Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Dons_1988]

12 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Frantically searching through this thread for every Aberdeen supporter that was bantering about locking down the west of coast to send a personalised GIRFUY message

Of course the west coast should be locked down, Covid or not. Only political correctness is preventing this.

[vikingTON]

1 minute ago, Dons_1988 said:

Of course the west coast should be locked down, Covid or not. Only political correctness is preventing this.

Not sure what the likes of Ullapool and Oban have done to attract the wrath of teuchter east coasters tbh, other than being hubs for domestic and foreign tourists flocking to their glorious surroundings and not being a grey shitehole facing a featureless sea...oh wait now I get it. 

[Blootoon87]

They weegies need a wash eh, dinny ken why they end sentences wae but like, ad lock them doon jist fur thawt like. Ad gie the lawddy Shawnklun a chawnce up front ahead eh that McBurnie eh.

You've obviously never been to Aberdeen if that's your attempt at their accent.

[doulikefish]

Aberdeen is riddled basically

 

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

16 minutes ago, virginton said:

Presumably because they expected that relatively well-educated teachers as well as senior management would grasp that their predictions had to be aligned to the historical precedent for their school's performance rather than wishful thinking based on how great their students' completed coursework was. Given that some schools did in fact do this, it seems that there were also instructions given to that effect. Obviously though that degree of trust proved to be just too much to place on the minds of the 'professionals' in the Scottish schools system, as at least a large minority of them submitted complete and utter nonsense instead: hence the near 20 fucking per cent disparity between predicted and prior performance on a nationwide basis. Why should the teachers' predictions of band 1 As for certain students retain credibility then when their overall, nonsense claim that 85% of them would get a Higher pass is getting chucked in the bin?

I have been thinking about this idea of ranking students and how hard it must be to do it accurately.

If you have a few students who are in between a grade and they all routinely score around the same marks but never in the same order how is it possible for teachers' rankings to be accurate?

Take a small example. A teacher has a top class of 30 pupils and usually gets around 50% scoring A. So the top 15 are going to get an A this year. Maybe it is easy to pick the top 10 pupils but by the time you are asked to predict 10 to 20 you know all of them are capable on their day of getting an A but only around half of them will. And if you had ranked previous years there would be a disparity between ranking and actual results.

So the teacher picks 8 of the 10 mid ranked students to get an A. That is a 20% overprediction but it would be otherwise impossible to split pupils on the borderline of A and B.

---

I think what these results show is that overestimating grades is not the issue but how the exam system is biased towards schools who are more equipped to have pupils study for the exam. And that exams are now used as a gatekeeper to re-inforce class differences and "the attainment gap".  If you look at the tables the poor students were still predicted to do less well than rich students.

The real scandal here is that every year the poorest students are failed by an exam system that underestimates their ability by around 20%. Obviously the SQA and the Scottish Govt are not going to admit their exams are materially flawed so we instead have a fudging of figures to make themselves look credible.

[super_carson]

Aberdeen is riddled basically
 

That's pretty much a walk through of my usual night out in Aberdeen as a student. Only it wasn't covid I caught...

[AyrshireTon]

3 minutes ago, doulikefish said:

Aberdeen is riddled basically

 

So basically avoid pubs which begin with the letter "B".

[CALDERON]

Full list:

Bieldside Inn, Bobbin, Brewdog, Buckie Farm Carvery, Café Andaluz, Café Dag, Café Drummond, The Cock & Bull, College Bar, The Dutch Mill, Dyce Carvery, East End Social Club, Ferryhill House Hotel, Hawthorn/Adam Lounge, The Howff, The Justice Mill, The Marine Hotel, McGinty's, McNasty's, Malmaison, Moonfish Café, No.10 Bar, O'Donoghues, Old Bank Bar, Prohibition, Soul,  Spiders Web and The Draft Project

[Todd_is_God]

1 minute ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

The real scandal here is that every year the poorest students are failed by an exam system that underestimates their ability by around 20%. Obviously the SQA and the Scottish Govt are not going to admit their exams are materially flawed so we instead have a fudging of figures to make themselves look credible.

Given that, over the past 5 years, the poorest students have actually attained those poor results, how is the exam system underestimating them?

The 'scandal' here is that a large group teachers have drastically overestimated the ability of their students to pass an exam.

[Stellaboz]

That's a hell of a pub crawl.

[AyrshireTon]

1 minute ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

I have been thinking about this idea of ranking students and how hard it must be to do it accurately.

If you have a few students who are in between a grade and they all routinely score around the same marks but never in the same order how is it possible for teachers' rankings to be accurate?

It depends on what was used.

We had endless Zoom meetings whilst doing the ranking. My PT (a real numbers man) has loads of data and figures. Tests were combined, not combined, tests and Prelims rolled into one, Prelims plus S3 summer exams - absolutely everything possible was used to rank them, with the extremely difficult cases eventually coming down to the teacher's gut feeling.

[Dons_1988]

Suspect Covid is the least of Prohibition's disease worries.

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

Full list:
Bieldside Inn, Bobbin, Brewdog, Buckie Farm Carvery, Café Andaluz, Café Dag, Café Drummond, The Cock & Bull, College Bar, The Dutch Mill, Dyce Carvery, East End Social Club, Ferryhill House Hotel, Hawthorn/Adam Lounge, The Howff, The Justice Mill, The Marine Hotel, McGinty's, McNasty's, Malmaison, Moonfish Café, No.10 Bar, O'Donoghues, Old Bank Bar, Prohibition, Soul,  Spiders Web and The Draft Project

I can't wait to see what top banter Brewdog's marketing come up with in response to this.

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

1 minute ago, Todd_is_God said:

Given that, over the past 5 years, the poorest students have actually attained those poor results, how is the exam system underestimating them?

The 'scandal' here is that a large group teachers have drastically overestimated the ability of their students to pass an exam.

Because the exams are not reflecting the ability that pupils are able to show over a whole academic year.

That good students routinely fail exams and that treating one 2 hour test as the unequivocal outcome of hundreds of hours of work is biased against students who do not have large resources to commit to peaking at the optimal time.

[Mark Connolly]

Just now, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

6 minutes ago, CALDERON said:

Full list:
Bieldside Inn, Bobbin, Brewdog, Buckie Farm Carvery, Café Andaluz, Café Dag, Café Drummond, The Cock & Bull, College Bar, The Dutch Mill, Dyce Carvery, East End Social Club, Ferryhill House Hotel, Hawthorn/Adam Lounge, The Howff, The Justice Mill, The Marine Hotel, McGinty's, McNasty's, Malmaison, Moonfish Café, No.10 Bar, O'Donoghues, Old Bank Bar, Prohibition, Soul,  Spiders Web and The Draft Project

I can't wait to see what top banter Brewdog's marketing come up with in response to this.

I must admit to a small sense of delight when I read their name.

[Todd_is_God]

Just now, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

Because the exams are not reflecting the ability that pupils are able to show over a whole academic year.

That good students routinely fail exams and that treating one 2 hour test as the unequivocal outcome of hundreds of hours of work is biased against students who do not have large resources to commit to peaking at the optimal time.

Or, maybe, teachers just took the piss with the predicted grades.

[vikingTON]

21 minutes ago, Jim McLean's Ghost said:

I think what these results show is that overestimating grades is not the issue but how the exam system is biased towards schools who are more equipped to have pupils study for the exam. And that exams are now used as a gatekeeper to re-inforce class differences and "the attainment gap".  If you look at the tables the poor students were still predicted to do less well than rich students.

The reasons why rich pupils on the whole do better than poor pupils has got little to do with the exam structure itself and a lot more to do with their access to education and support from a very young age. There's no assessment and qualification model that you can create that wouldn't reflect the inherent head start that those pupils enjoy due to the structural inequalities within society. 

There are also plenty of schools in the lower part of the SIMD who have very good results and direct students towards exam performance. Whether the second part is the best approach for all-round learning is highly questionable but it isn't just the rich pupils who are directed to focus intensely on the end product here. 

Quote

The real scandal here is that every year the poorest students are failed by an exam system that underestimates their ability by around 20%. Obviously the SQA and the Scottish Govt are not going to admit their exams are materially flawed so we instead have a fudging of figures to make themselves look credible.

How on earth does the exam system 'underestimate their ability'? They produce coursework and sit an assessment in a controlled environment to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the course. Due to structural causes, poorer students are less likely to have that and obtain the qualification. That's a fairly objective measurement of their ability for the course year - far more so than the fantasy island nonsense that their teachers sent to the SQA based on coursework and wishful thinking alone. 

Edited August 5, 2020 by vikingTON

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

2 minutes ago, virginton said:

The reasons why rich pupils on the whole do better than poor pupils has got little to do with the exam structure itself and a lot more to do with their access to education and support from a very young age. There's no assessment and qualification model that you can create that wouldn't reflect the inherent head start that those pupils enjoy due to the structural inequalities within society. 

There are also plenty of schools in the lower art of the SIMD who have very good results and direct students towards exam performance. Whether the second part is the best approach for all-round learning is highly questionable but it isn't just the rich pupils who are directed to focus intensely on the end product here. 

How on earth does the exam system 'underestimate their ability'? They produce coursework and sit an assessment in a controlled environment to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the course. Due to structural causes, poorer students are less likely to have that and obtain the qualification. That's a fairly objective measurement of their ability for the course year - far more so than the fantasy island nonsense that their teachers sent to the SQA based on coursework and wishful thinking alone. 

Allowing teachers to mark work over the year and produce a grade vastly reduced the attainment gap this year. Then they remodeled those results to re-inforce that gap because pupils in poorer areas were not being disadvantaged by the exam system.

Perhaps forcing pupils into a controlled environment is the problem and that demonstration of knowledge is better done over continuous assessment and teaching. And that the exam system puts too much stock in a single test. And that is why pupils from poorer areas score lower despite their course work being closer to the same standard as affluent schools.

[Bairnardo]

Hopefully neither Brewdog nor the Justice Mill survive

[Todd_is_God]

5 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

that list of pubs is like the whole of aberdeen and its surrounding villages, yeesh.

I note the Holburn is missing