Disgraced former defence secretary Gavin Williamson claims that he only knew the scale of the problem at the weekend. Oddly enough, lots of people seemed to have sussed this out on Thursday or Friday so it is rather odd that the person whose job it is to know this claims not to have known it for so long. After all, he will have had access to the information earlier than the general public.

He could have figured it out before Thursday as someone should have been checking the results. However, perhaps someone did check them and they just didn’t care and didn’t think anyone would notice.

Even though I knew what my students were going to get, it was so nice to see it in black and white on paper. The results have been emailed out to the students and it’s pretty depressing I don’t get to see them today, it’s usually the most rewarding day of the job.

Even though I knew what my students were going to get, it was so nice to see it in black and white on paper. The results have been emailed out to the students and it’s pretty depressing I don’t get to see them today, it’s usually the most rewarding day of the job.

At least you don't have to face the students who got a low grade from you :P I can see, though, that results day would normally be a rewarding time for a teacher. Just like seeing the "Eureka" moment on a student's face when they get something but multiplied many times over.

From watching the news you'd think everyone got A* is there many who do poorly in your group for example T Boy?

From watching the news you'd think everyone got A* is there many who do poorly in your group for example T Boy?

 

There are always those that don’t do well and they never get on TV or in the paper-well, until last week but that was very different.

 

I teach Welsh as a second language in a school just metres away from the English border so I get a good chunk of students that don’t do so well. But they are usually lower ability students in the lower sets. When you teach an entire year group, you always have students to cover every grade.

 

I was realistic in my predictions. I gave precisely one A* and one U out with lots of the grades in between. There are one or two D grade kids I might have pushed to a C if I knew my prediction would be it, just because they do work hard but aware of their mock performance and scrutiny I didn’t. Some schools will have taken the mick a bit though.

Yeh thanks.

 

I was always one who worked hard but usually got a C 😂 Which annoyed me because other talented people could do work for a day before a test and breeze an A grade.

So the Head has revealed that our predictions were within 2% of the algorithms results anyway, so go us for accuracy. Of course, had we gone with the algorithm, individual students would have been disadvantaged.

So the Head has revealed that our predictions were within 2% of the algorithms results anyway, so go us for accuracy. Of course, had we gone with the algorithm, individual students would have been disadvantaged.

A quick question. Did you supply your estimated grades and class rankings electronically?

A quick question. Did you supply your estimated grades and class rankings electronically?

 

We did.

We did.

I assumed you would have done. The data analyst in me has two questions which have been bugging me since this all blew up.

 

1) When Ofqual were devising their algorithm, did they use it to "predict" last year's results. If so, did they do a comparison at school level (as that is how the algorithm works) or did they just look at the overall results? If they checked at school level, surely they would have been able to see that there were some major differences between their "predictions" and the actual results.

 

2) As I understand it the data was sent in June. That gave Ofqal plenty of time to generate their predicted results and check them against teachers' predictions. Did this happen? If not, why? If they decided this was too complicated (it really isn't), why didn't they send the predicted results to schools weeks ago so schools could highlight obvious absurdities?

 

When the government said months ago that they hoped the results would be released at the normal time, I couldn't understand what possible excuse there could be for NOT doing it on time given that there was not a single exam paper to be marked. The shambles of the last couple weeks makes it even more ridiculous.

And now somebody has resigned. It is, of course, not a minister. As ever, it is somebody else's fault and the head of Ofqual has resigned / been sacked. At this point it seems reasonable to ask how ministers justify their salary given that they don't appear to be responsible for anything.

And Boris has blamed a ‘mutant algorithm’ for ‘almost derailing’ the results. The results were derailed and humans could have stepped in to stop that from happening. Unless mutant algorithm is his pet name for Williamson...

And Boris has blamed a ‘mutant algorithm’ for ‘almost derailing’ the results. The results were derailed and humans could have stepped in to stop that from happening. Unless mutant algorithm is his pet name for Williamson...

As I said before, the idea that they had no idea of what sort of results the algorithm would produce until results day is utterly ridiculous. Another day, another Trumpism.

For people at school (as students or staff), what is your school's policy on teachers taking in books for marking?

For people at school (as students or staff), what is your school's policy on teachers taking in books for marking?

 

Before the Summer we were banned from taking any work home and our lessons were based around Google anyway so we could mark things submitted on Classroom. I don’t know what’s happening yet next term but we have two inset days Tuesday and Wednesday next week where I’m sure this will be covered. Our Head is still keen for us to use Google Classroom as much as we can but we can’t do entire lessons out of it because we don’t have enough chromebooks for all the kids.