Shifting Sands
Shifting Sands
Shifting Sands
One of the somewhat unexplored stories of the recent GCSE season is whether the so-called ‘clampdown’ on grade boundaries had a disproportionate effect on foundation tier students.
Many of us believe that, in hindsight, some students would have had a significantly better chance of a C grade in, say, English if entered for the higher rather than the lower tier.
These were the shifting sands of grade boundaries and comparable outcomes which, in centres with large numbers of foundation students, resulted in many more than expected numbers of students getting a D rather than a C.
I wrote a few musings about the issue here.
The story didn’t gain much traction because everyone was tired of what seemed a re-run of last year’s English ‘fiasco’ narrative and, in any case, the media was distracted by talk of schools gaming the system through early entry or hurtling headlong into mass entry for IGCSE.
So I’m not going to bang on about it all again.
All I would say is this: our school’s GCSE results this year felt a bit odd, and we suspected that across a number of subjects it was the ‘higher end’ of foundation tier where students had taken a hit.
Reliable C grades had, in other words, turned out as Ds.
As a consequence we have sent some Maths and English papers back for a re-marking.
Today the first three re-marks came back.
The two English papers were shifted from D to C and so was the Maths paper.
So: three papers and three changed grades - from D to C.
It may be that this is a fluke and that that’s the extent of the regrading. All the other grades may prove correct.
But GCSE English and Maths count for more than the grades students receive. They shape significantly the performance tables.
Thus those three re-marks have changed the overall narrative of our school performance: today our results are apparently better than they were two weeks ago - indeed, than they were 24 hours ago.
And it may be, given we’ve requested more than twenty re-marks, that there are more to come.
Perhaps predictably, I’m not celebrating today’s initial upward shift in grades. Instead, in a funny kind of way, I’m lamenting it.
Because it’s a reminder of the turbulent nature of our examination system, of its sheer frustrating quixotic unreliability.
I’m not celebrating because I know how much these results matter.
There are already headteachers - some very good people - who have lost their jobs or have been made vulnerable in their posts because of the results their school supposedly got this summer.
It’s a sign of an accountability system that is deeply flawed, resulting in snap judgements by the local press, by governors, by Ofsted - based on a set of figures which may not have been accurate in the first place.
This is an accountability system built on shifting sands.
As I say, it appears not to matter to most people. Those of us making a fuss are perceived as whingers or excuse-makers or enemies of promise.
But the exam lottery matters to some of us a great deal because we believe in fairness, especially when we think of the consequences on some colleagues. These are good people now sidelined or discarded or humiliated, all in an August rush to judgement based on a hasty results analysis that appears now to have been - how shall I put this? - woefully wrong.
Geoff Barton
12 September 2013
8:15 pm
Thursday, 12 September 2013