sunday, 9 august 2020
eleven days. eleven days. ELEVEN DAYS UNTIL RESULTS DAY.
shitting a brick won’t lie.
just to recap I’ll be getting 12 results:
maths (numeracy), additional maths, english language, biology, chemistry, physics, welsh 2nd language, computer science, art & design, product design, welsh baccalaureate and religious studies.
i’ve already gotten back mathematics and english literature - both went very well thank god. damn the butterflies r getting worse. i’m excited but the whole not having actually taken the exams has gotten me tense. I keep thinking about whether I paid enough attention in class. did I participate enough? was I too chatty? was I too sleepy? my track record with sleep is so bad I fell asleep in biology once. ik it’s not supposed to be biased but they’re ranking us within a grade so that could determine how high or low I am within a grade compared to my peers which cld potentially push me down a whole ass grade. anyways all I can do now is manifest manifest manifest.
i’ll see y’all 20th august yeah?
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Why this year’s CAGs are the most accurate results schools have ever had?
There has been so much written and said about the government’s handling (does it really count as handling?) of the GCSE and A Level awarding process this year, most of it very critical. The U-turn towards using Teacher Assessment was greeted with cheers in many areas, though some, including those who opposed it in the first place, had grave concerns.
Cheating?
The main concern was that teachers would significantly over-estimate the outcomes for the students they teach: meaning that this year would result in grossly over-inflated grades. Then there were all the other knock-on effects that this would have, especially around unfairness for students in other years.
At first glance this would seem true, the famous Ofqual algorithm was lowering about 40% of grades overall, ergo the teachers were somehow at best inaccurate or as one or two of the wilder accusations suggested, ‘cheating’ in their grading.
I have written previously about how unreliable GCSE predicted grades were under the normal system , but with CAGs, the process was different. So, is this really the case that they are inaccurate and over-inflated? I would argue not and here is why...
1. The Process
Firstly they are not teacher assessments as the news and press would have you believe. Of course there is a strong element of teacher assessment within them, but they are Centre Assessed Grades, and are exactly that - assessed by the examination centre, not individual teachers.
Having been the architect of our school’s process for coming up with CAGs and having discussed with many other heads how they had gone about it, I strongly believe the process was fair. We started of course with teacher assessments - teachers looked at mocks, classwork, assessments, homeworks, attitude and many other factors to answer the question - as a best guess, what would this student achieve in his / her GCSE exam?
Then whole departments came together to analyse, question and moderate each other’s grades. Teachers provided evidence to back up their claims, if questioned. From the fire of this discussion, judgements were again adjusted and then the rank ordering began, with even more questioning, justifying and adjusting.
Finally, the information came to the SLT and it was again analysed, we also reviewed predictions from before the pandemic and overlay other sources of data such as the FFT data predictions for our students in each subject. This began another week of backward and forwards between SLT and Heads of Department. I don’t recall any other Quality Assurance system in any school I have worked in, being so rigorous. At the end of it all, we had Centre Assessed Grades that I could, hand on heart, sign off as being honest and reliable.
2. The Accuracy
As I have just explained, we clearly felt we had accurate CAGs, as I am sure nearly every other school in the country believed they had. So why, when all these CAGs come together, does the exam pass rate and gradings rise on previous years and the Ofqual algorithm need to reduce them by 40%?
The answer is fairly simple - the CAGs are showing what the students are capable of and should achieve, whereas exams often don’t.
Let me unpick that a bit more.
Every grade we entered as a CAG, we were confident any individual child could, in an exam, achieve. Not a single one was entered that was beyond a student’s capability. The difference is that, in exams, many students don’t achieve what they are capable of.
We have all looked at the results in August and been surprised at results where students have underachieved: this could be on a single answer, a paper or across a range of subjects.
Why might this happen? Any number of reasons such as:
external factors that knock their confidence or affect their performance: such as family issues on the day, missing a bus, falling out with a friend, boyfriend / girlfriend issues, not sleeping, not eating or drinking and another 1000 small issues.
Exam factors: being thrown by the wording of a question, or the example used in a question, distractions in the exam, misreading or rushing the question, missing a page and so on and so forth - I have heard hundreds of reasons.
I strongly believe that, with this year’s CAGs, what we are seeing is not an artificial inflating of student achievement but rather the removal of all those many reasons for underachievement. I would also go as far as to suggest that this year’s results will be the most accurate picture of the true ability of students that we have ever had. It is the other years that have given us inaccurate and depressed grades.
So should we replace exams with CAGs in future?
Actually I don’t think we should, at least not completely. I believe the CAGs this year were accurate because we expected them to be externally moderated, very aware that any artificial over-inflation might be taken out on other students in our school. We also knew we wouldn’t be held accountable for these results - as an SLT we had nothing to prove, beyond our competence to run a fair and equitable system.
Moving forward, however, I would fear the return of high stakes accountability and, with it, all the games, tricks, shortcuts and manipulation that were starting to be exposed by recent Ofsted inspections. This would pollute the process and be wide open to abuse and misuse.
So what is the solution? A mix of well moderated teacher assessment alongside reduced examinations with a reduction in high stakes accountability might take us to a place that not only recognises the true ability of the students whilst maintaining an external validation, which could only be a good thing. What that actually looks like I don’t know, but we can leave that to the professionals such as Ofqual.
Oh hang on....
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