/sigh, PC run amok again!! On the brightside I wonder if in the future I will be able to see a Nearly Doctor for my chest pains?? Since they will only be NEARLY a doctor, shouldnt cost as much eh?
‘ungood’ has rather negative connotations. ‘Differently Good’ would be more appropriate…
Futile, in America we use multiple ‘nearlies’ to indicate being closer and closer to the goal. The way you put it, the ‘F’ is closer to perfect than ‘A’.
Our public examinations are graded with letter grades, and U for Ungraded (a fail).
GCSEs are graded A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and U. The F doesn’t stand for Fail. It’s another letter grade on the A-G scale.
(Many employers look for GCSE passes at grade C or above, so don’t be tempted to think that a grade G pass is worth as much as a grade B pass.)
A levels are graded A, B, C, D, E, N (yes, it stands for nearly) and U. A levels were graded this way over 10 years ago, when I took them. N ain’t a new thing with the A levels.
U for Ungraded means you really did flunk this, for both the public examinations.
However, the tests being discussed here are the non-public National Curriculum tests at the end of Key Stage One (when the child is 7), Key Stage Two (when the child is 11) and Key Stage Three (when the child is 14). The tests are marked, and the number of marks the kid gets determines what “level of achievement” he or she has attained. These levels of achievement are set out in the UK National Curriculum documents. Unlike the GCSE grades, or American grades, they aren’t letters. They’re numbers. Kids are awarded “level 3”, “level 4”, level 5" etc, not A, B, C, D, F. Apparently, kids who are being tested to see if they fall into the level 3, level 4 or level 5 brackets, but just fail to reach the level 3 mark bracket, are getting a level 2. And if they don’t get enough even for that they’ve got Fuck All, or maybe Fail. Which is now going to be called “N”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/09/22/tenexam21.xml - this Telegraph story explains it better than the Linconshire Echo story previously cited.
I’m currently looking through the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) website to find the guidelines for marking the KS1, KS2 and KS3 tests, so we can discuss the exact wording, see what’s happening, and see how big a change this really is. I have some experience with trying to find stuff on the QCA website through my work in educational publishing, so I can safely say that it might take a wee while. I’ll be back with you as soon as I’ve found the actual document in question.
edit on preview - BAH! I’m looking at the level threshold tables for the last few years and the buggers have edited them all this summer. So, if the old ones DID say F, they’ve now been edited to say N. What I can say is that the full pdf format level threshold doesn’t mention a change, it just says “if mark too low, give N” (paraphrased)
Incidentally, the thresholds for the level 3-5 Writing test go like this
0-20 marks - N
21-23 marks - level 2 (it’s a small bracket, this compensatory award)
24-43 marks - level 3
44-68 marks - level 4
69+ marks - level 5. (If the kid is very bright, they can
sit an extra extension paper, where they can get a level 6)
There is the vaguest outside chance that I might have an old pre 2003 markscheme and level threshold table for a KS3 exam lying around the house somewhere. I’ll confirm if it says F.
Re: creditworthy and non-creditworthy - I do buy the idea that a wrong maths answer with correct working is creditworthy (worth some of the credit, not none), although it isn’t actually the right answer. I don’t think that calling it creditworthy is going to have that much of an impact on children’s moral fibre. Nick Seaton from the Campaign for Real Education says “children who are no longer taught the difference between right and wrong but that everything is simply a matter of personal choice”, and well, it sounds a bit shrill to me. Creditworthy means it gets marks. Non-creditworthy means it don’t. The kid gets graded on how many marks they get in the test. Not much personal choice there, really.
- this is more something to be worried about. An interesting thing is how much benefit of the doubt markers can give an answer, and whether there’s any pressure to mark up rather than marking down. Another interesting thing is how grade boundaries change each year, to what extent this is down to varying difficulty of questions between each year, and to what extent this is a trend of maxing tests easier year on year, and to what extent there’s political pressure on the QCA and on examiners to provide better exam results.
Our public examinations are graded with letter grades, and U for Ungraded (a fail).
GCSEs are graded A*, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and U. The F doesn’t stand for Fail. It’s another letter grade on the A-G scale.
(Many employers look for GCSE passes at grade C or above, so don’t be tempted to think that a grade G pass is worth as much as a grade B pass.)
A levels are graded A, B, C, D, E, N (yes, it stands for nearly) and U. A levels were graded this way over 10 years ago, when I took them. N ain’t a new thing with the A levels.
U for Ungraded means you really did flunk this, for both the public examinations.
However, the tests being discussed here are the non-public National Curriculum tests at the end of Key Stage One (when the child is 7), Key Stage Two (when the child is 11) and Key Stage Three (when the child is 14). The tests are marked, and the number of marks the kid gets determines what “level of achievement” he or she has attained. These levels of achievement are set out in the UK National Curriculum documents. Unlike the GCSE grades, or American grades, they aren’t letters. They’re numbers. Kids are awarded “level 3”, “level 4”, level 5" etc, not A, B, C, D, F. Apparently, kids who are being tested to see if they fall into the level 3, level 4 or level 5 brackets, but just fail to reach the level 3 mark bracket, are getting a level 2. And if they don’t get enough even for that they’ve got Fuck All, or maybe Fail. Which is now going to be called “N”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/main.jhtml?xml=/education/2003/09/22/tenexam21.xml - this Telegraph story explains it better than the Linconshire Echo story previously cited.
I’m currently looking through the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) website to find the guidelines for marking the KS1, KS2 and KS3 tests, so we can discuss the exact wording, see what’s happening, and see how big a change this really is. I have some experience with trying to find stuff on the QCA website through my work in educational publishing, so I can safely say that it might take a wee while. I’ll be back with you as soon as I’ve found the actual document in question.
edit on preview - BAH! I’m looking at the level threshold tables for the last few years and the buggers have edited them all this summer. So, if the old ones DID say F, they’ve now been edited to say N. What I can say is that the full pdf format level threshold doesn’t mention a change, it just says “if mark too low, give N” (paraphrased)
Incidentally, the thresholds for the level 3-5 Writing test go like this
0-20 marks - N
21-23 marks - level 2 (it’s a small bracket, this compensatory award)
24-43 marks - level 3
44-68 marks - level 4
69+ marks - level 5. (If the kid is very bright, they can
sit an extra extension paper, where they can get a level 6)
There is the vaguest outside chance that I might have an old pre 2003 markscheme and level threshold table for a KS3 exam lying around the house somewhere. I’ll confirm if it says F.
Re: creditworthy and non-creditworthy - I do buy the idea that a wrong maths answer with correct working is creditworthy (worth some of the credit, not none), although it isn’t actually the right answer. I don’t think that calling it creditworthy is going to have that much of an impact on children’s moral fibre. Nick Seaton from the Campaign for Real Education says “children who are no longer taught the difference between right and wrong but that everything is simply a matter of personal choice”, and well, it sounds a bit shrill to me. Creditworthy means it gets marks. Non-creditworthy means it don’t. The kid gets graded on how many marks they get in the test. Not much personal choice there, really.
- this is more something to be worried about. An interesting thing is how much benefit of the doubt markers can give an answer, and whether there’s any pressure to mark up rather than marking down. Another interesting thing is how grade boundaries change each year, to what extent this is down to varying difficulty of questions between each year, and to what extent this is a trend of maxing tests easier year on year, and to what extent there’s political pressure on the QCA and on examiners to provide better exam results.
Guess that’s another place where the Americans get it wrong. 
If we were to give ‘Nearly’ a value, say for the sake of argument, 90%.
‘Nearly’, Nearly’ = 90% of 90% = 81%.
‘Nearly, Nearly Nearly’ = 90% of 90% of 90% = 72.9%
The only way your ‘American’ way would work would be if the Nearlys worked like:
“Nearly, Nearly” = 90% + 90% of 10% = 99%.
“Nearly, Nearly, Nearly” = 90% + 90% of 10% + 90% 0f 1%= 99.9%.
And that would just be daft, wouldn’t it?
Ahem.
It has differently positive connotations.
This change seems a triviality to me, not worth making or worth getting worked up over. I do, however, see the advantage in not marking all spelling errors, in some cases: if a kid has a lot of trouble spelling, marking thirty errors per page isn’t going to be much help to them.
Instead, I’d think it best to choose maybe ten words per paper that the kid is going to learn permanently and completely. If the kid misspells rabies, February, ceiling, sequence, storebought, etc., then give the kid those words as a spelling list. Require the kid to learn those words thoroughly. Test the kid on those words. And don’t accept future papers with those words misspelled.
This is similar to how my sixth grade teacher taught spelling: twenty words per week per student, drawn from that specific student’s mistakes (or from words the student self-reported were difficult); if you missed a word on the weekly spelling test, you’d get it on the next week’s test until you knew it completely.
That seems a great approach to me. Trying to get a kid to learn every single word they misspelled could overwhelm a poor speller and make them decide to give up. Give the kid measurable, concrete, incremental goals instead.
Daniel
Don’t you mean the “Governmentally debatable, oppositional while equal and balanced, Creditworthy” stuff? 
Dude, you rattled that off so well it’s freakin’ scary! What the hell do you do for a living?