is how wealthy your parents are not intelligence or competence. I don't think any government can realistically change it, hence why it;s so important to minimise the damage it already does. Our entire socio-economic system is set up to transfer public money to private hands. From how the banks are set up with fractional reserve lending to pay to win legal system the entire system is gamed against change. Any attempt to change it even slightly is met with tremendous resistance.

So this has to be fixed which it is. Sorting the actual root problem is nigh impossible though.

Incidentally there's much discussion where i live that the reason the local school does so well has little to do with the school and is mostly due to the massive amount of money being paid over to tutors. The amount of demand for tutors here is mental when you compare it to other places.

 

Yeah on SISO - it's a tad harsh on the teachers as essentially they're being asked to predict the future but was the shortest way of trying to describe the point I was trying to make.  

Agree too on the above with my concern now is this seems the easiest route/ path of least resistance to take in that it appeases parents, teachers and pupils.  It does save gifted kids from poor areas going through the appeals process but my criticism would be their achievements are now diluted because other kids have attained the same grade who wouldn’t have otherwise.  However the kids from poorer backgrounds getting this boost into uni, who might have not got the grades previously via examination, now have a window of opportunity.  

 

Idealistic, and with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, but how I’d have liked to see it play out is:

 

Ø  SQA had some form of mechanism to refer the results back to teachers as a first draft.   Basically this could have told them to wise up and no way can we get this level of increases through without some serious questions being asked during a pandemic.  Come back with something more realistic based on your own school’s previous performance + < 5% on previous pass rate.    

Ø  In failing to do the above the Scottish Government should have used the results as the catalyst to at least try to tackle head-on the attainment gap now everybody in the country has experienced as subtly as a sledgehammer.  Given they’re getting hammered on education anyway they could have used this as the benchmark/ starting point to be judged against moving forward and put a strategy in place to try to tackle it with a major benefit/threat keeping it in the public eye. For me the current fudge runs the risk of sweeping this under the carpet again and hope folk go back not noticing, or not caring, poor kids get the shitty end of the educational stick. 

Ø  To appease students and parents, especially the ones shafted by this, just guarantee their university/college places that they’ve been accepted on even provisionally.  This would look like a munificent way out of the problem whilst simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the modelling.  Additionally it would help towards solving the problem of funding given foreign student fees are going to fall off a cliff. 

Ø  Anyone not going on to higher education can then appeal if they’re unhappy with their grading.  If it is uplifted it then maintains its integrity in comparison to now where it could be looked upon as a ‘gimmie’. 

 

The tutoring stuff is definitely a factor as essentially, even though time is finite those with the resource can simply pay for somebody else’s.  Lass at my work her daughter was on for flunking maths last year and paid someone to come in 3 evenings a week so she ended up with an A.  There’s probably countless kids from schools in poor areas who could have pissed an A if they had access to facilities/teaching like her school in a posher area in the first place let alone 1 on 1 tutoring for an additional 6 hours a week.        

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16 hours ago, hampden_loon2878 said:

The unionist fell for it hook line and sinker, the snp got the strategy spot on here.  

Not sure about that - would say SG got caught in a shit storm and at least had provision to operate an umbrella once it became obvious it wasn't a shower.  They've, on the other hand,  seen the storm coming, criticised us for being stupidly caught in it and then decided to just think 'Fuck it' and gone out topless anyway whilst taking the piss out of our umbrella despite being covered in excrement themselves.  BBC Scotland obviously report late utilisation of the umbrella as 'SNP bad' and ask someone clad up to their neck in faeces for comment.  

Edited by ThistleWhistle
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15 minutes ago, ThistleWhistle said:

Not sure about that - would say SG got caught in a shit storm and at least had provision to operate an umbrella once it became obvious it wasn't a shower.  They've, on the other hand,  seen the storm coming, criticised us for being stupidly caught in it and then decided to just think 'Fuck it' and gone out topless anyway whilst taking the piss out of our umbrella despite being covered in excrement themselves.  BBC Scotland obviously report late utilisation of the umbrella as 'SNP bad' and ask someone clad up to their neck in faeces for comment.  

It's mental that the political partisans can only see how the "game" is affected , the lives of young adults or the integrity of the education system aren't actually important things. Their importance is directly tied to how they impact the partisan war. It's a straight up form of delusion.

Americans dying of coronavirus to "own the libs" type of thinking.

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27 minutes ago, phart said:

It's mental that the political partisans can only see how the "game" is affected , the lives of young adults or the integrity of the education system aren't actually important things. Their importance is directly tied to how they impact the partisan war. It's a straight up form of delusion.

Americans dying of coronavirus to "own the libs" type of thinking.

Agree again - I’m pretty staunch ‘Yes’ but can’t get behind decisions taken that seems short-term myopic with the main driver being maintaining voting share rather than actually improving the education of kids from poor backgrounds moving forward. 

 

I’d much rather seeing the SNP have the balls to admit that the model has provided a reflection nobody likes and are willing to kowtow this year to projected results whilst moving forward acknowledge that they need to somehow close this attainment gap in reality.  Lead by doing stuff rather than by telling as many people as possible what you think they want to hear - leave that shit to New Labour and old Tories.   

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1 hour ago, ThistleWhistle said:

Agree again - I’m pretty staunch ‘Yes’ but can’t get behind decisions taken that seems short-term myopic with the main driver being maintaining voting share rather than actually improving the education of kids from poor backgrounds moving forward. 

 

 

 

I’d much rather seeing the SNP have the balls to admit that the model has provided a reflection nobody likes and are willing to kowtow this year to projected results whilst moving forward acknowledge that they need to somehow close this attainment gap in reality.  Lead by doing stuff rather than by telling as many people as possible what you think they want to hear - leave that shit to New Labour and old Tories.   

 

Do you not realise the route taken was Required to keep the upgrades with as little outrage as possible, had they taken the path of just upgrading the pupils straight away then there would have been a similar uproar with the results in down grading? The way the media reacted to the initial down grading has pretty much rendered any arguments against upgrading useless. It sometimes amazes me how folk are unable to see past initial posturing which them helps the final goal. It would have always been the partys preferred option to up grade however the media and Snp bad ideology of the media would have made that impossible off the bat, instead they chose to go the only way allowable with a strategy

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5 minutes ago, hampden_loon2878 said:

Do you not realise the route taken was Required to keep the upgrades with as little outrage as possible, had they taken the path of just upgrading the pupils straight away then there would have been a similar uproar with the results in down grading? The way the media reacted to the initial down grading has pretty much rendered any arguments against upgrading useless. It sometimes amazes me how folk are unable to see past initial posturing which them helps the final goal. It would have always been the partys preferred option to up grade however the media and Snp bad ideology of the media would have made that impossible off the bat, instead they chose to go the only way allowable with a strategy

Sorry mate but not buying it.  That would involve JS agreeing to have his arse left hanging out the window and hoping for the best once upgrades confirmed.

In terms of it outmanoeuvring the Yoons the SG essentially played their hand whilst showing their opponents their cards.  That UK government in-turn decide to ignore them and plough on regardless isn't a stroke of tactical genius but pure luck in their opponent's incompetence.     

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I'd argue using what "reality" says rather than what "media" says would be the more intelligent route for governance.

Anyway it appears the SNP had nothing to do with it and the Greens forced their hand by getting them to accede to their demands in exchange for not ousting Swinney in the Vote of no confidence.

Backing down and giving into demands when the political gun is pointed at your Deputy's head doesn't anything like strategy. I might just be too dumb to see the 4d chess move though.

Edited by phart
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1 minute ago, ThistleWhistle said:

Sorry mate but not buying it.  That would involve JS agreeing to have his arse left hanging out the window and hoping for the best once upgrades confirmed.

In terms of it outmanoeuvring the Yoons the SG essentially played their hand whilst showing their opponents their cards.  That UK government in-turn decide to ignore them and plough on regardless isn't a stroke of tactical genius but pure luck in their opponent's incompetence.     

I disagree and called it from before any “u turn”was on the horizon as i stated on here. If your strategy is easy read it ineffective, even though i don't think this strategy was hard to see, it actually  shows how shit the opposition party's are 

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2 hours ago, ThistleWhistle said:

The tutoring stuff is definitely a factor as essentially, even though time is finite those with the resource can simply pay for somebody else’s.  Lass at my work her daughter was on for flunking maths last year and paid someone to come in 3 evenings a week so she ended up with an A.  There’s probably countless kids from schools in poor areas who could have pissed an A if they had access to facilities/teaching like her school in a posher area in the first place let alone 1 on 1 tutoring for an additional 6 hours a week.        

 

= See my youngest daughter. 
She got an F in her Higher English prelim so we got her a tutor. We are not rich but could afford a tutor for 1 hr a week between Jan -May. She got an A in her Higher. Partly she just needed a boot up the arse but it took a tutor to get her an A. This was 7 years ago right enough so its not a new thing. 


Without doubt the kids with more affluent parents have a huge advantage over kids in deprived areas.  However I don't necessarily think  that pupils in more affluent areas always get a better quality of teaching at school. I know a few good teachers who actually prefer working in deprived areas as they feel they are contributing more to the child and gain more satisfaction. 

Tutoring helps the kids grades massively yet the schools in affluent areas get the kudos , the extra ‘one to one’ out of school teaching makes the school look good.  IMO it masks the real quality of the teaching. 
We all want the best for our children. People pay silly money to buy houses in areas where there are ‘desirable ‘ schools . But if the school was that good why the need for tutors ? 
Downgrading kids results in deprived  areas to keep in line with the schools historical results is like rubbing salt onto the wound when you know that kids in schools in affluent areas are getting  a leg up from external tutoring  every year and without that the schools  results would be poorer. 






 

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1 hour ago, hampden_loon2878 said:

I disagree and called it from before any “u turn”was on the horizon as i stated on here. If your strategy is easy read it ineffective, even though i don't think this strategy was hard to see, it actually  shows how shit the opposition party's are 

Hampden i've went back and read all your posts in this thread can you point to the one where you called it?All I can see are the ones below.

On 8/10/2020 at 10:15 AM, hampden_loon2878 said:

I cant see what the big uproar is about tbf, you will always have those who think they should be better and appeal, there was always going to be Faux anger from the media irrespective if they had just gone by the teachers estimates, Swinney for the record is probably the most honest politician around, the unionists would love his scalp 

 

On 8/10/2020 at 12:25 PM, hampden_loon2878 said:

Lets be honest, its a situation where there was always going to be a carry on, whether the went with the 20% better pass rate from teachers or the methodology that has been used,i am confident the appeal process will be fair And sturgeon is making the right noises 

On 8/11/2020 at 3:57 PM, hampden_loon2878 said:

Well I actually dont know what i would have done had i been swinney, both decisions have their faults, i await more faux anger  

 

Edited by phart
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