1. Something really, really bad has
happened.

2. All that is necessary for the triumph
of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
What I should have done is shout,
“The Emperor is start bollock
naked!”
But, of course it would have made
no difference at all (and in fact, I did
shout quite loudly!)

3. The background
The previous GCSE was 40% course work (20%
written, 20% Speaking and Listening)
People thought, rightly, that this 40% was
corrupt.
So . . .

4. New spec.
• 40% exam
• 60% ‘controlled assessment’
– tasks set by exam boards
– tasks done under ‘controlled conditions’ (quasi-exam
conditions) in schools, marked by teachers and
moderated by boards
• at least 40% of marks must be banked at the end
of the course (i.e., this year, in June 2012)
• other ‘banking’ opportunities in June2011 and
Jan 2012

5. e.g. AQA English Language
• One exam proper (could be taken in June ’11,
Jan ’12 or June ’12)
• Speaking and listening ‘controlled assessment’
(marks could have been banked in June ’11,
Jan ’12 or June ’12)
• Three written controlled assessment units
(marks could have been banked in June ’11,
Jan ’12 or June ’12)

6. So . . .
Candidates and schools might well have 60%
of the qualification done, dusted and in the
bank before the Y11 June exams.
And . . .
Resits
Any unit (C/A or exam) could be re-taken once
The better mark counts (but the 40% terminal
rule applies)

7. And moreover . . .
• All four exam boards sold their new
specifications as being more likely to result in
better outcomes for candidates (by, for
example) encouraging teachers to ‘chunk-up’
the controlled assessment tasks and teach to
each chunk immediately before the
candidates tackle each chunk. Candidates
have never been better ‘prepared’ for their
GCSE.

8. Pause for questions
• new specification
• modular
• resit opportunities
• controlled assessment with lots of teacher
input
• resulted in higher performance
• schools and candidates had ‘banked’ higher
performance before June ’12

9. So what happened?
• grade boundaries moved substantially upwards between
January and June 2012 (i.e. harder to get higher grades)
• for one particular AQA unit, percentages of C+:
June 2011 26.7%
Jan 2012 37.0%
June 2012 10.2%
• England and Wales overall C+ in English / English Language fell
by 1.5%
• some (good and outstanding) schools’ results ‘fell off a cliff’
(down 20%+). Some in Norfolk
• ASCL say some 143 secondaries pushed below floor targets
(40% 5+ C+ inc. En and Ma) by the change. Some in Norfolk.

10. How did this happen?
• GCEs were norm-referenced (i.e. a fixed %age
of the entry achieved each grade. ‘Grade
inflation’ impossible
• Sir Keith Joseph’s GCSEs introduced as
‘criteria-referenced’ (i.e. you achieve a given
grade if you can do what the exam
specification says is required to achieve that
grade.) Improved performance is reflected in
improved exam statistics – ‘grade inflation’.

11. How did this happen? cont.
• Ofqual took the criteria-referenced GCSE and
applied a ‘comparable outcomes’ rule which
moves the exam back towards norm-
referencing
• comparable outcomes uses KS2 results to
‘predict’ what the entry cohort ‘should’
achieve and adjusts grade boundaries to bring
about that result

12. How did this happen? cont. 2
• Ofqual say they didn’t have the KS2 data to hand in
June 2011 or Jan 2012 and that the number of
entries (14K +!) was too small a sample for them to
realise that ‘too many’ candidates were going to get
higher grades until about two weeks before the
results were to be published
• they ordered boards to raise thresholds in order to
‘claw back’ the overall comparable outcome
• tens of thousands (50K+?) candidates downgraded

13. Ofqual says it did nothing wrong
• January grades were ‘too generous’
• they couldn’t have done anything at that time
• overall results were right (so logically June ’12 must be too
harsh!)
• it’s a problem with modular exams with lots of controlled
assessment
• it’s a problem with English
• teachers overestimated candidates’ performance (but no
board informed any schools that this was happening at the
time!)

14. Ofqual says it did nothing wrong
• January grades were ‘too generous’
• they couldn’t have done anything at that time so had to
intervene (strongly) when they spotted the ‘problem’
• overall results were right (so logically June ’12 must be too
harsh!)
• it’s a problem with modular exams with lots of controlled
assessment
• it’s a problem with English
• teachers overestimated candidates’ performance (but no
board informed any schools that this was happening at the
time!)

15. And . . .
• there has been no explanation of why the
picture of results is so massively variable
between schools. (‘We’re trying to
understand that.’)
• current Y11 following an identical assessment
process
• current Y10 following a ‘linear’ process – no
resits

16. Ofqual says it did nothing wrong
• January grades were ‘too generous’
• they couldn’t have done anything at that time
• overall results were right (so logically June ’12 must be too
harsh!)
• it’s a problem with modular exams with lots of controlled
assessment
• it’s a problem with English
• teachers overestimated candidates’ performance (but no
board informed any schools that this was happening at the
time!)

17. TES leading article today
. . . the August debacle. Exam boards were cowed or co-
opted into stringent grading of June's English papers to
compensate for Ofqual's neglect. Thousands of pupils were
denied predicted grades while schools crashed through
floor targets.
When pressed by MPs this week on why her watchdog
failed to bark earlier, the chief regulator claimed it lacked
sufficient data (see pages 8-9). Why were forecasts so wide
of the mark? Well, schools are prone to exaggeration. Why
were they not informed? Er, it was all terribly difficult. Why
were January's marks so generous? Good Lord, is that the
time?

18. Glenys Stacey at the Select Committee
“There are several unknowns. There are more
unknowns than there is when we’ve got a stable
qualification, or than there are at the end of a
qualification. So the unknowns are these, for example:
the strength of the correlation between the units,
which strongly influences, actually, how unit outcomes
aggregate to these subject outcomes…”