U-turns show how incompetent this government is. There’s a U-turn every other week. You can get some things wrong but you can’t get everything wrong. And yes, if you change your policy you admit you got it wrong. So I guess it’s good that they U-turned and abandoned their stupid policies but it also shows they’re incompetent. Thank Labour for holding the government to account.
@M. H. Who’s talking about Brexit? Are you you okay? Keir Starmer said that the government should change their policy. He was also right 10 or so other times when the government U-turned. He never said Gavin should resign so who’s ‘forcing resignations’? I think Bojo and his cronies have only shown how incompetent and corrupt they are.
M. H. No, you didn’t say ‘we should move on from Brexit’. You said ‘Please move on from Brexit’. You’re the one who brought it up and I still don’t know why as no one else mentioned Brexit 🤷♂️ It’s simply not relevant. He wasn’t hassled by Labour. The media and Piers Morgan were pushing for this but Keir Starmer never said Gavin should resign. Maybe some Labour MP’s said he should resign but some Tory MP’s think he should resign too so it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the first time and not the last time the government U-turns and does what Starmer said they should do.
@@commercio3564 i'm going to go out on a limb and say, based on the context, the average viewer of TLDR News, the general consensus in the media and the FACT THEY PUT AN EFFIN' WINKY FACE AFTER THE COMMENT, that they're taking the piss somewhat
When I did my A Levels I was predicted ABC, in the real exams I worked my bollocks off and managed to get A*AA.... I went to an "inadequate school" where the majority of students never got above a C grade. So I imagine under this system I would have received something like CCD. This is the same for any student who grew up in a poor derived area and took initiative to work hard and defeat the odds... Meanwhile, a lazy student in a top private school is predicted AAA, they get given A*A*A, but if they had actually taken the exam they would have got BBB. The system's bias is not a mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to inflate private school grades and inhibit social mobility under the disguise of an algorithm.
Okay what do you propose then? How would any system give you A* A A after being predicted ABC without hugely inflating everyone’s grades and making A*’s useless? This system is incredibly harsh for anyone who is in current year 12. They now have to compete for uni places with students that have deferred with around 40% higher grades than any other year.
@@matthewmaylin2268 To be honest I don't have a proposal for a solution, I think that the current U turn is the lesser of two evils but I honestly don't think there is a fair way to asses students who haven't even sat an exam, in any case the grades are kind of meaningless. Maybe I am missing something but I think the solution that could (and I emphasis could, as its too late now) have been achieved would be socially distanced exams, perhaps on scattered dates to accommodate for smaller capacity, and to prevent leakage of exam questions there could be slightly different exam questions on each date but the overall results could be normally distributed for each date, something like that?
Other proposals for alternatives that could have been considered; online exams (though it could be hard to prevent cheating), delayed exam dates, weighted combination of coursework assessments alongside previous mock exam results... I am not expert on this, but I am sure there are many alternatives as other countries seemed to manage okay
@@liamp487 There is no easy solution. Delayed exams couldn't work as we didn't (still don't) know when the virus will have calmed down enough for it to be "safe". A full exam period in November would have dragged students away from their A-levels or university studies. Staggered, socially-distanced exams would require a tremendous amount of new exam material to be created in a very short time. Online exams disenfranchise poorer students who may not have access to adequate tech - and you just know the government would have given the contract to Capita. Gove removed graded coursework from most subjects, so that's not an option. Some other countries did okay, but in general they don't have these high-stakes exams at age 16 and 18 (Finland is a great example). We have retained them because influential business leaders and universities insist that without exam grades, they can't possibly know who the best candidate for a job is - presumably they've never heard of application letters, references, interviews, or probation periods. Some people have been pushing for years for the high-stakes exams to be scrapped, but there has been no appetite for this in government. And with schools closing only 2 months before the exam period, there wasn't time to create a new system from scratch. I suppose the government could have abolished exams permanently, but a change so big in such a short time would have been even more chaotic; and abolishing grades just for this year's cohort would have led to the whole year group being disadvantaged for the rest of their lives when applying for jobs. I'm a teacher, and I think the government - of which I'm not fond - handled this badly. But even I admit there's probably no "perfect" solution in this case.
You're definitely right to an extent liam, the algorithm was inaccurate and advantaged private schools! However, the statistics are being exagerrated by TLDR here. TLDR only looks at the absolute rise in percentages of studetns at private schools getting top grades vs state schools, when they should look at the rise as a proportion of what those school types got last year. If 40% at private schools got an A*/A in 2019, a rise to 44% in 2020 is a 10% proportional rise. If 20% at state comprehensive schools got A*/A in 2019, then 22% in 2020, that's also a 10% rise! Of course, looking at other types of state schools, private schools were marginally advantaged but it's nowhere near the levels that TLDR suggests.
I was like “Doesn’t sound like a bad algorithm” until they said CAGS have no weight for classes over 15. Why not put weight on all classes? Ofqual really messed up here.
I know, right‽ I've never been in a class of fewer than 25 in 15 years and most of the time, I'm in 30 pupil classes. How many classes in this country have fewer than 15‽
The issue is the smaller the sample size the lower the probability of previous years being representative of the current students, for example a subject with only 2 or 3 students if the previous years have had continuous D's and the current year had just A* you would see all the students get a D.This is effectively the same problem they had anyway just on a larger scale with outliers to previous years being misrepresented. 15 is the arbitrary number they picked where they decided the probability of it being representative above that was big enough to justify. Obviously it wasn't
@Garrett Canavan Thing Is I know a few people who didn't care at GCSE but got their act together for A level, I get the system was broken but there is no system that wouldn't be bar taking the exams
Billy Fox some classes are small, even in state schools. For example in my year there are only 5 further maths and 5 music students. So I guess I got kinda lucky
Let's be honest, no matter what the government did it was going to be unfair. The reality is that the only way to ensure fair grades was for students to actually sit the exams. The algorithim was unfair, and the U-turn is also unfair. The average grade now is seriously inflated and, put simply, an A or A* in 2020 is worth less than it would be in any other year. Many students will have received significantly higher grades than what they would have done if they actually sat the exams and this is shown by universities now struggling with too many people meeting their conditional offers. This also means that students who genuinely deserve top grades are joined by people who would never have achieved them in any other year. Reversely, and drastically more unfortunate, many students will have been awarded predicted grades significantly below what they are capable of actually getting if they sat the exams. So, I just think this whole situation is a mess and this year will go down as the year that A-Levels and GCSEs are meaningless.
Even more, grades in real one-time written exams don't even reflect the reality of how well prepared a students is for anything so in the end it's all very esoteric. The guy in this video even uses adjective such as dumb or smart referring to students which shows how most people miss the point of school test thinking it's some sort of scientific test that tells how intelligent some kid is. For what I've learned on my academic years is that ANY written test is unfair for some students and the one's that get the bes scores are typically far from being the "smartest" students
I don't get effected by exams since my Uni work is project based, but I agree that this year is going to be flagged for scrutiny. I'm still taking a break though (Most probably should) because I don't want outside influence to effect what feedback I'm given. I want realistic feedback I can improve on, not random shinanigans. It'll be nice to take the time off and save a bit more money and work on my own stuff for a while though. I don't see a problem with people using this as an opertunity to learn non acedemic skills, or more impressive acedemic skills in autonomy.
As a data scientist it is common practice to validate your model. So either they didnt validate it which shows they are stupid or they did and let private schools get a freebie. Either way those privileged kids will get a free pass to unis they didnt earn despite the u turn as i doubt they will let their grades get dropped
How can you validate or even calibrate your model unless you have a representative sample of students who actually took the real exam? Surely this is Statistics-101 ???
Private school daughter (obviously privileged!) expecting (all the evidence suggested) A (need for course) given a B. Do you appreciate that it is possible that a student a high performing school expecting A with 76% could be awarded B due ranking order where as a student at State Academy expecting A with 74% but ranked 1 (or 2, maybe 3) would get an A. Lower mark = higher grade. Unfair on everyone, not just "privileged" students!
@Daniel PG So you're happy with it happening again in the future? I'm not. Everything must be done to force the point that this is just not good enough from Government or Ofqual. One thing is certain, there was significant over grading going on throughout the CAGs.
@@RugbyLeagueSouth-Results no they were realistic predictions of what the Student should get on the day. they do not account for the numerous people having bad days on the exam day which was why most were moderated down. Teachers are not to blame here. My biology Teacher put so much effort in to try to get us good grades he would have been devastated to find that the effort he put in results in everyone in my class being dropped one to 2 grades including the Oxford offer holder for biology who got an A in biology when he needed a A*
John it was an algorithm... not the government. The algorithm was poorly coded by people working by a government funded org, not the government themselves
But what lead us to this point could have been avoidable, simply by trusting our teacher, governors and people in government, including the secretary of education, don’t teach the students yet they took their words against teachers, who clearly know more, and picked an algorithm that was bias towards students. The government let it happen, they even had 5 months to sort A-level and GCSE grade out...
In France, people get their university application results even before getting their A-level results. Students need to create a file with their grades from the past three years, they also have interviews. This is not the perfect system but at least this means that consistency is rewarded.
Teacher here. Just wanted to clarify something at 8:35. Even if we appealed the whole class's results to be based on their mock exams, the individual students would have received the higher of their moderated or mock results, due to the triple lock, so that's not why we were discouraged from appealing. This is a bit of a moot point anyway, as I doubt many schools were able to file their appeals in the few hours the guidelines were online!
Not to mention that students usually go up one or two grades between their mocks (if they are done on the same basis as the final exams) and the final exams, so using the mock results as a safety net would only protect a small minority of students.
@@stevieinselby From my experience final results are usually 10% better than their mock results. Only issue with using mock exams is the difficulty can hugely vary and some teachers may be more inclined to teach to them.
Well there was the threat in the appeals process that stated if a student successfully got thr grade upgraded on appeal could affect other students and move other students grades down as a result. This was why appeals were asked to be whole class. It also highlighted the system gave out grades as a finite resource to students. So if a subject had a large intake of students one year and the algorithm ran out of grades to award due to going off historical data of the school, then those students left would receive automatic U grades.
Teachers are actually pretty accurate with their grades. There is still unconscious bias for and against people from different backgrounds. But the teachers are pretty accurate on what a student will achieve on a good day. This algorithm was a disaster.
The problem is, if all teachers give the grades that would happen on a good day, so many more people end up with higher marks than usual. I guess that's not the biggest problem but it will cause problems for universities. I guess this is just highlighting the problem that so many people do have bad days when they sit their exams
Most teachers are pretty optimistic and lenient with their predictions. This year As and A*s will be meaningless because so many people will have them and not because they actually achieved those grades
I was the opposite, my grades would have been predicted perfectly. Although in all seriousness, it was never going to be perfect, but yeah this was a total shit show. Clearly no testing done, and for the time they had to figure this out...
In reality, there was no "right" way of going about this as there is no way to both give students the grades they believe they can achieve and make these grades realistic and fair. Centre assessed grades should of been used from the beginning. Taking into account factors such as past college peformance and especially class size is not only stupid but prejudice against students. Their grades were defined by what how well a college or sixth form did rather than the hard work, effort and dedication each student put in.
Use previous results data, add in historical trends, tell schools how many of each grade they can award and let them assess who gets the grades. Not perfect but fairer!
It's like they didn't even consider mocks though, as some students got lower than their mock grades and predicteds. I think the mock grade should have served as a boundary as the lowest grade a student can be given. From their it can only be the SAME or UP (based on the teachers predicted grade unless it was lower)
@@RugbyLeagueSouth-Results I still think this is a bad idea. Yes it's fairer, yes this may be the best solution possible, but that doesn't mean it's enough. Just because you tried your best to create an algorithm to solve this issue, doesn't mean your best was good enough to be accepted, or at least I don't accept this algorithm/all three locks to be good enough a solution to be used. Judging students on their previous results don't mean anything. Who cares about how a student performed last year/month, I want to know how they perform currently, after they have had more time to study, improve themselves, and receive feedback from their teachers. Some students don't study for mock exams because they don't matter, and during this time the student may choose to focus on completing a project, or working on some other important area of their life. I think it's also inherently unethical to give a student an informal assessment, then turn around later and tell them its actually going to count as their final exam. Algorithms can only ever work based on historical data. They inherently are not able to factor in a students potential to grow and improve. If I told you that an algorithm would decide your score based on your previous tests, there is no incentive to work hard anymore because none of that effort will be reflected in your final score. This system has no room for student agency, there is no hope for any student to better themselves or prove their worth despite doubts from their teachers. You could argue students had agency in that they could have studied harder for mocks and other inclass informal/formal assessments. But I don't think thats fair as they were never told how important those assessments would be. They never had the opportunity to put in the extra effort to prepare for what they believed would be a casual, non serious exam. I think an online exam should be administered instead. Despite all the flaws and difficulties of an online exam, the potential hacking and cheating, students disconnecting or not having the IT support needed etc. I think it is a fairer, better way to place students over what is currently being offered. It gives the students agency to actually affect their futures. They can study hard and do their best. All students will be on a level playing field (other than those too poor to afford stable internet so maybe not so level), and they could actually demonstrate their improvement.
I think you might be pleased to know that I personally refer to tldr fake news team as "scamdemic profiteering new world order sympathising schmucky cockwombles" :)
All the UK exams I took were in sports halls or assembly rooms with the desks spread out? It seems very possible to safely distance students in this scenario?
You they could have just used other rooms as well. I had lots of my exams outside of the main exam hall so they have systems for that and schools have lots of rooms and if they don't have enough there a plenty of other empty places to use.
the probllem isnt the exams, it was preparing for them during lockdown, with no certainty whatsoever of when it would be possible to do the exams. First of all it would have been incredibly unfair to finish the year, learning and preparing at home in lockdown since levels of support between schools would be massively different, and second of all there was no way of knowing where the pandemic would be at this point to be able to decide from early on if its possible to do the exams
@@Dinosmash I do understand that some school lessons were probably droopped but tbh most of the preparations for exams at this late stage is actually done from home and not in school. I would never go into an exam just with the prep I got at school or uni. You start preparing for exams months in advance if you want a good result.
@@hederahelix4600 school closed at the end of march. At that point, there is still lots we need from teachers, many schools (including mine) hadn't finished all the content in all subjects, and there is plenty of exam prep from teachers needed. Had it been in mid may when study leave is about to start it may have been a different story.
3:16 "Sounds like a good idea right?" No, it certainly does not sound like a good idea. It's based on what a teacher *thinks* a student might get, and adjusted to *past* performance. Both have potential for huge biases that no algorithm can reasonably correct for
@@aceywacey9871 That's true in a general sense but when it comes to the result that a student is actually going to get on a specific exam, I'd trust the old guy marking the exam (because he literally knows their result) than a teacher's guess at what their result should be. The thing I trust the least out of the three is some algo that pretends to be fair There are huge problems with standardized tests, obviously, but I don't think there is an alternative that even comes close when it comes to assigning a value to a student's competency
page 204 of the OfQal report on their algorithm shows that it was only at most 68% accurate when comparing its predictions against the 2019 actual results - yet they went ahead and used it because it was quite good at getting within one grade. Note dropping a grade in even one A level could be enough to lose your preferred place but the algorithm might drop a student one grade per A level and still be counted as a success according to this metric.
I am so glad I decided to leave after my AS exams despite being able to go back, if I'd have to deal with this bullshit I would've been livid. The whole point of education is to provide you the nessessary skills and qualifications to enter the workforce, yet the qualifications you'd get at a public school would be lowered, ensuring you have less chances once you start looking for a job, this will be devastating to working class students who could never afford private schools, and they'll likely never get a stable job living paycheck to paycheck. This wouldn't have happened had the algorithm been made non biased. The "lesson" to take away from this situation is this. Have a goddamn plan in place before you have to cobble together garbage that messes with kids.
Why should education be limited to workplace utilitarianism? Education should be gratuitous. F**k work - some of us have been at work long enough to know that there’s a life beyond it.
@@markofsaltburn Not education, 'schooling' is for work. Work pays (invests). If you want education, do it your own dime, its incredibly cheap these days.
I disagree, the algorithm is worthless and should never have been proposed as a solution in the first place. Whats the point of judging students based on past performances? Do you not care about the effort students put into learning and building off feedback? None of the effort a student put in between taking those mock exams/in school assessments and the final GCSE/A level exams are reflected in that historical data. I remember when I did my mock and then real IB exams years ago. The effort I put in to prepare for the mock and real exams were not even close to comparable and it would've been unethically unfair to take my mock IB exam and treat them as my final grade. I put a lot of effort between those formative assessments, mock tests, class assignments and the final test. To just discount all of that and say "well we didn't think any of those efforts you made were going to bear fruit anyway so here's your score based on how you did a year ago" is BS.
Buck Deniston Buck Deniston B****cks - you’re never more receptive and critical than when you’re young. We should be building minds, not compliant wage-monkeys to force into a system that isn’t working anymore. The economy and society will actually benefit more in the long term if we cultivate the enquiry, creativity and individuality that drives (amongst many other good things) entrepreneurship. I want schools that produce people, not workers.
This isn't the exception to the rule either. Dumb kids who went to private schools nearly always have favourable outcomes in life, just because their parents have money.
The teachers grades were too high, that is the fundamental problem no one wants to address. We now have massive grade inflation which is going to be a huge problem for universities. Could be a problem for students too if they get on to courses that they wont be able to finish. The other elephant in the room is that smaller class sizes and better funded schools do dramatically improve grades. It all very well to say that the algorithm favoured private schools but what we really need to address is the tragic variation in quality of education across state schools and between state and private.
teachers grades can often be high because the student has a bad day on the day of the exam. It doesn't change the students capability to cope with the rigours of a university course, or change their understanding of the concepts from the past 2 years.
@Rainbows & Butterflies It doesn't change the point I made. You've just made a case against existence of these exams not how they should be graded. Basically you strip a person of chance working hard for this exam and getting a better grade than his/her average grade.
@Brad Sanchez It's been proven that the GERS system was made to show Scotland running at deficits as the whole budget of Trident is put on Scotland even though it is UK Government spending
Can we stop pretending all private school kids had an advantage? I went to private school and all of my subject sizes were over 15 and I got unfairly downgraded.
here is how computer science goes: An algorithm is either "complete" or "heuristic"(a.k.a. greedy). For statistical problems like the exam result adjustments it's never a "complete" solution algorithm. Reason being you're working on partial data(of a large NP problem) in the first place. So what happens is that they run a(set of) heuristic algorithms that give "suggested" solutions to the problem. The thing with heuristic algorithms is that they NEVER give optimal solution. They do "somewhat good" solutions in some cases and awful or no solution in many cases. They are never good at running on a single set of data like in this case. What you get is "a solution" it's not even expected to be "a good solution" and is GUARANTEED NOT TO BE OPTIMAL SOLUTION. So anyone having any competence in computer algorithms could see that coming from miles.. many, many, many miles.
Right idea, by my penchant for pedantry is biting: - "Greedy" algorithms are complete algorithms. They always return an optimal solution to the specific subset of problems that can be tackled that way. They are not heuristic algorithms. - Something like guessing students' supposed test scores is well beyond an NP problem as there really isn't a "right" answer without actually performing the test. The best you can do is "probably right," which is a statistical problem (of course you might end up using some NP algorithms and some heuristics to compute the math behind the statistics, but that's not entirely the same thing conceptually.) - Heuristic algorithms absolutely can give optimal solutions. How likely that is depends on how many "optimal" solutions there are relative to how many "almost optimal" solutions there are, and certainly that tends to be a pretty low ratio for most cases we'd need heuristics for in the first place, but there's always the possibility that your heuristic algorithm will stumble upon a true optimal solution just by chance.
@@altrag Just on the pedantic side, per my post above: "complete solution"==="exhaustive solution"==="proven optimal solution". Heuristics just (sometimes) give "a solution". There is no proof of it's completeness involved in the process. Greedy is a type of heuristics that takes the "best guess" at each step. Yes heuristic algorithms can theoretically guess the optimal solutions in some trivial cases. In a problem space involved with the exam result problem, which is NP, and open in several ways, the chance of that happening ... is so low that it is just theoretical. Per a public post the word "never" describes it best. The only reason heuristic algorithm sets are used is for the ability to even produce "a solution" on such a computationally complex problem. As I said in my initial post the application of such methods is not for a single set of data issues where the individual solution points matter by themselves. It only works if you care for the solution as a whole and not it's individual parts. There are real life applications where that works "well" or to be more precise - we have nothing better.
Most countries in the EU took their exams mostly as planned. In my country senior level(after 12 grade applying for university) and junior year(after 7th grade, applying for highschool/college) students returned to school on 2(some more) separate days to take their exams. Distancing, masks, cleaning and other measures were taken. No massive drama whatsoever. No "awarding", "credit", "opinions" and that kind of crap. UK certainly is world beating in subjectivity.
It’s great to have this explained properly and without any confusion. I hate to jump immediately to conclusions and prefer to actually see what actually happened. I can now see that the results were definitely tilted towards smaller private schools. Why could the government not have seen this? Or maybe they did.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but the U-turn had to have been premeditated, seeing as giving CAGs straight away will make it impossible for Uni’s to deal with the influx of students with the the grade requirements/have firmed their offer. So using this BS socioeconomically discriminative model will make a lot of those students have to end up deferring a year or go through clearing whereas the private school kids get basically a free pass into some of the best universities. Why else would they not weigh CAGs for classes over 15? Then by announcing that they will use your mock grades, it makes them look as if they are doing it for our benefit, when in fact most of these students who have already been rejected by their Uni’s will most likely have their place taken by someone else. There were already a lot of students who planned on taking a gap year due to COVID impacting lectures and seminars so next years application process will be incredibly competitive, which also sucks for the year 12's going into year 13, having to compete with the year 13s who will have a years worth of extra experience on their resume.
It’s actually even worse for year 12’s. Current year 13’s have MASSIVELY inflated grades this year (around 40% higher than average). It’s great for the kids this year but screws over everyone else.
@@matthewmaylin2268 As a year 12 myself from a pretty bad state school, i can attest to the fact that we have been provided little to no support for our courses during lockdown. There will be many students like us with huge gaps in their learning that will have to catch up for next years exams (which are still gonna contain the whole content of the A levels) and have to work extra hard to compete for uni places too.
Matthew Maylin how is it great for the kids this year? 40% of students in year 13 had their grades downgraded by one or more grades, which means a lot of us lost the spots at university we had. There’s nothing great about these grades, essentially those already privileged in life were pushed forwards, and those disadvantaged were pushed back. Do you know how many people lost their firm and insurance spots? I don’t know why the year 12’s keep trying to push this woe is me narrative, when no one is winning in this situation.
I am a AS and A level student from India. Still waiting for the board to stop ignoring my country's situation and being completely inflexible about the exam schedule and syllabus.
I scored an A at GCSE's IT, an A at AS levels IT, im a spanish student with a not very good school. I was awarded a C, I had to go through clearing and I got york instead of UCl, as I was 2 grades below what I expected, now I have to cancel my clearing choice and make messages to Unis that I won't be sure will accept me as the courses are probably already full. All of this with stress and with a lot of things I had to do in the meantime. Thanks ofqual, you ignored all of the evidence my school sent you to prove I was an A student, you ignored it and proceeded to use the algorithm on me.
If you lost the subject ones in this system you cannot win in rewriting them again. IN my experience. If you start from begining and got two subject U this means that if the starting is not good the ending will be worst than this. My starting was same and in the end i lost two subjects. I didnt rewrite the exam in lost two exams because i know rewriting them will be very very very hard than final exam and they will eat our money.
Teacher predicted grades are unfair. Teachers who did not inflate grades are penalised. The only fair way is to say this year's grades are provisional unless the exams are actually taken
My A and AS students sat a dozen mock exams which I graded meticulously and other external teachers double-checked. We scanned dozens of pages of supporting evidence from classwork and trial exams. CIE asked for no evidence, knocked off 2 levels from their predictions... and it felt quite insulting to the sincere students who had worked so hard through lockdown. Algorithm-malgorith.... a relief to see the u-tirn, but emotionally exhausting for the kids.
I'd just add that because of confirmation biased, teachers also often give lower grades when marking exams of disadvantaged, BAME, and SEN pupils than if the same exams were marked anonymously.
If this fiasco had happened when I was at school I wouldn't have got my grade As in Music and Maths, and wouldn't have got my job in a band playing the isosceles triangle.
A couple of points here from a Scottish Student: - GCSEs are not equivalent to Scottish Highers. Although sat at the same age, GCSEs are more equivalent to National 5s, which are big part of the Scottish education system oddly omitted from the video. - You mention the SNP government and John Swinney, but fail to name Gavin Williamson and the Conservative government, which is again, odd. - Statistics for the Scottish exam results are readily available on the SQA website.
I got a Distinction in Engineering. I'm super happy but also feel guilty about it. Really would have preferred to sit all the exams and coursework but... it is what it is.
congrats, assuming its lvl 3 at least if u go onto further education like I did the unis can better accomodate working from home, also dont feal guilty, i had to take an internationally recognised exam online his year which due to covid the new papers hadn't been released so the board gave permission for us to use past papers, of which my class found before the exam so we knew all the answers from revising XD
The initial plan doesn't even sound reasonable! That is the wildest thing I have ever heard, I genuinely cannot believe someone thought that was a good idea in good faith. I'm an American and that plan makes ME mad, I can't imagine how livid I would be if I lived in the UK. Minimum a lot of people in the Education Ministry need to be fired.
I worked my ass of to outdo by predicted grades back when I was in A-level (10 years ago actually!) and was so glad. Can only imagine how bad it would feel to be robbed of that. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about this situation but now I know it is the complete definition of systemic discrimination!
I have NO faith in this government after both the Coronavirus situation and now A-level/ GCSE handling.... I will NEVER vote Conservative in my life......
For me failing most of my mock exams is what caused me to work harder and pass most of the real exams so I'm glad I'm no longer in school because if I was a GSCE student this year I would be completely screwed.
Honestly so pissed when I saw the government gave me ABC after my teachers submitted me at A*AA it was entirely of historical data and nothing to do with my work. In biology I had never once since the start of alevel got below an A and in my gcse I got a 9 but the government gave me a B ? In my physics I got a 9 at gcse and got a B's and A's in every single past test so the government went and gave me a C ? And my maths which they gave an A in i got a c in my mock so I didnt really deserve an A ? I'm so glad they did a u turn
So you’ve admitted that in a mock for maths you got a C, but your school predicted you an A. Shows what’s wrong with this system. You’ve now gained an “A in A-Level Maths” when there was probably a strong chance this wouldn’t have happened if you had to sit the exam . Hopefully future employers will be able to see through these fake and worthless results you have gained. Your degree will now be especially important for you and anything less than a first now will undermine any of your credibility.
@@computerbot2004 well I mean you realise that for my degree I only needed a B which I would have confidently got in my maths i think it would be disingenuous if I dont mention the flaws of the whole thing good or bad, but do I think that ABC is a better representation of what I would have got NO A*AA is definitely a closer outcome and no employers look at my alevels after I have my degree anyway you are talking out of your arse I wonder if the reason your so annoyed is bc school didn't go so well for you but i welcome some kind of rebuttal. Like what are you talking about if 'I didnt get a first it has no credibility' piss off 😂😂
@@computerbot2004 sorry, but that isn't true at all. In some subjects like Maths mocks often come out way lower, as there may be modules that you haven't completed or started that appear in the mock exams. It depends on the exam board and the syllabus, but it's not uncommon to sit a mock exam in January without having yet learned half of the paper.
SupremeLeader 33 well most employers will take these results with a pinch of salt in the future. You’ve received a qualification whilst never sitting an exam . If for instance, after now receiving grades of A*AA you get a 2:2 or a 2:1, most employers will take that uni degree as a true representation of your abilities. If you can’t see that, or fail to see that I’m afraid you’re slightly deluded. There is and will always remain a strong element of doubt over these A Level and GCSE results. The whole thing has been a farce and it is laughable that qualifications are being given out when the exam has never been sat. A lot of the people sitting A Levels seem to feel entitled to good grades- that’s not how life works. These type of people will receive a sharp dose of reality once in working life. You’re not owed anything...
@@computerbot2004 i completely and wholey agree that the grade of my degree is the best measure of my ability ultimately I would be more than happy with a 2.1 and most employers would too. And my alevels are definitely a second to that, that is obvious to everyone but what would you have the government do ? They fucked up with this algorithm thats a fact
For most schools, teachers already have to produce teacher forecasts, which are based off recent exams, and I imagine that many schools will have enforced it that they had to be used. Obviously, I understand that there will be exceptions, but at most schools, the grades will have been based off those teacher forecasts, which are based off exams rather than the teachers' actual estimates.
The CAGs are not predicted grades. As a teacher who went through the process, we spent over a month taking information about each child into account, including but not limited to their mock result, progress in topic tests, classwork, homework, past year's performances, tendancy to cram before an exam and finally our teacher professional judgement. Then these factors were assigned a weighting which were then debated with the teachers within the department and the head of department. Then these results went to the senior team who scrutinised our methods, compared the data with our results in the past (to mitigate against the potential changes due to the algorithm) and looked at each student's CAGs across all subjects. Finally when all are satisfied, these grades were sent off. These are not grades dreamed up by 1 teacher and for them to be ignored with larger cohort sizes is simply insulting.
@@Tobiasfowler Exactly, yeah. 😂 As a wise man once said, '[d]on't tell someone how to do something. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.' Teachers are trained professionals and although, obviously, they're still human, which provides the opportunity for corruption and error, confirmation from other teachers will help to prevent this.
As somebody who goes to a Grammar School, I'll say the Algorithm was a god damn disaster. The grade's biggest impact should be based upon The Individual and Teacher. I'd argue Grammar Schools may have more studious pupils and more dedicated teachers, but not by such a ridiculous margin which the Algorithm examined.
They usually say that the plan was better on paper, but this whole thing seemed like a mess from the get-go. Also, I am trying very hard to figure out why someone would have a whip on their desk...
Well this is, undoubtedly, a massive shit show. But in lieu of being able to take the actual final exams, it's hard to come up with any system that is going to be entirely fair (that's not to say it couldn't be fairer than this one). It obviously doesn't help now, but maybe in the future there should be less weight put on a single final exam? It seems like an antiquated system as it is. And I say that as somebody who took A levels many, many years ago and benefited from being good at taking exams but less good at staying motivated through an entire school year (or two). I did a lot better on my final exams than I expected to do.
In several subjects an essay would have done well as an exam substitute as well, with that even subjects where an online exam wouldn't have made much sense like English could have been covered
If I was top set and got a b, even if I deserved it but thought that I could get an A then obviously I’d protest this. Whatever you do this is going to happen
That's what they should have done back in May when they were working on it. But by mid-August when they were giving the results out, it was too late to go back and re-write it ... and politically impossible to withdraw grades that they had already given out and replace them with lower grades, especially where students had already accepted a university offer based on the grades they had been told first.
They couldn't do anything good for brexit which affects the whole country in over 4 years, they can't even make a contact tracing app for the pandemic, of course they weren't going to succeed at making an algorithm that worked. It's what happens when you pick the privileged mediocrity that rule the country over the very people they're gatekeeping who would actually do the job properly
The idea of predicting students' grades works great on population or even school level but trying to predict individual grades is a bad idea. This is how we did it in Croatia. Year 12 students came to the school and they simply took the exam. We had several epidemiological measures in place like the obligatory use of disinfectant, fewer students per classroom, compulsory masks for teachers etc. Since only year 12 students were in school, achieving proper students' protection was not a problem. The younger students can wait and take their exams later.
The kids could have sat the actual exams in the Summer under social distancing conditions (they always have to keep a distance anyway). There was plenty of time to get ready for that since the schools were closed in March. Exams are the only option to be fair.
Private Education in the UK is a major export industry, under a totally nationalised system the hundreds of thousands of foreign students would not come to British Private Schools, let's not shut down one of the few exports we have left
I find it crazy that secondary schools don't make use of predicted grades and milestones considering the fact that they are potentially the most important time for a student to be able to monitor their performance in any and all classes, and to predict their final grade. I am currently studying in Telford College, and every unit for the course is monitored with Pass, Merit, and Distinction criteria, which eventually evaluate into UCAS points. Based on my performance at each stage of college, my predicted grade (P/M/D) is updated. A similar system could easily be implemented in secondary schools (cit. I was educated in a public one) by breaking the yearly curriculum into units (which it may already be) and completing unit tests regularly in an environment that isn't as distracting and intimidating as the "Everyone sit 3-ft apart in complete silence in the most echo-y gym hall ever while teachers *constantly* look over your shoulder and pace around". As a result, in the final year where students would normally sit the GCSE or A-Level exams, when a problem like this occurs each student already has a predicted grade and a record of performance - which can then be bolstered by the teachers for the missing units irrespective of historical school performance. After all, schools can improve each year independently of their historical performance based on a wide array of factors. If i could *really* get my way; I would make Primary Schools (ages 5/6 - 11) consist of the core fundamentals for a child to progress in any field (math, national language, basic science, IT/Computers, etc) with only small dabbles of interesting and engaging lessons in other fields (history, geography, foreign language, etc). Secondary school would then follow on from that point where a student is able to properly make informed decisions on their education and what they would like to learn. And more specifically, be grouped by their strength in that field and not their age - exactly like College & University. The student's decisions on what fields they study can be made at the start of every year - with only the primary fields being a requirement (math, nat.lang, science, IT) - such that a kid can experiment with different subjects and choose to excel in what they enjoy. As it currently stands, in Secondary Schools (at least the one I went to) we had 6 Years of education, of which only the final 2 had any personal choice, and all of which were banded by age and not skill or experience. For 4 years I had to sit through multiple History, Religious Study, French, and German lessons a week despite having no appreciable interest or desire to learn them, and with no signs of aptitude despite honestly trying. In my final 2 years, I was still forced to take 2 courses I had no interest in due to the way the system worked, resulting in an average GCSE of (C-) rather than a (B+) if they were removed entirely.
I go to a private school and my peers and I were also heavily downgraded by the algorithm despite our school doing well historically. I was downgraded from a C in maths to an E, even though I never got an E in any maths exam. I think there is a high chance that the algorithm downgraded a lot of private school pupils as well in order for the government to avoid criticism regarding the economic position of the school playing a part in the grades received. This can also be seen through the fact that I was downgraded in my EPQ from an A to a B, even though I gave it in before lockdown and it was marked like in any other year.
In my country, teacher’s grades and exams are scored from 1 to 20, and both are taken into account for college applications. My school (state school) has an average difference between teacher’s and exam grade of 4 or 5 points, depending on the subject. Thus, since I had a teacher grade of 20 in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Maths, I was predicted to get 15-16 exam grades. I actually had 19-20 exam grades, well above the expected. Probably would have been penalised with the UK system. Here we still kept the exams during the pandemic, however they were optional (you only had to take the ones you would want to use in your college application). You should always have the opportunity to take the exam in my opinion.
The whole idea that someone has to fail, that, that is a problem, I've taken several classes over the years with absolutely zero fails, and that is a good thing, it means that class and students fucking worked. A failed exam is an indicator of only TWO things: A student that failed or a class that failed. Note, CLASS that failed, not teacher, the classes poor structure, irrellevant teachings and poor educator are all factors to consider, you can have a brilliant teacher, but if she/he/it has to teach fucking garbage, then the class has failed, not the teacher. That's it, a failed exam is either a student that fucked up or got sick or whatever OR a class that failed.
The problem is that with standardisation you can't have everyone succeeding. Let's say you have a class of 100 full of really good students. Each time you use a past paper they all score between 30 and 40 out of 40. Then if you decide to standardise the exam and apply what the gvt do every year, you will allocate something like the following: 5% of a* 10% of a 30 %of b 30% of c 15 % of d 5% of e 5% of u you need 5 students to have a U, you will take the one who have scored 30/40. Are they bad students? No they are just not the best but they are bloody good! the system work like this on a bigger scale. How do you want a teacher to know the overall outcome of a nation to base their predictions. The teachers can only base their prediction using their knowledge of their students.
@@gchelem That is why companies that use rankings like that where someone has to be the worst and fired every year don't build really good teams. You could have all nobel laureates and still have to fire one as the worst each year. As a result they hire sacrificial people that don't have to do any work just to save the team. An exam should test if you have sufficient mastery of the material and not going for any distribution of students. That is a really evil system there where the more good students you have in a class and the more they work to help each other the worse the outcome is for them even though that is much better for all of us.
@@Immudzen This system is part of the capitalist psyche where the best are to be on top. This is why private schools thrive in Britain. The setting of private schools suit the system but not the setting of state schools. The system is rigged so the social elite wins at anytime.
Even as a student, I think it's hard to be tough on the government here and most people should give them some more credit and sympathy. They didn't want to go off teachers predictions and see unprecedented grade inflation, so the algorithm approach was really quite sensible, problem being as many angry news articles point out there have been some interesting results from it, such as students who got As in mocks getting given Bs, Cs and even Ds. Plus every year some people are going to be disspointed, the difference is this year, the dissapointed felt wronged since it'd been decided for them and they never got a chance to prove otherwise. At least the government changed their stance aswell, they could've just kept their heads down and tried to endure the shitstorm, but they did admit it was a bad system and change it.
Most private schools are academically selective, which means that students have to be quite intelligent already before they’re even allowed into the school; so it makes sense that they have a higher % of A*/A grades. Although, I do agree that the way the standardisation downgraded intelligent state school students was very unfair.
Yes, private schools will get a higher proportion of A*/A grades, no-one is disputing that. But what has happened this year is that that gap has widened extraordinarily, with private schools getting a *much, much higher* proportion of A*/A grades than they have done before, and seeing far more pupils moved up a grade or kept at the CAG compared with state schools and colleges.
So... they just guessed? Ridiculous. They should have at least just taken whatever marks the student had earned in classes and averaged those. That would have been more accurate.
@@taylorlynn2522 I personally don't support Bitcoin as a project for innumerous reasons but crypto-currency itself is great. I don't see what the problem is.
I went to a public school a decade ago and got As and A*s in every single subject for my GSCEs but all of my class sizes were over 15 so under this system I would have been punished hugely.
Let's be honest, the government U-turn is due to Dominic Raab being downgraded to Dominic Rbbb
Amazing
That's great
Cominid Rbbc *
actually he is a posh, private, Tory elitist so his grades would have gone the other way
Cominib Ra*a*a
RDFCD
If I had a pound for every U-turn of this government, I could almost afford a flat in London.
Loooool
if I'd have a pound for every u-turn governments world wide do I could afford half a kidney operation in the US
U-turns show how incompetent this government is. There’s a U-turn every other week. You can get some things wrong but you can’t get everything wrong. And yes, if you change your policy you admit you got it wrong. So I guess it’s good that they U-turned and abandoned their stupid policies but it also shows they’re incompetent. Thank Labour for holding the government to account.
@M. H. Who’s talking about Brexit? Are you you okay? Keir Starmer said that the government should change their policy. He was also right 10 or so other times when the government U-turned. He never said Gavin should resign so who’s ‘forcing resignations’? I think Bojo and his cronies have only shown how incompetent and corrupt they are.
M. H. No, you didn’t say ‘we should move on from Brexit’. You said ‘Please move on from Brexit’. You’re the one who brought it up and I still don’t know why as no one else mentioned Brexit 🤷♂️ It’s simply not relevant. He wasn’t hassled by Labour. The media and Piers Morgan were pushing for this but Keir Starmer never said Gavin should resign. Maybe some Labour MP’s said he should resign but some Tory MP’s think he should resign too so it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the first time and not the last time the government U-turns and does what Starmer said they should do.
"Do you think the government handled it well?"
Didn't know TLDR was breaking into comedy nowadays
What are you even meant to say to all this, even the government didn't think the government handled this well.
tldr fake news is a effing joke ;)
@@Albimar17 It's not fake, if it's posing a question to the audience. How old are you?
@@commercio3564 i'm going to go out on a limb and say, based on the context, the average viewer of TLDR News, the general consensus in the media and the FACT THEY PUT AN EFFIN' WINKY FACE AFTER THE COMMENT, that they're taking the piss somewhat
@@commercio3564 in my 30s and laughing all the way to the bank at the number of sheeple who blindly believe everything this channel tells them :)
Just thought I'd point out that iGCSEs are taken internationally and these changes also apply to the gcse students abroad.
I am an IGCSE student and we have already received our Cambridge moderated grades, does this mean that those grades will probably change?
Oh boii i'll recieve my edexcel ones tomorrow. I'll inform whether they gave me fair grades or not. 🤐😫
@@angelinahoussein1351 I hated IGCSE English
@@aaronthomas1226 dude I hated Chemistry...😅
@@angelinahoussein1351 bruh I hated physics
When I did my A Levels I was predicted ABC, in the real exams I worked my bollocks off and managed to get A*AA.... I went to an "inadequate school" where the majority of students never got above a C grade. So I imagine under this system I would have received something like CCD. This is the same for any student who grew up in a poor derived area and took initiative to work hard and defeat the odds...
Meanwhile, a lazy student in a top private school is predicted AAA, they get given A*A*A, but if they had actually taken the exam they would have got BBB. The system's bias is not a mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to inflate private school grades and inhibit social mobility under the disguise of an algorithm.
Okay what do you propose then? How would any system give you A* A A after being predicted ABC without hugely inflating everyone’s grades and making A*’s useless?
This system is incredibly harsh for anyone who is in current year 12. They now have to compete for uni places with students that have deferred with around 40% higher grades than any other year.
@@matthewmaylin2268 To be honest I don't have a proposal for a solution, I think that the current U turn is the lesser of two evils but I honestly don't think there is a fair way to asses students who haven't even sat an exam, in any case the grades are kind of meaningless.
Maybe I am missing something but I think the solution that could (and I emphasis could, as its too late now) have been achieved would be socially distanced exams, perhaps on scattered dates to accommodate for smaller capacity, and to prevent leakage of exam questions there could be slightly different exam questions on each date but the overall results could be normally distributed for each date, something like that?
Other proposals for alternatives that could have been considered; online exams (though it could be hard to prevent cheating), delayed exam dates, weighted combination of coursework assessments alongside previous mock exam results... I am not expert on this, but I am sure there are many alternatives as other countries seemed to manage okay
@@liamp487 There is no easy solution. Delayed exams couldn't work as we didn't (still don't) know when the virus will have calmed down enough for it to be "safe". A full exam period in November would have dragged students away from their A-levels or university studies. Staggered, socially-distanced exams would require a tremendous amount of new exam material to be created in a very short time. Online exams disenfranchise poorer students who may not have access to adequate tech - and you just know the government would have given the contract to Capita. Gove removed graded coursework from most subjects, so that's not an option.
Some other countries did okay, but in general they don't have these high-stakes exams at age 16 and 18 (Finland is a great example). We have retained them because influential business leaders and universities insist that without exam grades, they can't possibly know who the best candidate for a job is - presumably they've never heard of application letters, references, interviews, or probation periods.
Some people have been pushing for years for the high-stakes exams to be scrapped, but there has been no appetite for this in government. And with schools closing only 2 months before the exam period, there wasn't time to create a new system from scratch. I suppose the government could have abolished exams permanently, but a change so big in such a short time would have been even more chaotic; and abolishing grades just for this year's cohort would have led to the whole year group being disadvantaged for the rest of their lives when applying for jobs.
I'm a teacher, and I think the government - of which I'm not fond - handled this badly. But even I admit there's probably no "perfect" solution in this case.
You're definitely right to an extent liam, the algorithm was inaccurate and advantaged private schools! However, the statistics are being exagerrated by TLDR here. TLDR only looks at the absolute rise in percentages of studetns at private schools getting top grades vs state schools, when they should look at the rise as a proportion of what those school types got last year. If 40% at private schools got an A*/A in 2019, a rise to 44% in 2020 is a 10% proportional rise. If 20% at state comprehensive schools got A*/A in 2019, then 22% in 2020, that's also a 10% rise! Of course, looking at other types of state schools, private schools were marginally advantaged but it's nowhere near the levels that TLDR suggests.
I was like “Doesn’t sound like a bad algorithm” until they said CAGS have no weight for classes over 15. Why not put weight on all classes? Ofqual really messed up here.
I know, right‽ I've never been in a class of fewer than 25 in 15 years and most of the time, I'm in 30 pupil classes. How many classes in this country have fewer than 15‽
The issue is the smaller the sample size the lower the probability of previous years being representative of the current students, for example a subject with only 2 or 3 students if the previous years have had continuous D's and the current year had just A* you would see all the students get a D.This is effectively the same problem they had anyway just on a larger scale with outliers to previous years being misrepresented. 15 is the arbitrary number they picked where they decided the probability of it being representative above that was big enough to justify. Obviously it wasn't
@Garrett Canavan Thing Is I know a few people who didn't care at GCSE but got their act together for A level, I get the system was broken but there is no system that wouldn't be bar taking the exams
Not enough data for the algorithm to work properly. Still sucks tho
Billy Fox some classes are small, even in state schools. For example in my year there are only 5 further maths and 5 music students. So I guess I got kinda lucky
I did an extra year of A-levels hoping to get better grades and honestly I felt I wasted a year at first because of this whole fiasco
Damn that’s unlucky
And now? Are you o.k, with your grades?
I don't care, you didn't earn those grades like the rest of us.
Portuguese Turban Guy need some tissues ?
@@SquirrelKnight50 you seem upset need some tissues?
Let's be honest, no matter what the government did it was going to be unfair. The reality is that the only way to ensure fair grades was for students to actually sit the exams. The algorithim was unfair, and the U-turn is also unfair. The average grade now is seriously inflated and, put simply, an A or A* in 2020 is worth less than it would be in any other year. Many students will have received significantly higher grades than what they would have done if they actually sat the exams and this is shown by universities now struggling with too many people meeting their conditional offers. This also means that students who genuinely deserve top grades are joined by people who would never have achieved them in any other year. Reversely, and drastically more unfortunate, many students will have been awarded predicted grades significantly below what they are capable of actually getting if they sat the exams. So, I just think this whole situation is a mess and this year will go down as the year that A-Levels and GCSEs are meaningless.
Even more, grades in real one-time written exams don't even reflect the reality of how well prepared a students is for anything so in the end it's all very esoteric. The guy in this video even uses adjective such as dumb or smart referring to students which shows how most people miss the point of school test thinking it's some sort of scientific test that tells how intelligent some kid is. For what I've learned on my academic years is that ANY written test is unfair for some students and the one's that get the bes scores are typically far from being the "smartest" students
I don't get effected by exams since my Uni work is project based, but I agree that this year is going to be flagged for scrutiny. I'm still taking a break though (Most probably should) because I don't want outside influence to effect what feedback I'm given. I want realistic feedback I can improve on, not random shinanigans. It'll be nice to take the time off and save a bit more money and work on my own stuff for a while though. I don't see a problem with people using this as an opertunity to learn non acedemic skills, or more impressive acedemic skills in autonomy.
I mean, they’re pretty meaningless anyway. Any job that requires a degree isn’t going to care what GCSEs you have.
@@Ultima2876 To be fair, I never had any GCSEs and still got into university and work with no problem.
True, but the algorithm could definitely have been fairer. The people behind it really messed it up.
I thought they would use the student's performance history to give the A-level results, not school's history
And I can't understand why they didn't.
As a data scientist it is common practice to validate your model. So either they didnt validate it which shows they are stupid or they did and let private schools get a freebie. Either way those privileged kids will get a free pass to unis they didnt earn despite the u turn as i doubt they will let their grades get dropped
Well, they get "whichever is the highest" so you're right on the money there.
How can you validate or even calibrate your model unless you have a representative sample of students who actually took the real exam? Surely this is Statistics-101 ???
Private school daughter (obviously privileged!) expecting (all the evidence suggested) A (need for course) given a B. Do you appreciate that it is possible that a student a high performing school expecting A with 76% could be awarded B due ranking order where as a student at State Academy expecting A with 74% but ranked 1 (or 2, maybe 3) would get an A. Lower mark = higher grade. Unfair on everyone, not just "privileged" students!
@Daniel PG So you're happy with it happening again in the future? I'm not. Everything must be done to force the point that this is just not good enough from Government or Ofqual. One thing is certain, there was significant over grading going on throughout the CAGs.
@@RugbyLeagueSouth-Results no they were realistic predictions of what the Student should get on the day. they do not account for the numerous people having bad days on the exam day which was why most were moderated down. Teachers are not to blame here. My biology Teacher put so much effort in to try to get us good grades he would have been devastated to find that the effort he put in results in everyone in my class being dropped one to 2 grades including the Oxford offer holder for biology who got an A in biology when he needed a A*
GCSE results day tomorrow good luck lads
ThAanks
Thank you
Thanks
Oh christ
Oh boy
Request to UK: Please don't screw up anymore.
LOL! Some hope of that ... sadly!
Uk lol no
There can be no “fair” system without standardised exams for all. End of story.
Yup
Our government is so unreliable and extremely irresponsible...
John it was an algorithm... not the government. The algorithm was poorly coded by people working by a government funded org, not the government themselves
Billbo MC Sir are you familiar with the word obtuse? If not, may I suggest you look it up. Respectfully, etc.
But what lead us to this point could have been avoidable, simply by trusting our teacher, governors and people in government, including the secretary of education, don’t teach the students yet they took their words against teachers, who clearly know more, and picked an algorithm that was bias towards students. The government let it happen, they even had 5 months to sort A-level and GCSE grade out...
@@BillboMC yes ... God's algorithm ... nobody could face it
In France, people get their university application results even before getting their A-level results. Students need to create a file with their grades from the past three years, they also have interviews. This is not the perfect system but at least this means that consistency is rewarded.
Teacher here. Just wanted to clarify something at 8:35. Even if we appealed the whole class's results to be based on their mock exams, the individual students would have received the higher of their moderated or mock results, due to the triple lock, so that's not why we were discouraged from appealing. This is a bit of a moot point anyway, as I doubt many schools were able to file their appeals in the few hours the guidelines were online!
what you on about?
Not to mention that students usually go up one or two grades between their mocks (if they are done on the same basis as the final exams) and the final exams, so using the mock results as a safety net would only protect a small minority of students.
@@stevieinselby From my experience final results are usually 10% better than their mock results. Only issue with using mock exams is the difficulty can hugely vary and some teachers may be more inclined to teach to them.
Well there was the threat in the appeals process that stated if a student successfully got thr grade upgraded on appeal could affect other students and move other students grades down as a result. This was why appeals were asked to be whole class. It also highlighted the system gave out grades as a finite resource to students. So if a subject had a large intake of students one year and the algorithm ran out of grades to award due to going off historical data of the school, then those students left would receive automatic U grades.
Government didn't handle it well, I was downgraded by two grades in all my subjects!!!
I have results day tomorrow. This week has been a rollercoaster.
Good luck
Rollercoaster crash*
Same😭!
same! im actually so scared.
SAME!!! so scared about this!
Teachers are actually pretty accurate with their grades. There is still unconscious bias for and against people from different backgrounds. But the teachers are pretty accurate on what a student will achieve on a good day. This algorithm was a disaster.
The problem is, if all teachers give the grades that would happen on a good day, so many more people end up with higher marks than usual. I guess that's not the biggest problem but it will cause problems for universities. I guess this is just highlighting the problem that so many people do have bad days when they sit their exams
They haven't been though, historically. In the past, many people have done much worse on their exams than their predicted grades
@@pequalsnpsquared2852 this is exactly the problem the algorithm was assigning people to have a bad day in the exam that's just not fair.
Most teachers are pretty optimistic and lenient with their predictions. This year As and A*s will be meaningless because so many people will have them and not because they actually achieved those grades
I was the opposite, my grades would have been predicted perfectly.
Although in all seriousness, it was never going to be perfect, but yeah this was a total shit show. Clearly no testing done, and for the time they had to figure this out...
Solid question:
"Is there ANYTHING this goverment has started that they actually finished, without scrapping 'it'?!"
Brexit
@@MEATBALLmonty That has changed so many times it isn't even worth mentioning...
Wichnam HS2, at the moment...
cuminic domings' journey to the centre of durham maybe?
Y should I be punished for the “historical performance” of latter students
@God Himself bruh
In reality, there was no "right" way of going about this as there is no way to both give students the grades they believe they can achieve and make these grades realistic and fair. Centre assessed grades should of been used from the beginning. Taking into account factors such as past college peformance and especially class size is not only stupid but prejudice against students. Their grades were defined by what how well a college or sixth form did rather than the hard work, effort and dedication each student put in.
Use previous results data, add in historical trends, tell schools how many of each grade they can award and let them assess who gets the grades. Not perfect but fairer!
It's like they didn't even consider mocks though, as some students got lower than their mock grades and predicteds. I think the mock grade should have served as a boundary as the lowest grade a student can be given. From their it can only be the SAME or UP (based on the teachers predicted grade unless it was lower)
@@RugbyLeagueSouth-Results I still think this is a bad idea. Yes it's fairer, yes this may be the best solution possible, but that doesn't mean it's enough. Just because you tried your best to create an algorithm to solve this issue, doesn't mean your best was good enough to be accepted, or at least I don't accept this algorithm/all three locks to be good enough a solution to be used. Judging students on their previous results don't mean anything. Who cares about how a student performed last year/month, I want to know how they perform currently, after they have had more time to study, improve themselves, and receive feedback from their teachers. Some students don't study for mock exams because they don't matter, and during this time the student may choose to focus on completing a project, or working on some other important area of their life. I think it's also inherently unethical to give a student an informal assessment, then turn around later and tell them its actually going to count as their final exam. Algorithms can only ever work based on historical data. They inherently are not able to factor in a students potential to grow and improve. If I told you that an algorithm would decide your score based on your previous tests, there is no incentive to work hard anymore because none of that effort will be reflected in your final score. This system has no room for student agency, there is no hope for any student to better themselves or prove their worth despite doubts from their teachers. You could argue students had agency in that they could have studied harder for mocks and other inclass informal/formal assessments. But I don't think thats fair as they were never told how important those assessments would be. They never had the opportunity to put in the extra effort to prepare for what they believed would be a casual, non serious exam.
I think an online exam should be administered instead. Despite all the flaws and difficulties of an online exam, the potential hacking and cheating, students disconnecting or not having the IT support needed etc. I think it is a fairer, better way to place students over what is currently being offered. It gives the students agency to actually affect their futures. They can study hard and do their best. All students will be on a level playing field (other than those too poor to afford stable internet so maybe not so level), and they could actually demonstrate their improvement.
I was awarded grades two levels higher in my A levels than I was predicted, if this algorithm had happened to me I would have been screwed
Do you go to a private school by any chance ?
@@andrewmelton2686 He probably is a past candidate
Same with my gcse's at 5 grades higher.
@@andrewmelton2686 I did not go to a private school no
po long Mine were increased by the algorithm and I did not go to a private school
I didn’t think I’d hear you say “uturn laden omnishambles” but I’m so glad I did
"U-Turn laden omni-shambles" perfectly describes everything that's happened since the Tories have been in government
I think you might be pleased to know that I personally refer to tldr fake news team as "scamdemic profiteering new world order sympathising schmucky cockwombles" :)
@@Albimar17 oh you're so funny. Please, tell us another joke! I'd happily sit here all day laughing at your stupid comments.
@@Albimar17 you tinfoil hat must be so large that it makes you look like an antenna
@@cloodberst if ye think so, obviously you need to get yer eyesight tested. twat :)
"Filling a room full of students taking exams wasn't possible this summer"
Germany: Doubt it
All the UK exams I took were in sports halls or assembly rooms with the desks spread out? It seems very possible to safely distance students in this scenario?
You they could have just used other rooms as well. I had lots of my exams outside of the main exam hall so they have systems for that and schools have lots of rooms and if they don't have enough there a plenty of other empty places to use.
the probllem isnt the exams, it was preparing for them during lockdown, with no certainty whatsoever of when it would be possible to do the exams. First of all it would have been incredibly unfair to finish the year, learning and preparing at home in lockdown since levels of support between schools would be massively different, and second of all there was no way of knowing where the pandemic would be at this point to be able to decide from early on if its possible to do the exams
@@Dinosmash I do understand that some school lessons were probably droopped but tbh most of the preparations for exams at this late stage is actually done from home and not in school. I would never go into an exam just with the prep I got at school or uni. You start preparing for exams months in advance if you want a good result.
@@hederahelix4600 school closed at the end of march. At that point, there is still lots we need from teachers, many schools (including mine) hadn't finished all the content in all subjects, and there is plenty of exam prep from teachers needed. Had it been in mid may when study leave is about to start it may have been a different story.
3:16 "Sounds like a good idea right?"
No, it certainly does not sound like a good idea. It's based on what a teacher *thinks* a student might get, and adjusted to *past* performance. Both have potential for huge biases that no algorithm can reasonably correct for
To be fair a teacher has a fair better idea on what a student is capable of rather than some old guy who looks at an exam
@@aceywacey9871 That's true in a general sense but when it comes to the result that a student is actually going to get on a specific exam, I'd trust the old guy marking the exam (because he literally knows their result) than a teacher's guess at what their result should be. The thing I trust the least out of the three is some algo that pretends to be fair
There are huge problems with standardized tests, obviously, but I don't think there is an alternative that even comes close when it comes to assigning a value to a student's competency
page 204 of the OfQal report on their algorithm shows that it was only at most 68% accurate when comparing its predictions against the 2019 actual results - yet they went ahead and used it because it was quite good at getting within one grade. Note dropping a grade in even one A level could be enough to lose your preferred place but the algorithm might drop a student one grade per A level and still be counted as a success according to this metric.
*The government should do a better way and have coped with the situation.*
your joking right?
Al Mack *No*
I am so glad I decided to leave after my AS exams despite being able to go back, if I'd have to deal with this bullshit I would've been livid. The whole point of education is to provide you the nessessary skills and qualifications to enter the workforce, yet the qualifications you'd get at a public school would be lowered, ensuring you have less chances once you start looking for a job, this will be devastating to working class students who could never afford private schools, and they'll likely never get a stable job living paycheck to paycheck. This wouldn't have happened had the algorithm been made non biased. The "lesson" to take away from this situation is this. Have a goddamn plan in place before you have to cobble together garbage that messes with kids.
Why should education be limited to workplace utilitarianism? Education should be gratuitous. F**k work - some of us have been at work long enough to know that there’s a life beyond it.
By 'public school' I'm sure he means 'state school' here.
@@markofsaltburn Not education, 'schooling' is for work. Work pays (invests). If you want education, do it your own dime, its incredibly cheap these days.
I disagree, the algorithm is worthless and should never have been proposed as a solution in the first place. Whats the point of judging students based on past performances? Do you not care about the effort students put into learning and building off feedback? None of the effort a student put in between taking those mock exams/in school assessments and the final GCSE/A level exams are reflected in that historical data. I remember when I did my mock and then real IB exams years ago. The effort I put in to prepare for the mock and real exams were not even close to comparable and it would've been unethically unfair to take my mock IB exam and treat them as my final grade. I put a lot of effort between those formative assessments, mock tests, class assignments and the final test. To just discount all of that and say "well we didn't think any of those efforts you made were going to bear fruit anyway so here's your score based on how you did a year ago" is BS.
Buck Deniston Buck Deniston B****cks - you’re never more receptive and critical than when you’re young. We should be building minds, not compliant wage-monkeys to force into a system that isn’t working anymore. The economy and society will actually benefit more in the long term if we cultivate the enquiry, creativity and individuality that drives (amongst many other good things) entrepreneurship. I want schools that produce people, not workers.
This isn't the exception to the rule either. Dumb kids who went to private schools nearly always have favourable outcomes in life, just because their parents have money.
And contacts they make in school. Its all about who you know.
@@ilkkll5210 exactly
The teachers grades were too high, that is the fundamental problem no one wants to address. We now have massive grade inflation which is going to be a huge problem for universities. Could be a problem for students too if they get on to courses that they wont be able to finish.
The other elephant in the room is that smaller class sizes and better funded schools do dramatically improve grades. It all very well to say that the algorithm favoured private schools but what we really need to address is the tragic variation in quality of education across state schools and between state and private.
all school eff you up equally, i dont see the difference there...
teachers grades can often be high because the student has a bad day on the day of the exam. It doesn't change the students capability to cope with the rigours of a university course, or change their understanding of the concepts from the past 2 years.
Too many people are going to uni when they shouldn't
Blair started this bullshit
Grading a person based on a exam he didn't take is a bad idea no matter the method.
@Rainbows & Butterflies It doesn't change the point I made. You've just made a case against existence of these exams not how they should be graded.
Basically you strip a person of chance working hard for this exam and getting a better grade than his/her average grade.
N5s are Scotland’s GCSE equivalent and Highers are AS Levels and Advanced Higher are A Level
mchibs62 Who’s going to pay for your university place when you leave? We won’t anymore.
Tristram Randall the Scottish Taxpayers as they are right now Scotland gets less back in budget than they pay to the UK in taxes
@Brad Sanchez It's been proven that the GERS system was made to show Scotland running at deficits as the whole budget of Trident is put on Scotland even though it is UK Government spending
Gove killed AS levels in England
Can we stop pretending all private school kids had an advantage? I went to private school and all of my subject sizes were over 15 and I got unfairly downgraded.
Good lol
Living AngryCheese 94.5% of independent school headteachers have reported of grades being downgraded.
But the problem with going off teacher judgment is some teachers are more lenient than others which is unfair on some students
I missed half of math attendance because I had to go hospital but I was predicted a 4 I think. So scared 😅😐
Elliot Poole You can appeal that to the exam board with evidence.
here is how computer science goes: An algorithm is either "complete" or "heuristic"(a.k.a. greedy). For statistical problems like the exam result adjustments it's never a "complete" solution algorithm. Reason being you're working on partial data(of a large NP problem) in the first place. So what happens is that they run a(set of) heuristic algorithms that give "suggested" solutions to the problem.
The thing with heuristic algorithms is that they NEVER give optimal solution. They do "somewhat good" solutions in some cases and awful or no solution in many cases. They are never good at running on a single set of data like in this case.
What you get is "a solution" it's not even expected to be "a good solution" and is GUARANTEED NOT TO BE OPTIMAL SOLUTION.
So anyone having any competence in computer algorithms could see that coming from miles.. many, many, many miles.
Right idea, by my penchant for pedantry is biting:
- "Greedy" algorithms are complete algorithms. They always return an optimal solution to the specific subset of problems that can be tackled that way. They are not heuristic algorithms.
- Something like guessing students' supposed test scores is well beyond an NP problem as there really isn't a "right" answer without actually performing the test. The best you can do is "probably right," which is a statistical problem (of course you might end up using some NP algorithms and some heuristics to compute the math behind the statistics, but that's not entirely the same thing conceptually.)
- Heuristic algorithms absolutely can give optimal solutions. How likely that is depends on how many "optimal" solutions there are relative to how many "almost optimal" solutions there are, and certainly that tends to be a pretty low ratio for most cases we'd need heuristics for in the first place, but there's always the possibility that your heuristic algorithm will stumble upon a true optimal solution just by chance.
@@altrag Just on the pedantic side, per my post above: "complete solution"==="exhaustive solution"==="proven optimal solution".
Heuristics just (sometimes) give "a solution". There is no proof of it's completeness involved in the process. Greedy is a type of heuristics that takes the "best guess" at each step.
Yes heuristic algorithms can theoretically guess the optimal solutions in some trivial cases. In a problem space involved with the exam result problem, which is NP, and open in several ways, the chance of that happening ... is so low that it is just theoretical. Per a public post the word "never" describes it best.
The only reason heuristic algorithm sets are used is for the ability to even produce "a solution" on such a computationally complex problem. As I said in my initial post the application of such methods is not for a single set of data issues where the individual solution points matter by themselves. It only works if you care for the solution as a whole and not it's individual parts. There are real life applications where that works "well" or to be more precise - we have nothing better.
Most countries in the EU took their exams mostly as planned. In my country senior level(after 12 grade applying for university) and junior year(after 7th grade, applying for highschool/college) students returned to school on 2(some more) separate days to take their exams. Distancing, masks, cleaning and other measures were taken. No massive drama whatsoever. No "awarding", "credit", "opinions" and that kind of crap. UK certainly is world beating in subjectivity.
Government handling anything this year has been a joke.
And what would labour or the lib dems do?
Exactly nothing
They provide no sensible alternative
I'll be honest, this was fun to watch
It’s great to have this explained properly and without any confusion. I hate to jump immediately to conclusions and prefer to actually see what actually happened. I can now see that the results were definitely tilted towards smaller private schools. Why could the government not have seen this? Or maybe they did.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but the U-turn had to have been premeditated, seeing as giving CAGs straight away will make it impossible for Uni’s to deal with the influx of students with the the grade requirements/have firmed their offer. So using this BS socioeconomically discriminative model will make a lot of those students have to end up deferring a year or go through clearing whereas the private school kids get basically a free pass into some of the best universities. Why else would they not weigh CAGs for classes over 15?
Then by announcing that they will use your mock grades, it makes them look as if they are doing it for our benefit, when in fact most of these students who have already been rejected by their Uni’s will most likely have their place taken by someone else.
There were already a lot of students who planned on taking a gap year due to COVID impacting lectures and seminars so next years application process will be incredibly competitive, which also sucks for the year 12's going into year 13, having to compete with the year 13s who will have a years worth of extra experience on their resume.
It’s actually even worse for year 12’s. Current year 13’s have MASSIVELY inflated grades this year (around 40% higher than average). It’s great for the kids this year but screws over everyone else.
@@matthewmaylin2268 As a year 12 myself from a pretty bad state school, i can attest to the fact that we have been provided little to no support for our courses during lockdown. There will be many students like us with huge gaps in their learning that will have to catch up for next years exams (which are still gonna contain the whole content of the A levels) and have to work extra hard to compete for uni places too.
If if a lot of students are taking a gap year, wouldn’t that free up space for more students?
Polaris 5 How do you know it’ll double the amount of people applying?
Matthew Maylin how is it great for the kids this year? 40% of students in year 13 had their grades downgraded by one or more grades, which means a lot of us lost the spots at university we had. There’s nothing great about these grades, essentially those already privileged in life were pushed forwards, and those disadvantaged were pushed back. Do you know how many people lost their firm and insurance spots? I don’t know why the year 12’s keep trying to push this woe is me narrative, when no one is winning in this situation.
I am a AS and A level student from India. Still waiting for the board to stop ignoring my country's situation and being completely inflexible about the exam schedule and syllabus.
I scored an A at GCSE's IT, an A at AS levels IT, im a spanish student with a not very good school. I was awarded a C, I had to go through clearing and I got york instead of UCl, as I was 2 grades below what I expected, now I have to cancel my clearing choice and make messages to Unis that I won't be sure will accept me as the courses are probably already full. All of this with stress and with a lot of things I had to do in the meantime. Thanks ofqual, you ignored all of the evidence my school sent you to prove I was an A student, you ignored it and proceeded to use the algorithm on me.
Abrazos Asombrosos so you are saying you were in a class of students that received no weighted CAGS Grades?
If you lost the subject ones in this system you cannot win in rewriting them again.
IN my experience. If you start from begining and got two subject U this means that if the starting is not good the ending will be worst than this. My starting was same and in the end i lost two subjects. I didnt rewrite the exam in lost two exams because i know rewriting them will be very very very hard than final exam and they will eat our money.
Teacher predicted grades are unfair. Teachers who did not inflate grades are penalised. The only fair way is to say this year's grades are provisional unless the exams are actually taken
Christopher Rutherford There is no incentive for teachers to inflate a grade.
Honestly the system seemed alright until they said CAGs have no weight in large classes. If they moderated it using CAGs I may have less complaints
Pay to win has gone to the next level.
Good luck to everyone getting their GCSE results tomorrow!
Thanks!
I'm so nervous 😰😰😰
Grace Abu me too! It’s going to be a longgg night tonight
Dawiggliestone
Hope you are pleased with your results!
Grace Abu and you! Extremely happy thanks 😊
My A and AS students sat a dozen mock exams which I graded meticulously and other external teachers double-checked. We scanned dozens of pages of supporting evidence from classwork and trial exams. CIE asked for no evidence, knocked off 2 levels from their predictions... and it felt quite insulting to the sincere students who had worked so hard through lockdown. Algorithm-malgorith.... a relief to see the u-tirn, but emotionally exhausting for the kids.
So we have an unfair system and eventually had a unfair system.....example.....usually 8% get A* in real exams and now the A* is now nearer to 14%.
I'd just add that because of confirmation biased, teachers also often give lower grades when marking exams of disadvantaged, BAME, and SEN pupils than if the same exams were marked anonymously.
If this fiasco had happened when I was at school I wouldn't have got my grade As in Music and Maths, and wouldn't have got my job in a band playing the isosceles triangle.
The occasional U-turn is a good thing. It shows the government is listening. However, having U-turn after U-turn after U-turn is really embarrassing.
So basically the whole thing was a gigantic dumpster fire.
Thanks for the video. TLDR is performing a function that BBC and mainstream media are failing to perform; explaining the issues behind the headlines.
It truly was an insane system, but I respect their acknowledgment and rectification of it.
A couple of points here from a Scottish Student:
- GCSEs are not equivalent to Scottish Highers. Although sat at the same age, GCSEs are more equivalent to National 5s, which are big part of the Scottish education system oddly omitted from the video.
- You mention the SNP government and John Swinney, but fail to name Gavin Williamson and the Conservative government, which is again, odd.
- Statistics for the Scottish exam results are readily available on the SQA website.
I got a Distinction in Engineering. I'm super happy but also feel guilty about it. Really would have preferred to sit all the exams and coursework but... it is what it is.
congrats, assuming its lvl 3 at least if u go onto further education like I did the unis can better accomodate working from home, also dont feal guilty, i had to take an internationally recognised exam online his year which due to covid the new papers hadn't been released so the board gave permission for us to use past papers, of which my class found before the exam so we knew all the answers from revising XD
The initial plan doesn't even sound reasonable! That is the wildest thing I have ever heard, I genuinely cannot believe someone thought that was a good idea in good faith. I'm an American and that plan makes ME mad, I can't imagine how livid I would be if I lived in the UK.
Minimum a lot of people in the Education Ministry need to be fired.
The algorithm was unfair because THEY MADE it unfair.
Do you think they handled it well? Seriously? No, it was a total mess. Endemic of this government.
0:22 - GCSE is equivalent to National 5, not higher, and A-Level is equivalent to Higher, not Adv Higher.
I worked my ass of to outdo by predicted grades back when I was in A-level (10 years ago actually!) and was so glad. Can only imagine how bad it would feel to be robbed of that. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about this situation but now I know it is the complete definition of systemic discrimination!
I have NO faith in this government after both the Coronavirus situation and now A-level/ GCSE handling....
I will NEVER vote Conservative in my life......
so it took you 10 years to realise connies are shit govt? wow, youre quick man. perhaps in the year 2097 you'll realise covid was just a scamdemic :)
@@Albimar17 he could be like 18...
For me failing most of my mock exams is what caused me to work harder and pass most of the real exams so I'm glad I'm no longer in school because if I was a GSCE student this year I would be completely screwed.
Honestly so pissed when I saw the government gave me ABC after my teachers submitted me at A*AA it was entirely of historical data and nothing to do with my work. In biology I had never once since the start of alevel got below an A and in my gcse I got a 9 but the government gave me a B ? In my physics I got a 9 at gcse and got a B's and A's in every single past test so the government went and gave me a C ? And my maths which they gave an A in i got a c in my mock so I didnt really deserve an A ? I'm so glad they did a u turn
So you’ve admitted that in a mock for maths you got a C, but your school predicted you an A. Shows what’s wrong with this system. You’ve now gained an “A in A-Level Maths” when there was probably a strong chance this wouldn’t have happened if you had to sit the exam . Hopefully future employers will be able to see through these fake and worthless results you have gained. Your degree will now be especially important for you and anything less than a first now will undermine any of your credibility.
@@computerbot2004 well I mean you realise that for my degree I only needed a B which I would have confidently got in my maths i think it would be disingenuous if I dont mention the flaws of the whole thing good or bad, but do I think that ABC is a better representation of what I would have got NO A*AA is definitely a closer outcome and no employers look at my alevels after I have my degree anyway you are talking out of your arse I wonder if the reason your so annoyed is bc school didn't go so well for you but i welcome some kind of rebuttal. Like what are you talking about if 'I didnt get a first it has no credibility' piss off 😂😂
@@computerbot2004 sorry, but that isn't true at all. In some subjects like Maths mocks often come out way lower, as there may be modules that you haven't completed or started that appear in the mock exams. It depends on the exam board and the syllabus, but it's not uncommon to sit a mock exam in January without having yet learned half of the paper.
SupremeLeader 33 well most employers will take these results with a pinch of salt in the future. You’ve received a qualification whilst never sitting an exam . If for instance, after now receiving grades of A*AA you get a 2:2 or a 2:1, most employers will take that uni degree as a true representation of your abilities. If you can’t see that, or fail to see that I’m afraid you’re slightly deluded. There is and will always remain a strong element of doubt over these A Level and GCSE results. The whole thing has been a farce and it is laughable that qualifications are being given out when the exam has never been sat. A lot of the people sitting A Levels seem to feel entitled to good grades- that’s not how life works. These type of people will receive a sharp dose of reality once in working life. You’re not owed anything...
@@computerbot2004 i completely and wholey agree that the grade of my degree is the best measure of my ability ultimately I would be more than happy with a 2.1 and most employers would too. And my alevels are definitely a second to that, that is obvious to everyone but what would you have the government do ? They fucked up with this algorithm thats a fact
What was the problem with just going on prelim results? They're exams sat in exam conditions, which students have to study hard to pass.
nejdalej It is not taken as seriously by either schools or students. It also does not take into account some of the syllabus.
Teacher's predicted grades are just as unfair. Different teachers will have different opinions of what an A, B, C, D etc Student looks like.
For most schools, teachers already have to produce teacher forecasts, which are based off recent exams, and I imagine that many schools will have enforced it that they had to be used. Obviously, I understand that there will be exceptions, but at most schools, the grades will have been based off those teacher forecasts, which are based off exams rather than the teachers' actual estimates.
They're not ideal, but it's fairer than marking a kid down for an exam they weren't allowed to do.
Billy Fox basically this, who would have thought to trust the professionals who’s job it is to prepare students for these tests.
The CAGs are not predicted grades. As a teacher who went through the process, we spent over a month taking information about each child into account, including but not limited to their mock result, progress in topic tests, classwork, homework, past year's performances, tendancy to cram before an exam and finally our teacher professional judgement. Then these factors were assigned a weighting which were then debated with the teachers within the department and the head of department. Then these results went to the senior team who scrutinised our methods, compared the data with our results in the past (to mitigate against the potential changes due to the algorithm) and looked at each student's CAGs across all subjects. Finally when all are satisfied, these grades were sent off. These are not grades dreamed up by 1 teacher and for them to be ignored with larger cohort sizes is simply insulting.
@@Tobiasfowler Exactly, yeah. 😂 As a wise man once said, '[d]on't tell someone how to do something. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.' Teachers are trained professionals and although, obviously, they're still human, which provides the opportunity for corruption and error, confirmation from other teachers will help to prevent this.
As somebody who goes to a Grammar School, I'll say the Algorithm was a god damn disaster.
The grade's biggest impact should be based upon The Individual and Teacher. I'd argue Grammar Schools may have more studious pupils and more dedicated teachers, but not by such a ridiculous margin which the Algorithm examined.
This page explains stuff so so well
no it doesnt mr cotteril reynolds
They usually say that the plan was better on paper, but this whole thing seemed like a mess from the get-go. Also, I am trying very hard to figure out why someone would have a whip on their desk...
You vote a clown Prime Minister then complain when the country becomes a circus.
Good luck to y'all. Let's hope everything will be alright.
Well this is, undoubtedly, a massive shit show. But in lieu of being able to take the actual final exams, it's hard to come up with any system that is going to be entirely fair (that's not to say it couldn't be fairer than this one).
It obviously doesn't help now, but maybe in the future there should be less weight put on a single final exam? It seems like an antiquated system as it is. And I say that as somebody who took A levels many, many years ago and benefited from being good at taking exams but less good at staying motivated through an entire school year (or two). I did a lot better on my final exams than I expected to do.
GCSE student here
Yes you were right
should have given us online exams🤷🏾♂️
In several subjects an essay would have done well as an exam substitute as well, with that even subjects where an online exam wouldn't have made much sense like English could have been covered
Thank you for finally making a video that gives some clarity over all the media noise.
If I was top set and got a b, even if I deserved it but thought that I could get an A then obviously I’d protest this. Whatever you do this is going to happen
People are saying that this algorithm didn't work are missing the point. It worked exactly as intended, it just wasn't made for regular people.
Why couldn't they have just improved the algorithm!?
Because they're lazy
That's what they should have done back in May when they were working on it. But by mid-August when they were giving the results out, it was too late to go back and re-write it ... and politically impossible to withdraw grades that they had already given out and replace them with lower grades, especially where students had already accepted a university offer based on the grades they had been told first.
They couldn't do anything good for brexit which affects the whole country in over 4 years, they can't even make a contact tracing app for the pandemic, of course they weren't going to succeed at making an algorithm that worked. It's what happens when you pick the privileged mediocrity that rule the country over the very people they're gatekeeping who would actually do the job properly
It’s not worth spending billions of taxpayers money on yet another broken algorithm.
bj.exe file got corrupted...
The idea of predicting students' grades works great on population or even school level but trying to predict individual grades is a bad idea. This is how we did it in Croatia. Year 12 students came to the school and they simply took the exam. We had several epidemiological measures in place like the obligatory use of disinfectant, fewer students per classroom, compulsory masks for teachers etc. Since only year 12 students were in school, achieving proper students' protection was not a problem. The younger students can wait and take their exams later.
I did not realise how clapped the system was like obviously it was never gonna work😂
The kids could have sat the actual exams in the Summer under social distancing conditions (they always have to keep a distance anyway). There was plenty of time to get ready for that since the schools were closed in March. Exams are the only option to be fair.
Use the Finland System.
I think we should all just move there. It seams like the Fins know what they are doing
Private Education in the UK is a major export industry, under a totally nationalised system the hundreds of thousands of foreign students would not come to British Private Schools, let's not shut down one of the few exports we have left
I'm not a socialist but I have to admit it's working there.
@@detectiverick9934 No one listens to me.
i got worse results than my mocks and they were called inflated, how is something worse than an actual achievement be called inflated
Why didn’t they just establish an online examination system?
people have complained about online exam proctoring elsewhere, so that may have been the issue
F A Thanks for making me aware. Just seems strange to me since thats how my university curriculum is evaluated.
J L maybe because people would cheat
because EVERYONE would cheat, I certainly would have
Ben Wyatt suggestions on hie they would?
That's insane! I went to a very working class school on an estate, where no class was smaller than thirty. We would've all been absolutely fucked.
The reason this didn't work and could never work, is because statistics don't work on individuals.
It's basicly the first lesson in statistics...
A clear example of when technology and data cannot replace the human element!
The U-turn doesn’t affect BTEC students so we’re still screwed :)))))))
Lol 🤣🤣
I find it crazy that secondary schools don't make use of predicted grades and milestones considering the fact that they are potentially the most important time for a student to be able to monitor their performance in any and all classes, and to predict their final grade.
I am currently studying in Telford College, and every unit for the course is monitored with Pass, Merit, and Distinction criteria, which eventually evaluate into UCAS points. Based on my performance at each stage of college, my predicted grade (P/M/D) is updated. A similar system could easily be implemented in secondary schools (cit. I was educated in a public one) by breaking the yearly curriculum into units (which it may already be) and completing unit tests regularly in an environment that isn't as distracting and intimidating as the "Everyone sit 3-ft apart in complete silence in the most echo-y gym hall ever while teachers *constantly* look over your shoulder and pace around". As a result, in the final year where students would normally sit the GCSE or A-Level exams, when a problem like this occurs each student already has a predicted grade and a record of performance - which can then be bolstered by the teachers for the missing units irrespective of historical school performance. After all, schools can improve each year independently of their historical performance based on a wide array of factors.
If i could *really* get my way; I would make Primary Schools (ages 5/6 - 11) consist of the core fundamentals for a child to progress in any field (math, national language, basic science, IT/Computers, etc) with only small dabbles of interesting and engaging lessons in other fields (history, geography, foreign language, etc). Secondary school would then follow on from that point where a student is able to properly make informed decisions on their education and what they would like to learn. And more specifically, be grouped by their strength in that field and not their age - exactly like College & University. The student's decisions on what fields they study can be made at the start of every year - with only the primary fields being a requirement (math, nat.lang, science, IT) - such that a kid can experiment with different subjects and choose to excel in what they enjoy.
As it currently stands, in Secondary Schools (at least the one I went to) we had 6 Years of education, of which only the final 2 had any personal choice, and all of which were banded by age and not skill or experience. For 4 years I had to sit through multiple History, Religious Study, French, and German lessons a week despite having no appreciable interest or desire to learn them, and with no signs of aptitude despite honestly trying. In my final 2 years, I was still forced to take 2 courses I had no interest in due to the way the system worked, resulting in an average GCSE of (C-) rather than a (B+) if they were removed entirely.
I go to a private school and my peers and I were also heavily downgraded by the algorithm despite our school doing well historically. I was downgraded from a C in maths to an E, even though I never got an E in any maths exam. I think there is a high chance that the algorithm downgraded a lot of private school pupils as well in order for the government to avoid criticism regarding the economic position of the school playing a part in the grades received.
This can also be seen through the fact that I was downgraded in my EPQ from an A to a B, even though I gave it in before lockdown and it was marked like in any other year.
I never understood that, nationally EPQ is submitted before the exams meaning virus or not you should have gotten a permanent grade.
Vi CO 94.5% of independent school headteachers reported grades being downgraded.
In my country, teacher’s grades and exams are scored from 1 to 20, and both are taken into account for college applications. My school (state school) has an average difference between teacher’s and exam grade of 4 or 5 points, depending on the subject. Thus, since I had a teacher grade of 20 in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Maths, I was predicted to get 15-16 exam grades. I actually had 19-20 exam grades, well above the expected. Probably would have been penalised with the UK system.
Here we still kept the exams during the pandemic, however they were optional (you only had to take the ones you would want to use in your college application). You should always have the opportunity to take the exam in my opinion.
The whole idea that someone has to fail, that, that is a problem, I've taken several classes over the years with absolutely zero fails, and that is a good thing, it means that class and students fucking worked.
A failed exam is an indicator of only TWO things: A student that failed or a class that failed.
Note, CLASS that failed, not teacher, the classes poor structure, irrellevant teachings and poor educator are all factors to consider, you can have a brilliant teacher, but if she/he/it has to teach fucking garbage, then the class has failed, not the teacher.
That's it, a failed exam is either a student that fucked up or got sick or whatever OR a class that failed.
The problem is that with standardisation you can't have everyone succeeding. Let's say you have a class of 100 full of really good students. Each time you use a past paper they all score between 30 and 40 out of 40. Then if you decide to standardise the exam and apply what the gvt do every year, you will allocate something like the following:
5% of a*
10% of a
30 %of b
30% of c
15 % of d
5% of e
5% of u
you need 5 students to have a U, you will take the one who have scored 30/40. Are they bad students? No they are just not the best but they are bloody good! the system work like this on a bigger scale. How do you want a teacher to know the overall outcome of a nation to base their predictions. The teachers can only base their prediction using their knowledge of their students.
@@gchelem just imagine if they have used this process for years with actual grades.
@@gchelem That is why companies that use rankings like that where someone has to be the worst and fired every year don't build really good teams. You could have all nobel laureates and still have to fire one as the worst each year. As a result they hire sacrificial people that don't have to do any work just to save the team. An exam should test if you have sufficient mastery of the material and not going for any distribution of students. That is a really evil system there where the more good students you have in a class and the more they work to help each other the worse the outcome is for them even though that is much better for all of us.
@@k_a47 They have been doing!
@@Immudzen This system is part of the capitalist psyche where the best are to be on top. This is why private schools thrive in Britain. The setting of private schools suit the system but not the setting of state schools. The system is rigged so the social elite wins at anytime.
Good luck to you all tomorrow for your GCSEs!
Even as a student, I think it's hard to be tough on the government here and most people should give them some more credit and sympathy. They didn't want to go off teachers predictions and see unprecedented grade inflation, so the algorithm approach was really quite sensible, problem being as many angry news articles point out there have been some interesting results from it, such as students who got As in mocks getting given Bs, Cs and even Ds. Plus every year some people are going to be disspointed, the difference is this year, the dissapointed felt wronged since it'd been decided for them and they never got a chance to prove otherwise.
At least the government changed their stance aswell, they could've just kept their heads down and tried to endure the shitstorm, but they did admit it was a bad system and change it.
Most private schools are academically selective, which means that students have to be quite intelligent already before they’re even allowed into the school; so it makes sense that they have a higher % of A*/A grades. Although, I do agree that the way the standardisation downgraded intelligent state school students was very unfair.
Yes, private schools will get a higher proportion of A*/A grades, no-one is disputing that. But what has happened this year is that that gap has widened extraordinarily, with private schools getting a *much, much higher* proportion of A*/A grades than they have done before, and seeing far more pupils moved up a grade or kept at the CAG compared with state schools and colleges.
Terrible reporting. There are no school rankings this year. The grades are for students only, not schools!
So... they just guessed? Ridiculous. They should have at least just taken whatever marks the student had earned in classes and averaged those. That would have been more accurate.
Think about the governments performance for the last 6 months. Look into Bitcoin, thank me later.
Like that'll ever be financially viable again
@@taylorlynn2522 I personally don't support Bitcoin as a project for innumerous reasons but crypto-currency itself is great. I don't see what the problem is.
Not going to trust bitcoin yet
I went to a public school a decade ago and got As and A*s in every single subject for my GSCEs but all of my class sizes were over 15 so under this system I would have been punished hugely.