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16 minutes ago, virginton said:

Life is hugely biased towards pupils in affluent areas and the historical exam results reflect those advantages year after year. That you think the SQA should somehow ignore these statistical facts and instead create a nice, equal set of results based on no reflection of reality whatsoever is mind-boggling.

 

The issue is that they have managed to make it even more biased.

It makes far more sense to do the opposite because as you say other factors will continue to favour affluent pupils.

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40 minutes ago, Detournement said:

Highers don't have any real value. They are a broad indicator for universities and employers who are still capable of selecting their preferred candidates via other assesments.

What a load of shite.

Highers are 99% of how universities chose between candidates.

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20 minutes ago, madwullie said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-53653683?__twitter_impression=true

 

Same school I was at. Didn't quite get AAAAA but I wasn't a kick in the arse off it. Life plans - fucked. 

Am I the only one that find running to the press as their first response to bad news a bit odd?

Hopefully she can get a college course to get her into medical school.

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1 minute ago, eez-eh said:

What a load of shite.

Highers are 99% of how universities chose between candidates.

Only 50% of people go to Uni though and of that 50% how many is it actually the right place for them.

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A lot of this could surely have been avoided by, unless there was an exceptional reason not to, just using the prelim results.

It's not ideal either, but it's surely far better for a student to receive an award based on an exam they sat, rather than the exams others at their school sat over the last 5 years.

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5 hours ago, pandarilla said:

Shit we've got two nights in a lot cabin in Stonehaven starting tomorrow. Fingers crossed it doesn't happen, or that it only includes Aberdeen itself (he says, clutching at straws).

Don’t know if you’ve been there before, but there’s a cracking chippy and castle! 

Edited by Thereisalight..
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7 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

A lot of this could surely have been avoided by, unless there was an exceptional reason not to, just using the prelim results.

It's not ideal either, but it's surely far better for a student to receive an award based on an exam they sat, rather than the exams others at their school sat over the last 5 years.

Dont think everywhere managed to get their prelims completed, although yes that should this year be used as evidence I'd imagine if they did

Edited by madwullie
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24 minutes ago, 101 said:

Only 50% of people go to Uni though and of that 50% how many is it actually the right place for them.

I think we could all name one who didn't turn out a well rounded individual.

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19 minutes ago, madwullie said:

Dont think everywhere managed to get their prelims completed, although yes that should this year be used as evidence I'd imagine if they did

Is there not also the issue that the prelims aren't standardised? IE different schools will examine on different amounts of the course dependent on how much they've completed by then.

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4 minutes ago, Mark Connolly said:

Is there not also the issue that the prelims aren't standardised? IE different schools will examine on different amounts of the course dependent on how much they've completed by then.

Could well be.

I just seem to remember them being sold to me at school as being evidence in the case of an appeal and as a back-up in case something happened that meant I couldn't sit the final exam.

I'm sure they had illness or a family bereavement in mind when they said that rather than the exam being cancelled, but still.

Might be a good idea now to work towards a standardised prelim!

Edited by Todd_is_God
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5 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

Could well be.

I just seem to remember them being sold to me at school as being evidence in the case of an appeal and as a back-up in case something happened that meant I couldn't sit the final exam.

I'm sure they had illness or a family bereavement in mind when they said that rather than the exam being cancelled, but still.

Might be a good idea now to work towards a standardised prelim!

That would be very difficult and almost impossible to maintain any integrity. If you take N5 as an example, you have some schools who do it over one year with S4, others do it over two (S3/4) and it also gets taken by S5 and S6 kids. Some schools do prelims pre-Christmas (down to accommodation issues and to avoid concentrating all the marking in one slot), others do it later in the year to get better course coverage in advance. It would need to be organised for the whole country to do a standardised prelim on the same day; the prelim we do, is not the prelim that the next school down the road do and therefore isn't compromised by doing it at a different time.

Prelims have lessened in importance to some extent as appeals are now very different to what they were 5-10 years ago. We used to do a second prelim but now no longer do as it's not required. Pupils can apply for exams to be re-marked (which is rarely used in cases where a pupil has missed out by a mark or two) but evidence is now only really used in the case of illness/bereavement that causes a pupil to miss an exam. And kids don't think that'll happen to them.

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1 hour ago, Detournement said:

The issue is that they have managed to make it even more biased.

No they haven't. The pass grade differential between the lowest quintile and the highest in the SIMD index is no greater than usual. They simply had to chuck out more garbage estimates from poorer performing schools because those schools had the stupidity/brass neck to insist that they'd have somehow smashed their previous pass rates by fully 15% across the board if only Covid hadn't cancelled the exams. Which is utterly risible nonsense. The inflation at the top end was more in the ballpark of 10% and those also got chucked out as well. 

Edited by vikingTON
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3 minutes ago, virginton said:

No they haven't. The pass grade differential between the lowest quintile and the highest in the SIMD index is no greater than usual. They simply had to chuck out more garbage estimates from poorer performing schools because those schools had the stupidity/brass neck to insist that they'd have somehow smashed their previous pass rates by fully 15% across the board average if only Covid hadn't cancelled the exams. Which is utterly risible nonsense. The inflation at the top end was more in the ballpark of 10% and those also got chucked out as well. 

Exactly.

Someone somewhere along the chain should have said "wait a minute..." weeks, if not months ago

Edited by Todd_is_God
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Exactly.
Someone somewhere along the chain should have said "wait a minute..." weeks, if not months ago
Dundee certainly did this, and no schools were allowed to submit unrealistic grades.

My issue is that our higher results have been stung because they've obviously decided across the board cuts - which is horribly unfair on the individual kids who never got the chance to perform (or over-perform) this year.

The overall grades might be a reasonably balanced prediction across the country, but plenty of individuals are going to have been shafted here.
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3 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkey said:

Storm in a tea cup. I doubt very much Uni’s are giving too much consideration to the odd lower grade this year. 

Perhaps not. But for the girl in the article earlier, for example, AABBB is a mile away from the AAAAA she'd need. If the course is filled with applicants who achieved AAAAA she's no chance.

AAAAB or, at a push, AAABB she'd maybe have a tiny chance.

Edited by Todd_is_God
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