Monkey Tennis

Are you able to share with me some further details of these "studies"?

The current situation cannot remotely be characterised as involving "all or nothing exams". It's nothing like that at all in the vast majority of subjects, at the vast majority of levels. A hopelessly outdated myth.

You don't believe that Swinney knew nothing until the last fortnight do you? He'd have surely been carefully monitoring what was coming in as it arrived. Hell, even I knew in June that the national figures were highly inflated. It's safe to say he'd have known rather more about it than me. I just think the extent to which there would be genuine hard luck stories, easily picked up and exaggerated by the press, was badly underestimated. The implications of an appeals process on such a scale, were probably underestimated. These things are political failings of course. The SG's response has not been nimble. They didn't sufficiently challenge the frankly ludicrous notion that individual pupils were marked down on account of their postcodes, a narrative that really gained a foothold. The whole thing is a bloody mess, that serves nobody particularly well.

After way over a century of exams, we have a year without them. The result is that chaos ensues. There are clear injustices, followed by a 'solution' that trashes the achievements of kids, dents the government and is certain to have damaging knock on effects. Your conclusion: Exams are the problem. Extraordinary.

It won't affect admissions one iota. You either had a conditional or unconditional offer which will be honoured assuming in the case of Conditional offers the conditions were met. Yes, but if a pupil fell short of the conditions of their offer last Tuesday, they might be meeting them today. That therefore means this has an effect.

Have you actual evidence that properly structured assessment systems that don't use exams, have the effect of closing the poverty gap?

Teacher estimates weren't wildly out everywhere though - in my school we were about 80% accurate while in another school in the region they were just over 50% accurate. There are plenty of pupils in my school who are going to miss out because we did things properly and downgraded some pupils to fit better to the previous grades. In my Advanced Higher class, one pupil I know failed the prelim but in any other year she'd gave got at least a C (she knew what she did wrong, she had a tutor, the prelim had a lot more questions from her weakest area than the final exam would have, etc.) but since we didn't have the evidence to put her in for C, because our AH numbers vary wildy (low of 7, high of 20 in the last 5 years) and because it was a good year group (2 kids applied to Oxbridge, we had twins who are amazing at everything - music, sport, academic subjects etc) as a department we felt we couldn't estimate a C even though we were extremely confident she could have got that. Now I wish I just put her in for a B just for the sake of it. Absolutely. The effect of today's switch is that kids who had accurate grades submitted on their behalf, have effectively been penalised. It's most unfortunate, but at this stage It probably had to happen, unless some mammoth appeals process could be undertaken.

The difficulty with only hammering the authorities clearly 'at it', is that within them there would also be cases of kids being very badly served. I'm still a bit baffled that massively inflated grades could be submitted. The process seemed to contain several stages designed to curtail such a thing. I had hopes last week that the appeals process could largely fix this, allowing deserving grades to improve, while calling the bluffs of those who'd overreached. I wondered about the scale of such a process in a logistical sense though. It maybe needed overtaking in this way. Perhaps hugely ambitious estimates should have been bumped back to schools when they reached the SQA. That would certainly have been known in June. What we've got now really is a bloody mess. Nobody emerges well.

The results business is rather a disaster. The main problem is that the teacher estimates were so wildly out in the first place. If they had been kept broadly in line with patterns that are established and reliable, then the SQA intervention wouldn't have been necessary. As it is, that intervention took the form of using a tool too crude to prevent there being large numbers of genuine individual injustices. The reversal it's apparently necessitated though, is thoroughly unsatisfactory.

It Is a bit like it , but you're right. The BBC thing is a much less grave offence.

I didn't say that. I've paid to watch Queens at Ibrox before. Please stop flogging this silly, irrelevant horse, and allow people to speculate on the game.

Only teasing. It seems that the Gretna issue really was entirely local for you, because when clubs spend suicidally beyond their means, while a compliant press lauds their associated 'achievements', you're sometimes fine with it.

It's also wrong, obviously enough. I'll leave those keen to discuss the match on here, to it though.

I have no interest in whether either part of the OF wins 9, 10 or 20 in a row. They're effectively two elements of the same entity, so it's massively regrettable that the count currently stands at 35. I'll take some notice when that sequence ends.

Totally agree. It's a bit like those "worst poster of all time" threads you get on here. You have those who contribute spiteful little lies about people. However, the 'aggregator' who dutifully compiles and publishes them, carries a greater moral responsibility, even if he or she tries to duck it.