18th September 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I was in Portugal for most of last week for a friend’s wedding, so didn’t get a huge amount done. Harriet’s been back for two weeks now though, and has settled in nicely. There was a chance, when Laura left, that I would have to find someone new for a few weeks, which would have made being out of the country a bit tough, but it’s nice to have someone I can trust looking after things while I’m incommunicado.
I saw another article about the English GCSE grades last week. This one was sensationalising the discovery that Edexcel had been told to increase their grade boundaries by Ofqual two weeks before the results were published. I don’t really understand what the fuss is about, surely the whole point of having a regulatory body for qualifications is so that grades can be normalised, and the same GCSE grade from two different examining bodies represents the same achievement? As for the grade boundaries being changed two weeks before the results were published, when are Ofqual expected to make that request? Before all the GCSE exams have been marked?
Again, I am incredibly sympathetic towards every student who was disappointed with their English GCSE grade this summer, two of them are in my family, but most of the criticisms seem to be questioning procedures that were in place long before this summer. I think it would be best to without judgement about the ‘fairness’ of this summer’s GCSE results until we’ve been able to properly analyse individual papers, and determine whether students have been incorrectly marked, or harshly marked. The first would obviously be a big problem, but the harsh marking would just be bucking the GCSE marking trend, which isn’t unfair.