love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

It definitely looks like they're going to revert to teacher grading, which is going to open up an interesting series of challenges - not least what universities who have offered more places they can fulfill, on the assumption that a proportion of the learners aren't going to get their grade, are going to do.

The inherent unfairness of teachers with wildly different standards applying the grades can probably be brushed under the carpet. idk what happens if the grade awarded is higher than the teacher-predicted one but that's likely to be a relatively small number,

Also not sure what happens if we're here again in nine months with exams that need to be cancelled.

Here in France the bac exams were cancelled also, and its notes were instead determined by committees who used as the basis the grades earned during the school year. I gather that there were no such committees in England?

I should add, among those grades earned during the school year are the bac blancs, which seem to be what you are talking about with "mock exams" in England.

It's not a lack of committees, it's a lack of grades throughout the year. The major problem is that in 2018, the government basically moved to an 'all your eggs in one basket' model of linear assessments on the assumption that ongoing assessment and courseware were reducing standards. You have one big set of tests at the end of the year and that's that. iirc, when i did my A-Levels, something like 60% in some subjects had already been determined before the final term. Now that would be 0%. There's not even a consistent approach to mock exams.

The bac, aiui, doesn't have a process of total standardisation either.

The Guardian ran a piece comparing how European systems dealt with the same problem and the only one that i can see fitting the UK linear model would have been Germany - which made the kids all come to school and take exams like nothing was wrong.

Wow, so no notes during the year. We don't even do that in our universities!

The bac is becoming less standardized starting with the 2019-2020 academic year, just ending. My son is part of this first class of the new system. Briefly, while the bac used to be determined by only the exams at the end of the year, now it's calculated in part by the notes during the school year ("control continu"). So with the rona this year it wasn't as systematically difficult to move to using entirely control continu to determine the bac scores, though we hope that next year the exams will return. Bac notes don't matter very much---what matters is whether you get your bac or not, since that's the determiner of whether you're admissible to university or not. The grands écoles are different, and I don't want to clog this thread with such foreign nonsense. Simply said, I was surprised to read that there are no notes during the year. I suppose that is mostly how it is at UK universities as well.

> on the assumption that ongoing assessment and courseware were reducing standards

this changed iirc with the switch from gce to gcse - my gce's were mostly exam-based, by brother's gcse's two years later were mainly coursework.

and i've a feeling gove, with his usual lack of imagination, changed them back to what he knew from school - the gce final-exam way.

The Welsh government has u-turned:

I am taking this decision now ahead of results being released this week, so that there is time for the necessary work to take place.

For grades issued last week, I have decided that all awards in Wales, will also be made on the basis of teacher assessment.

For those young people, for whom our system produced higher grades than those predicted by teachers, the higher grades will stand.

Maintaining standards is not new for 2020, it is a feature of awarding qualifications every year in Wales, and across the UK.

However, it is clear that maintaining confidence in our qualifications whilst being fair to students requires this difficult decision.

The rhetorical division between maintaining standards and maintaining confidence is an interesting one.

Crazy to me that this year, of all years, we should make grade inflation between years the primary concern - as if this year’s students have somehow had it easier

That only works if you think about grade inflation like financial inflation. The challenge is that some students will have had their grades inflated and others won't - which could be true within the same area, the same school or even the same class.

SV how do you explain the stories of people whose results have e.g. gone from BBB to EEE?

All A level and GCSE pupils in England to get teacher assessed grades -- announcement 4pm sources tell @thetimes

— Rosemary Bennett (@RosieDBennett) August 17, 2020

SV how do you explain the stories of people whose results have e.g. gone from BBB to EEE?

To be honest, i don't know. It sounds ridiculous but the most likely explanation is probably human error. I've not seen any concrete examples of it happening or any stats on how prevalent such a situation might be but i wouldn't rule it out as impossible. aiui, about 60% of grades are exactly in line with teacher predictions and 96% are within one grade of them. For a learner to drop from B to E not once but three separate times in three different subjects would be extraordinary. You'd need a psychometric expert to give you a proper answer but the only way i could see it happening, other than human error, would be for that learner to be consistently ranked last in a class that has historically, consistently, produced a lot of E-grade learners but were somehow all ranked as B by the teacher this time. If that's the case, that'd be where the option of a cohort appeal would kick in.

thanks. i'm sure dealing with oversubscribed universities will be a huge challenge and students will still miss out through no fault of their own but it seems like less of a kick in the teeth than this debacle.

In till 2024 baby.

So far the Government has U-turned on face masks, the NHS migrant surcharge, income tax on COVID tests, free school meals...a Government that requires moments of national outrage to rein in incompetent, arrogant and stupid policymaking isn't a Government that's fit for office.

— Nandini (@_nmtr) August 17, 2020

Huge anxiety in non-Russell Group unis about financial implications of a) CAG reversion and b) lifting of the cap (assuming both happen which seems likely). Suddenly they may potentially be left with far fewer students including many 1000s they’ve obtained through clearing.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) August 17, 2020

The gist of this is that if top universities can recruit thousands more learners, lower-ranking ones might go bust.

It is, and it's very important. Many jobs are now suddenly at risk - even more than they were before.

A lot of local economies will suffer if those places go.

And a lot of dedicated people will have their careers ruined or ended - if this pans out as badly as it looks.

With this government, most things do.

I don't have anything of use to add but this is looking like a disaster on almost every conceivable level.

Can someone explain the lifting of the cap in a little more detail?

75% of Britons - including 69% of Conservative voters - think the UK government have handled the situation regarding pupils’ exam results badly https://t.co/xzSZki0HOI pic.twitter.com/bBtnGsscHd

— YouGov (@YouGov) August 17, 2020

Have to say I have no idea what's going on in the head of the tiny minority who think the government is handling this well, especially the 2% of Labour voters, which might as well be a rounding error.

Universities are only allowed to recruit a certain number of English students - which, i think, is about 105% of the last year's intake. If they recruit more, they get fined heavily. This is partly to stop universities just taking everyone who'd want to go (as the government wants to control figures) and partly to share the students out across the system.

Using a completely made-up set of numbers, if Manchester had 10,000 English students in 2019, they can have 10,500 now. The problem comes if they send out 12,500 offers in the assumption that about 20% won't get their predicted grades. In a normal year, that group of 2000 would go to their second-choice university or into the clearing system. This year, everyone has their predicted grades. Manchester can't legally accept the 2000 but if they turn them away, the thing that everyone has been shouting about for the last week doesn't get fixed.

What the government can potentially do is say 'just go head and let them in, ignore the cap'. Manchester would get 2000 extra students, and the funds that go along with them, but the universities that those students would otherwise have gone to get nothing. A lot of those universities would be in a similar situation, where they've over-offered, and things might balance out a little, but you'd inevitably end up with a set of universities at the bottom that were few learners' first choice who ultimately end up screwed.

Cap officially lifted now.

Obvs the same people complaining about grades being downgraded are complaining about low-ranking universities facing financial ruin but idk how you square the circle. The government delaying everything by the best part of the week has made things worse but i have no idea what would have made them better.

good keith shade

Jeremy Corbyn
45m ·
This u-turn from the Government wouldn't have happened without the #Alevelprotests from so many young people, the important work of the teaching unions and everyone who spoke out.

My solidarity to all those who took a stand.

kieth shade, that's what they call him

Lads Corbyn is going to ask us to vote Labour. Ye know that, right?

Already? I only just voted

fluffed it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6-IQAdFU3w

Has Cronus been replaced with... a riding crop??

Photo du jour: Education Secretary @GavinWilliamson in his office at the Dept for Education today after announcing a change in the way A-Level grades will be awarded. By Stefan Rousseau/PA pic.twitter.com/yI3ICFEMBR

— Stefan Rousseau (@StefanRousseau) August 17, 2020

i presume nobody thinks williamson is indispensable as they clearly think that creepy guy who works for gove is, wonder if they think keeping him on is worth it for the implicit "fuck u everyone!"

Jenrick is still in position so yeah probably. Difference is that the public actually cares about this.

also firing jenrick might have signalled to potential donors that they weren't completely open to business for favours, not really sure what keeping williamson communicates aside from the obvious

Lads Corbyn is going to ask us to vote Labour. Ye know that, right?

― caută tu singur (gyac), Monday, 17 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Take a #chillPill

Dido Harding to run agency replacing Public Health England https://t.co/bVobVZmECe

— The Guardian (@guardian) August 17, 2020

Disaster at Talk Talk, disaster as head of the track and trace system, put in charge of the successor to Public Health England.

apparently the whip under the book in that gavin williamson pic ^^^ is some *very subtle* symbolic menace that he's got plenty of dirt from when he was chief whip and he ain't afraid to use it if he gets pumped.

Obviously Harding is a totally incompetent crook but it's annoying that we now have to pretend that public health England isn't a sham organisation itself a symptom of mismanagement of the NHS

Between this and the exam stuff we've had a whole week of partisan support for rubbish institutions

Gavin Williamson saying on sky he shouldn’t resign essentially because he’s always been right and it’s anomalies that’s the problem, so everyone can stfu. It’s fascinating how much they dgaf and Williamson has that look of not even really understanding why he has to be questioned on tv.

Would pleading the government to give this Department to Grayling be accelerationism?

expecting someone with the dynamism of a rusty sack cart to hasten the demise of capitalism? The only practical insurgent application of Grayling would be to strap a bomb to him.

Liverpool remains the best.

Social media attack tells 'Brylcreemed sh******e' Labour leader he and deputy Angela Rayner 'should be worried' https://t.co/yUgReSP4Bx

— Liverpool Echo (@LivEchonews) August 18, 2020

shitlorde?

shiteface imo

shtakhanovite

shitehole

Good on Sarah Morton obviously, but I've been struggling with that cryptic clue for a while now: shitehawk(e)? shiteheel(e)? Is this an esoteric Scouseism?

xp see ilx is already on the case

Sir Shittyarse having a bad day again

Cllr Morton wrote: "Watched the first 5 mins of ITV News and it wasn't a Tory that had me shouting at the TV, we know they are self interested, elitist sh***hawks. But Keir Starmer, the alleged leader of the opposition (Trading Standards should be having a word there) attempting to bask in the victory of a hard won U-turn by the thousands of students who took to the streets in the last few days to demand that the government treat them fairly."

she's wrong, it was a Tory that had her shouting at the TV