UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Granite City]

I expected Cummings to be more abrasive today, not sure whether he is genuinely concerned at how this is going down or is acting up for sympathy. I would guess the former given the timeline of Downing Street's response.

The Barnard Castle excursion is indefensible, not that I expect that to stop people.

Firstly, the DVLA pretty clearly does not allow you to drive to test your ability to drive

https://www.gov.uk/driving-eyesight-rules

but more importantly, if we have to excuse his behaviour because it was all within good judgement, I'm concerned about the judgment of keeping your wife and child in the car for a test of your ability to drive.

I imagine the defence will be that he had them in the car so as to not waste time travelling back to his parents' house and then back to London which might be legitimate if going to the Castle was directly on the way but it appears to have been something of a detour.

The defence of driving to Durham was slightly more convincing but if he can justify a symptomatic family driving 260 miles why couldn't the asymptomatic people in Durham who had volunteered themselves for childcare drive down to London? I believe he mentioned a 20 year old who you could presume can drive - maybe not but he should at least answer the question.

Pretty horrific excuses all round and a shame that the journalists were not more forensic.

[Granite City]

A level "results" are out today in England/Wales - already shaping up to be at least as much of a potential s***show as the Scottish experience in the last couple of weeks was.

It seems the downgrading and bias against deprived schools has not been quite as bad as in Scotland. Honestly, short of running exams, this is probably the best way it could have been done while keeping the value of grades, although perhaps with more leniency to high-achievers in schools with historically lower results.

I just went through my final results day in Scotland (3As at Advanced Higher so yay me!) and I would have to agree.

The concept of moderation via a statistical model wasn't the problem and that's where I disagree with the majority of the criticism. The problem was that the model was entirely too lazy and didn't deliver on what they had promised; most importantly the failure to take samples from school to test how robust internal moderation had been before they applied their own.

There was a lot of other horrendous communication problems from the SQA but those will happen any year. It won't affect me but the pass rates this year are going to be a problem into the future, I would imagine grade boundaries would need to come down by at least 5% next year to keep to the new standard (and they'll have to be to the same standard if the justification for this year's high pass rate is that we will be disadvantaged by COVID).

Hopefully this will lead to a new and better system where core qualifications (GCSE/Nat 5 Maths and English) can be criteria based and allow anyone to pass and traditional exam systems at A-Level and Higher. Not too optimistic.

[Granite City]

A level "results" are out today in England/Wales - already shaping up to be at least as much of a potential s***show as the Scottish experience in the last couple of weeks was.

It seems the downgrading and bias against deprived schools has not been quite as bad as in Scotland. Honestly, short of running exams, this is probably the best way it could have been done while keeping the value of grades, although perhaps with more leniency to high-achievers in schools with historically lower results.

I just went through my final results day in Scotland (3As at Advanced Higher so yay me!) and I would have to agree.

The concept of moderation via a statistical model wasn't the problem and that's where I disagree with the majority of the criticism. The problem was that the model was entirely too lazy and didn't deliver on what they had promised; most importantly the failure to take samples from school to test how robust internal moderation had been before they applied their own.

There was a lot of other horrendous communication problems from the SQA but those will happen any year. It won't affect me but the pass rates this year are going to be a problem into the future, I would imagine grade boundaries would need to come down by at least 5% next year to keep to the new standard (and they'll have to be to the same standard if the justification for this year's high pass rate is that we will be disadvantaged by COVID).

Hopefully this will lead to a new and better system where core qualifications (GCSE/Nat 5 Maths and English) can be criteria based and allow anyone to pass and traditional exam systems at A-Level and Higher. Not too optimistic.

Congrats on your results!

I think that contrary to initial predictions this year has actually shown that written external exams are necessary.

Having criteria based exams sounds good, but in practise would be very difficult. How do you gauge, year on year, what is a 9/A*/C etc. level of achievement? The reason that grade %s are the same every year is because that it is assumed each cohort has the overall same ability, which is reasonable in such a large sample size.

I agree, I was just referring to the absolutely core subjects at about GCSE level. To me, if your going to make passing Maths and English a prerequisite to virtually anything coming out of school, anyone should, in principle, be able to achieve them based on a consistent year-to-year standard. The implication (to me anyway) of requiring those two is to display minimum competency and I think that can be achieved without the need to compete for grades.

In England I could see a need to make that separate from GCSE because when they go so aggressively from 10 to 3 or 4 subjects, individual grades for Maths and English can matter more because you less likely to have anything at higher level for those but its reasonable for employers and universities to have a better idea of ability in the subject. In Scotland though, Nat 5s in Maths and English are basically already seen as pass-fail as if you need to make clearer your ability in an area its likely you'll already have a Higher in Maths or English because we go from 6-8 subjects to 5 to 3 or 4.