No. Normally teachers don’t submit predicted grades because it’s not necessary. They were only asked to do so this year because of the coronavirus.
Sorry I didn’t phrase that first part very well, was thinking aloud - I didn’t mean it as a question as teachers do submit predicted grades every year for all students for university entry.
What I was wondering about is whether this historical prediction performance could have been used to inform the whole assigned grade process. Whether it was a not a good idea in the first place or whether it did have merit but just couldn’t be realised practically. It does give you an individual assessment for every student.
I think you’re right, sorry.
But as far as I know, they normally submit predicted grades to admissions databases run by the universities, not to Ofcom. I’m not sure if they do that for all students, or only for those applying to universities.
Predicted grades would normally only be provided on the individual student’s application to university, not to any other external authority*, since there wouldn’t be any need for it (except where a school is making an appeal against the exam result).
Whether schools keep overall records for their own management purposes and assessing how reliable individual teachers’ assessments are - that I wouldn’t know.
*Ofqual rather than Ofcom in this case, of course - or the relevant examination board.
Looking forward, there might be some merit in the idea of teachers including predicted grades on the annual ‘report’. These are already done on computers so creating and maintaining a database to compare predictions with actual results should not add much to the bureaucracy that teachers have to deal with.
The data would be useful in so far as it would let head teachers know which teachers were over or under optimistic and students would have ammunition for challenging unexpected exam results.
Until recently ‘A’ level results depended on a series of modules spread out over time. The latest changes have made it more like it was when I did them in that almost everything depended on performance on the day. Both systems have benefits and dangers: a student might be ill on exam day, and some students perform better under the pressure of a deadline.
If anyone’s interested in precisely how it was done, this might help (or not):
Come to think of it, I ought to amend my earlier post about the American big important tests: One significant difference between the US and the UK is that our big important tests are all run by private companies, not the government. Most colleges do choose to make use of them, but they’re not obligated to, and they can put as much or as little weigh on them as they’d like.
Most states do have their own tests that they also administer, but those are just to determine if you can graduate from high school, and are mostly just to make sure that the schools are doing their job. The state tests are very easy, and almost everyone who would be going to college has no problem with passing them. Beyond the fact that you passed, no college would ever know nor care about your scores on such tests. I think (though I’m not certain) that this past year, my state (Ohio) just waived the requirement for the tests, and let individual schools decide who can graduate and who can’t, and it made very little difference.
I work in Admissions in a middle-ranking UK university, and can certainly testify that the past two weeks have been very tiring. We prepare for Clearing (late course offers) and Confirmation (accepting, rejecting, and ‘cascading’ applicants onto alternative course when the results come out) for months in advance, and the U-turn on Centre Assessed Grades has meant we’ve had to do half of Confirmation again, and we’re finding it tricky to accommodate all those we promised a place to earlier in the year (Clearing having been used to fill the gaps left on courses following Confirmation).
I was surprised the anonymous VC in the Guardian article above had their phone-lines open at 6:30am, when the UCAS results embargo ended at 8am, rather than 6am, this year…
And as far as I’m aware, Predicted grades are essentially part of the tutor’s reference on UCAS applications, so wouldn’t exist where a university application hasn’t been made.
One point that had escaped me until now is that the “centre assessed grades” to which they have now finally reverted already took schools’ past results into account. So the further adjustments the Ofqual formula applied added an extra layer of disadvantage in many cases.
When I was a student, my predicted grade was A, I got an F (because the teacher had taught the wrong syllabus!). In another subject, I was predicted an F and told not to take the exam. I took the exam and got an A.
One issue is that some students progress evenly throughout the year, others pick up at the end, and this is not just ‘cramming’, this is just how some students progress.
I hope to hell you had some recourse for fixing that up. That’s appalling!
Happened to a good friend of mine. In 1969.
This is the weakness of depending on teacher assessments.
When I did what were then ‘O’ (ordinary) Levels, my maths teacher told me that I deserved to fail.
There were no grades - just pass or fail and I got 96% for maths. I could never decide whether he really meant what he said or intended to give me a verbal kick up the backside.
They do provide predicted grades, usually in October or so, in order that their students can apply for university. Those grades are known to sometimes over-predict the students’ grades.
For A levels, it’s not unusual for the teachers to have only met the kids a few weeks before those grades, so they’re mostly submitting those grades based on their previous GCSE results. That’s less likely to happen at schools where the teachers have known the students for their entire secondary education, and for longer reasons that I think is right for this thread, students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to change schools for sixth form and only meet their teachers in September of the year before they sat their A levels.
This year the teachers were given an additional task of assigning grades based on the entire two years’ work - a centre assessed grade - which is very different to a a predicted grade. They had nearly a whole school extra year’s work to go on, for a start, and they were being asked to actually assess their students’ whole performance. For most teachers, that wasn’t a new thing, because they would have taught in subjects that had coursework, and that’s externally regulated as well as internally.
The CAG - centre assessed grades - they submitted were not the same in the level of optimism as the grades they might have submitted in October. But Ofqual initially acted as if the CAG were just the same as predicted grades, even though they weren’t.
But, really, if the current govt hadn’t changed the system in the way they did, it wouldn’t have been as big of an issue. They did away with AS levels that contributed to grades, took away almost all coursework, and made it so that everything depended on one or two exams taken in May and June two years after you started the course. The exams for GCSEs and A levels are externally marked like AP exams are - teachers teach them, but they don’t mark them.
If we’d still had AS levels, modular exams, and coursework, most of this would have been avoided.
So now there are no exams and teachers are expected to provided final grades for the first time in UK history. It was always going to be bad, but man, they did exceed expectations.