Hacker News Reader

Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

Teachers predict grades all the time. It's part of how student progress is tracked. We are constantly being told what level our kids are at and predicted level at exam time.

Part of the problem is that teachers often push the "prediction" slightly higher as a means of motivating the student. Now those predictions are being used as the real deal.

I am pretty convinced that most teachers with more than superficial experience will be able to predict grades reasonably accurately, after doing so for many tens of students 5-6 times a year .

View on HN

Well as a point of fact, they didnt. Their requested, "accurate" grades represent a 20% increase in general attainment. That has never happened in the history of modern education, and occurs only when, eg., civil wars end.

As a comparative reference, we'd expect an at-most, 3% increase in IQ in the general population.

This is desirable and it's easy to explain why. For any student there will be a range of grades they could expect to achieve. The fairest grade to assign is the best case grade in that range (not the midpoint), because there is no evidence that they would not have studied hard and achieved that grade in the exam. If every student is given their best case grade then you will indeed see an overall rise, this simply reflects a lack of knowledge of who would have studied hard and who would not have.

That's only fair in an environment where education is not a scarce good. But college education needs some way to artificially pick winners because the schools are underfunded and then economy is classist.

I have no problem with the idea of down-weighting the entire national cohort to correct for this. The problem is that they actually weighted the results on a per-school basis.

Even down-weighting the entire national cohort... some kids have seen grades go from C (or B/C in one case) to U! A fail grade for an exam they weren't allowed to take.

That would be an improvement if your luck of the draw was national rather than biased in favour of private schools, but it's still a pretty awful outcome.

There may not have been any solution available that would be 100% fair to both this year and other year cohorts, but at the very least they should avoid making any student feel actively screwed over.

Nonsense. There has always been a divide in the UK between public schools that try and predict grades accurately and private schools that game the system to maximise their students' chances of acceptance.

I don't think teachers, or anyone else, can reliably predict results. I got the equivalent of an A* in most of my of my AS exams, but because I had bad GCSEs my results were ranked down for my predicted grades to AAB. Only after complaining did they change them to AAA. In the event I got two A*'s and an A - a whole grade above all of my original predictions.

The entire system is asinine because there's no reliable way of predicting future results from past performance, because of the unfair discretion it gives teachers and schools, and because it demotivates students to achieve above their prediction (because they cannot be accepted by any course above that prediction). It should have been abolished long ago.

The teachers don't play a part in downgrading based on past results, only on grade prediction based on current performance.

I'm glad you got the grades you wanted eventually, but the finger needs to be pointed in the correct direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com