Exam results

There's no way to do it that will be fair to everyone. As the OP said, there is no answer. Some will benefit from it, some will not.

There's far too much bias involved in basing it purely on teachers predicted grades in my opinion though which is how the Scots have done it.

 

No coincidence at all. Those schools tend to not be as good, they don't attract the best teachers and so many pupils often under-achieve.

What about all those kids who do great during the school year but really struggle with exams? Those who suffer with anxiety and can't take the pressure of exams? These kids will benefit massively from all this.

 

The problem is without the adjustment its massively open for abuse. Even without the potential for abuse only 16% of predicted grades turn out to be accurate and when when a margin of error is applied only 42% were found to be within that, 48% were overly optimistic and 10% too pessimistic.

And its not like over the 5 year period that's being considered schools suddenly have a massive swing so taking these years into account and adjusting them does make sense. Schools are able to appeal across the board if there is circumstances that they can show such as maybe a single bad year for some reason or perhaps they can show evidence of improvement which makes the first couple of years being used unfair.

I would imagine as well that those worse schools have more to gain from lets say being more optimistic than the better schools as there is probably more potential to gain at the lower end than the top

You also have to spare a thought for everyone who took exams in previous years and those in future years. The pass rate rises by around 2% each year roughly, even with the downgrading in Scotland it was around 4% and now without it its almost 11%. So kids from previous and future years are now going to have to compete with people who have results that are around 8-9% inflated which potentially puts them at a massive disadvantage despite potentially being better. Mind you I can perhaps see it ending up being reversed and anyone using 2020 exam results to get a place on a course or a job having the person looking at their application basically write their qualifications off as being meaningless

 

Why? If anything 3 years makes things worse because a single year has way more impact. if anything having more data points would make more sense not less. Single abnormal years have less impact and it gives more years for schools to show progression so as to appeal

 

People would do that and then complain it was unfair when they didn't do as well as they wanted as they hadn't had time to prepare correctly