All Tories Are Cunts thread

[WyattSheepMask]

15 minutes ago, scratchdj said:

My wife teaches A Level maths at a good school. She knows her students inside out, who has certain strengths, who has certain weaknesses, who’s tried hard, who’s constantly missed extra revision, who’s turned up after class and who clearly understands the subject.

She’s dedicated, professional and has an excellent track record that falls above the other teachers in her department. I know she’s my wife, but she knows her shit, has an excellent reputation and has worked hard her entire career to be the best teacher she can be. She absolutely loves her job.

As a teacher, she has tools and metrics provided by the exam board that help her and her colleagues to predict grades as the course progresses. She spent an awful, awful long time working out which grades to give each student and ended up 100% satisfied she had it right, standing by every grade based on what she knew about every student and of course their most recent work and of course mock results.

This morning, she was in floods of tears as the results became apparent. Of the 32 students she had, 28 were marked down by exactly 1 grade. 28!

She has some seriously bright pupils who showed every evidence they would’ve achieved a certain grade. But apparently a computer algorithm knows her kids better than she does.

Most of them have missed out on where they were almost a dead cert to go, with their adjusted grades now just too low to get in to their preferred university.

What is also apparent is the kids don’t yet know if the grade they have came from her, their teacher, or from a computer. The headlines are saying 40% were lowered nationally, yet for her class it was well over double that percentage.

The whole thing stinks, and this will, in my opinion, be the one thing that this government will be unable to shake off.

These cunts are covered in Teflon and will shake this off though and it will go away just like everything else does, that’s whats so disheartening about it.

I’m sorry to hear about your wife being in tears and what’s happened to her pupils, but we’ve seen over the last few months that this government don’t give a flying fuck about any of us.

[PowerButchi]

7 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

If all my GCSEs and A-Levels had been exam only I would have smashed it because the information was there, but as soon as I was out of that academic environment I had no inclination to do any coursework, as a result it was either not turned in, or some hastily cobbled together token effort done under duress. Looking back it was probably an Autism thing. 

As King Procrastination coursework fucking ruined my GCSEs. I was Lord Superb in an exam but Cs and Bs in pretty much all coursework meant low As and high Bs in the full results. Horses for courses. 

 

I absolutely used to love a good exam. Me vs the world! 

 

But again, Horses for Courses and people learn different ways. I've always hated visual and aural aids, and hated even more being told. I've always liked learning by doing for myself. People thrive in different fields, especially as kids, and it's dogshit that those what don't get on with the (in my opinion) exciting cut and thrust of a good exam have to fall by the wayside when they're harder workers than exam nobs like myself. 

Edited August 13, 2020 by PowerButchi

[Guest]

This Twitter thread's quite a handy explainer of what's going on:

There are some shocking cases though. I saw a comment from someone whose daughter was marked three grades below her predicted result.

The worst thing, as it stands, is that these kids are being charged a fee if they want to appeal. That's indefensible, especially as it's those in poorer areas who are most likely to have been affected.

Edited August 14, 2020 by Uncle Zeb

[Nexus]

Not just a fee, but about £100 per subject.

 

Also there is a line in the OFQUAL guidance somewhere that says if you appeal then it may mean a regrading (read: downgrading) of the whole centre's results.

[BomberPat]

yesterday was one of the most exhausting days I've ever had in this job.

Results day is already full of uncertainty and anxiety for students, and even staff are usually completely on edge about it because it's a major undertaking, and you have to hope that you pull it off - doubly so this year, when we had physical distancing and whatnot to consider, before it even gets as far as what results people got. Most of our courses are BTECs rather  than A-Levels, but there are some students doing blended learning, where they study a BTEC with us alongside an A-Level at another school, and we have students coming in to enrol on degree courses based on A-Level grades from other schools, and it's just been a complete clusterfuck. And in my capacity on the day of offering advice and guidance, there's absolutely sod all I can say to them.

The advice from the Education Department, locally, has been completely nonsensical, and far more concerned with schools covering their own back rather than what's best for the students. Guaranteed that it will only be a matter of days before a teacher or administrator breaks rank - if they haven't already - and starts telling students/parents exactly what they're entitled to do, and what the process involved is. I'm absolutely convinced that complaints and appeals will run for months. 

Every single student who completed their A-Levels this year will be marred by this - people will see 2019/20 on CVs, and immediately see them as "The Covid Year". Hopefully it means universities, potential employers etc., will give lower performing students a little more leeway and assume that maybe they were graded unfairly, but I doubt it. And because how other qualifications - at any level - have been graded due to Covid hasn't been as well communicated to the public, I don't think it will affect just A-Level students either. I can see a lot of my students who have achieved a 1st or a 2:1 struggling in the job market when employers look at it and think, "yeah, but is it a real 2:1?" - which we already have to deal with from the snobs who don't think we're a "proper university" anyway.

Ah well, still GCSE Results Day to look forward to as well.

[Tommy!]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

yeah, but is it a real 2:1?" - which we already have to deal with from the snobs who don't think we're a "proper university" anyway.

I questioned why my old employer invited a graduate with a 2.1 over one with a first for a grad scheme interview and they said the university "isn't really Oxford is it".

Having a good degree from a less respected university did me more harm than having a weaker class or no degree at all because one group of wrote me off as not sticking in an entry level job because of the degree and the next step up saw so many graduates they often used the perception of the university to trim the numbers.

I watched someone once bin any CV with a qualification they didn't recognise or understand. It's too much hassle to look up what a GNVQ relates to, just whack it in the bin. Someone in thier team offered to help but they were happy with their system.

[Grecian]

I did a twelve hour stint running at Clearing call-centre yesterday. Everyone that called to come to my uni - without exception - all said they'd be appealing their grades. I've seen people who got a C in As-level get U grades. It's an absolute mess. But at least they'll make a fortune out of appeals fees... 

So this morning anyone coming back from France now has to quarantine. Any shouts for which country will be added to the quarantine list next Thursday to distract from the incoming GSCE results mess? 

[WyattSheepMask]

Are Italy on the list already? If not, stick me down for a quid on them

[BomberPat]

42 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

I questioned why my old employer invited a graduate with a 2.1 over one with a first for a grad scheme interview and they said the university "isn't really Oxford is it".

Having a good degree from a less respected university did me more harm than having a weaker class or no degree at all because one group of wrote me off as not sticking in an entry level job because of the degree and the next step up saw so many graduates they often used the perception of the university to trim the numbers.

I watched someone once bin any CV with a qualification they didn't recognise or understand. It's too much hassle to look up what a GNVQ relates to, just whack it in the bin. Someone in thier team offered to help but they were happy with their system.

Yep. I basically worry about all of this a lot - though I'm planning on moving back to the UK reasonably soon, so at least the "bad school" aspect of my CV won't be an issue when nobody knows the name in the first place, and it's outside of the England and Wales league tables. Though, admittedly, the school I went to in Jersey - and one other - would be at the bottom of those tables if they were counted, because the levels of inequality in investment between public and state schools here is even worse than in the UK, as are the levels of nepotism and networking that the public schools use to block out the state schools.

I work in the HE department of a predominantly FE college, and older generations routinely write off the college as a whole as "just for labourers and hairdressers" because we're predominantly a vocational college; we're seen as where kids go if they fuck up at GCSE and can't do their A-Levels at one of the "proper" schools. The "solution" at the HE level has often been to distance ourselves from the rest of the college, so it means that even within the college we're saying, "yeah, that lot are awful, but we're different". It's a complete mess, and built entirely on snobbery, not anything approaching actual data - we routinely outperform the UK average at A-Level and degree level, but because we're not the "right" school and our students don't have the right surnames, it doesn't matter. It's just endless. 

A former colleague of mine once made a really impassioned speech to the local government about how we have lower entry requirements that most universities, and often take on students with real difficulties in their past, or poor academic histories, and see them come out with 2:1s and 1sts that they would never have dreamed they were capable of, and being able to take a lower achieving student at Year 1 and see them come out with higher than average results should be a cause for celebration, and the response among much of the old guard at the government effectively amounted to, "yes, but they're not real degrees are they?". I've spent half an hour on the phone talking to a parent who was "concerned" that their kid wanted to apply here rather than a UK university, who just kept asking for reassurance that they were still "proper" degrees.

Edited August 14, 2020 by BomberPat

[Surf Digby]

In all seriousness, I'm predicting a spike in teen suicides as a result of this.

[JNLister]

5 hours ago, Grecian said:

I did a twelve hour stint running at Clearing call-centre yesterday. Everyone that called to come to my uni - without exception - all said they'd be appealing their grades. I've seen people who got a C in As-level get U grades. It's an absolute mess. But at least they'll make a fortune out of appeals fees... 

 

Several people who've read and somehow comprehended the 100+ page explanation of the algorithm say it's a major bug in the way it's calculated. In simple terms the algorithm throws out a breakdown of grades for each class and then you hand them out starting with the best kid in the class (based on mocks, assessment, etc).

The problem is that the breakdown might say 0.2 people in the class should get a U. You'd think that would mean nobody gets a U because, well, 0.2 isn't a whole person. In reality, there's a weird rounding process that means by the time you get to the bottom person in the class, all the passing grades are allocated and they wind up with the U, even if they were expecting/deserved the C. 

Note that the algorithm isn't used on small classes because it works even less well there. And no prizes for guessing which type of school have small classes (and offer subjects which only a few people take.)

[LariatTom]

I read yesterday that around 2 million GCSE grades will be knocked down. I can not wait for that shitshow when I go in on Thursday. Like A-Levels, the hours that were put into grading pupils and putting them in a ranked order... meaningless. We may as well have thrown darts with a name onto a board and let luck decide their grades, it probably would have had more accuracy.

A-Levels is a shitshow. Students/schools can appeal, but their choices for uni have refused them based on grades. Those universities aren't going to be able to do a u-turn in 6 weeks time and suddenly be massively oversubscribed for a course because things get reversed. I have colleagues with children who have been in the 40% to be downgraded which means they didn't get into university. Having been predicted As, they've come out with Cs because the system decided that only a handful of her class could get an A. I'm so disappointed in the system.

But hey, Big Gav has said that the government are going to have a fund of £15 million for appeals of grades. Between him, Johnson and Ofqual, these daft cunts haven't set foot in a school for years. It baffles me that the Education Secretary has no experience in education... 

[Grecian]

26 minutes ago, LariatTom said:

 

A-Levels is a shitshow. Students/schools can appeal, but their choices for uni have refused them based on grades. Those universities aren't going to be able to do a u-turn in 6 weeks time and suddenly be massively oversubscribed for a course because things get reversed. I have colleagues with children who have been in the 40% to be downgraded which means they didn't get into university. Having been predicted As, they've come out with Cs because the system decided that only a handful of her class could get an A. I'm so disappointed in the system.

Leicester Uni has announced they're going to offer places based on mock exam results or confirmed grades, whichever is higher. Some are looking at doing a January intake. 

Universities need the tuition fees far too much to not take people. Given the drop in international students due to Covid, where there's a tuition fee to be had, there's a way... 

[LariatTom]

57 minutes ago, Grecian said:

Leicester Uni has announced they're going to offer places based on mock exam results or confirmed grades, whichever is higher. Some are looking at doing a January intake.

That's excellent, hopefully other universities are going to follow suit with that. January intake could work, are they then going to have two intakes running alongside each other or bring them together over time?

[Nexus]

Mock exams should mostly be lower than whatever they are awarded in August - the point is that a mock is taken in Feb/March time so as we as teachers can see where the gaps are to help boost the kids up.

 

Plus, kids don't take mocks seriously anyway. They should just trust teacher's judgements. Who cares if they've inflated some of the grades? It is, after all, as they have constantly reminded us, an unprecedented situation. It's not like these A-Level students are going to go into a world of privelege and super happy life, unless they are from a private school.