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Daughter not happy with LC results - anyone else?
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Thats a strawman, you avoiding the point, high achieving schools were brought down, poor achieving schools were brought up. Your latching onto the mocks, where I said 1 student received less than his mocks. You have no idea what the school in quetion did or didn't do in relation to the mocks, whether they bought in papers or wrote their own, whether they marked hard or easy. In this case the school set papers written by the teachers and no leaked before hand. You can't deny that some schools are high achieving yr on yr. That's whats being discussed.joeguevara wrote: »Your failing to grasp my crux. They got the grades not from teacher bias who lets face it in grinds schools get the tests before they are given (i went to one so I know) so it is completely irrelevantg that they got 100% in every test in 2 years.
I do understand that. A hign achieving school will sit higher on the national average curve, a low achieving school at the far end.joeguevara wrote: »What you fail to understand is the leaving cert normally is graded on a bell curve so that the results are always skewed.
I never said if I liked or disliked the man. I said so far I think he's doing a bad job, nothing about him personally. This is not a brexit discussion, but the WA is now front and central and is not completed by any stretch of imagination. Secondly IRL played a key role in negotiating the final parts of the WA, when Johnson visited here the deadlock was broke. But lets not discuss that here.joeguevara wrote: »All of this boils down to you don't like Micheal Martin. And the EU will be leading the Brexit negotiations which are already complete as far as the withdrawal agreement goes. For the sake of clarity, who would you prefer to be in the role0 -
Thats a strawman, you avoiding the point, high achieving schools were brought down, poor achieving schools were brought up. Your latching onto the mocks, where I said 1 student received less than his mocks. You have no idea what the school in quetion did or didn't do in relation to the mocks, whether they bought in papers or wrote their own, whether they marked hard or easy. In this case the school set papers written by the teachers and no leaked before hand. You can't deny that some schools are high achieving yr on yr. That's whats being discussed.
I do understand that. A hign achieving school will sit higher on the national average curve, a low achieving school at the far end.
I never said if I liked or disliked the man. I said so far I think he's doing a bad job, nothing about him personally. This is not a brexit discussion, but the WA is now front and central and is not completed by any stretch of imagination. Secondly IRL played a key role in negotiating the final parts of the WA, when Johnson visited here the deadlock was broke. But lets not discuss that here.
I agree with what you are saying but I think that if everyone receives the grades the teacher predicted that the points for everything would have increased and they wouldn't have got in anyway. I do agree that the people in niche schools were treated unfairly. But you can't please everyone and the comments about Martin were harsh but you have explained your self well.0 -
Sorry but does anybody else not think they should have just made them all do the damn exam?
Seriously, the idea that it would have been impossible to socially distance with 1/6th of the student population in a school is absurd. "Oh but what about the stress and anxiety of students?" Welcome the being an adult bucko! Life is pure stress. Get used to it.
And as for them missing their last few months of school, for God's sake, get the teachers off their asses and do daily Zoom classes. Stick to the full timetable but just do it online. Seriously, I'm was in university and I was getting about 5-6 online classes every day. Stop pussyfooting over the teachers and their bloody unions and demand that these people do their jobs. Kick some butts if you have to.
I'm quite skeptical as to whether the majority of teachers actually give two damns about educating children.0 -
Isn't that the whole point of an exam, to see who at the end of the day actually does deserve it?I agree with most of what you say bar that last bit. If a school with a 100 LC students gave out 5h1 in maths and that was the average for the whole country per hundred students then no student was marked down or marked up from a h2. But if you went to a school where 8 students were being given a h1, and deserved it, then 3 of those students were marked down. Again if your school only gave 3h1's then 2 lucky h2 students got marked up.
That's my understanding of not introducing a schools past performance into the equation. It's a simplistic view but it does seem to be ringing through when it's disadvantage schools that seem to be raving about this years results and high achieving schools complaining.
I think that is probably the closest you can get to a school "deserving" it, but it's unfortunate, they still didn't sit the exam. They don't deserve anything more than other schools therefore.St Kilian's is a great example, they teach through German and every year get way above average compared to other schools in higher level German, usually 40- 50% of students get a h1. This would make perfect sense This year those students were marked down and only 14% got a h1. When the Govt said they would take that into account, one week before the results were due out, under Martin's watch this part of the calculation was removed.
I don't know how people expect a system that guesses how students might have done is going to come up with results comparable to a real exam. You have to accept that a different system was used this year.0 -
@ Gerry T
Not sure much of what you say about “the national average” is correct.
Say you have 30 students in a subject class, St Killian’s or anywhere. As far as I understand it the algorithm was based on a weighted combination of:
- teacher estimated marks and class rankings; and
- how that set of 30 students did in their 5 core junior cert subjects (not just German which may explain the St Killian’s case and which could have been any school, say grind school students coming from elsewhere for LC)
So, say that set of 30 students scored an average of 75% across their 5 core JC subjects then that is the coefficient for those 30 students in the subject in that school, and the teacher estimates are then crushed to yield that same average of 75%, pushing the higher scorers down and the lower scorers up - moving everyone in the group towards the average point at an equal rate.
Trying to read the department’s guide to the standardisation model is torture but if above is even broadly correct then rather than being judged by the national averages including DEIS school results etc, each student is being judged by reference to himself and the other 29 in his class. And if you do 6 subjects, then you are a member of 6 different class sets, working to 6 different average JC 5 core subject coefficients.0 -
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Going back to OP, my daughter was happy with her leaving cert results in 2019, had hoped to study Medicine in NUIG, but came down a few points short in her HPAT exam that year and decided to take a year out to repeat HPAT 2020. She ended up with 728 (combined HPAT & LC) , the 3 previous years were 725, 725, 726 respectively so she was justifiably confident of an offer. Then the calculated grades came into play, we were assured they would rigorously apply the bell-curve from the previous 3 years to ensure fairness. We all know where this went. Points in NUIG med went up to 728 and my daughter lost out to random selection. She has no opportunity to appeal, resit in November or combine points. Points were so badly inflated, all the extra places created were taken up by 2020 candidates, very few trickled down to the intended recipients. This is the case for anybody using points from past LC. While I have sympathy with this years cohort of students, they have an opportunity to get the grades they feel they lost out on by resitting exams in November. This will likely distort next years CAO's and i'll lay odds that 2021 LC class will be in dispute about this imbalance. The students using grades from previous years are the real losers in this debacle and i'd guess most would happily swap places with the 2020 group.0
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Yes the only ones I have sympathy for are previous years students that worked hard and sat ACTUAL exams- not made up drivel.
Their real results that they achieved in that old fashioned way of actually sitting an exam and working for a grade should be at least inflated in line with this years made up ones to level the CAO playing field0 -
joeguevara wrote: »There was not an error in her process. They simply totted up the marks incorrectly.
Your second sentence contradicts your first.0 -
Going back to OP, my daughter was happy with her leaving cert results in 2019, had hoped to study Medicine in NUIG, but came down a few points short in her HPAT exam that year and decided to take a year out to repeat HPAT 2020. She ended up with 728 (combined HPAT & LC) , the 3 previous years were 725, 725, 726 respectively so she was justifiably confident of an offer. Then the calculated grades came into play, we were assured they would rigorously apply the bell-curve from the previous 3 years to ensure fairness. We all know where this went. Points in NUIG med went up to 728 and my daughter lost out to random selection. She has no opportunity to appeal, resit in November or combine points. Points were so badly inflated, all the extra places created were taken up by 2020 candidates, very few trickled down to the intended recipients. This is the case for anybody using points from past LC. While I have sympathy with this years cohort of students, they have an opportunity to get the grades they feel they lost out on by resitting exams in November. This will likely distort next years CAO's and i'll lay odds that 2021 LC class will be in dispute about this imbalance. The students using grades from previous years are the real losers in this debacle and i'd guess most would happily swap places with the 2020 group.
That is dreadful in fairness, omg that is very hard luck and definitely unfair0 -
It's difficult to overstate just how catastrophically terrible the decision was to cancel the LC exam.
And even more so because of the reason they did it - to appease opportunistic students that saw a way to get their exams cancelled and fought for it with all their might.0 -
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Sorry but does anybody else not think they should have just made them all do the damn exam?
Seriously, the idea that it would have been impossible to socially distance with 1/6th of the student population in a school is absurd. "Oh but what about the stress and anxiety of students?" Welcome the being an adult bucko! Life is pure stress. Get used to it.
And as for them missing their last few months of school, for God's sake, get the teachers off their asses and do daily Zoom classes. Stick to the full timetable but just do it online. Seriously, I'm was in university and I was getting about 5-6 online classes every day. Stop pussyfooting over the teachers and their bloody unions and demand that these people do their jobs. Kick some butts if you have to.
I'm quite skeptical as to whether the majority of teachers actually give two damns about educating children.
Teachers were doing online classes, or are you just one of those keyboard warriors who likes to jump on the teacher bashing bandwagon?
Lots of students chose not to do online learning, but you'll never hear that in the media.0 -
Maybe my other post was phrased a bit strongly but I stand by what I said.rainbowtrout wrote: »Teachers were doing online classes, or are you just one of those keyboard warriors who likes to jump on the teacher bashing bandwagon?
Some teachers did some online classes. But this was mainly the prerogative of the schools or individual teachers. I know several people who only had a handful of Zoom sessions in the entire period before the calculated grade scheme was announced.
I stand by what I said about teachers. I would say a substantial minority of teachers are actually invested in educating their students.
The majority got into teaching because they wanted an easy job, a secure job, alright wages, summer holiday and the luxury of extorting the taxpayer by striking if any of these things come under threat.
I did the Leaving Cert a few years ago and teaching was the most popular career option among my peers. They want the holidays and the job security. They want it because it's a free ride. Very few of them seemed interested in teaching children. The unions have converted a once noble profession into a gravy train.
Sure. Nobody that age is obligated to go to school, none of them were obligated to attend online sessions. But the teacher is obligated to teach because it's their job.rainbowtrout wrote: »Lots of students chose not to do online learning, but you'll never hear that in the media.0 -
It's difficult to overstate just how catastrophically terrible the decision was to cancel the LC exam.
And even more so because of the reason they did it - to appease opportunistic students that saw a way to get their exams cancelled and fought for it with all their might.
Did it ever dawn on u the stress it put on students and if cancelling the exam only saved one life it was worth it .
It’s only a bloody exam get over it , repeat it if doesn’t suit u .
I feel sorry for that girl in previous post having the correct points but unlucky in the random draw for last few places0 -
I stand by what I said about teachers. I would say a substantial minority of teachers are actually invested in educating their students.
The majority got into teaching because they wanted an easy job, a secure job, alright wages, summer holiday and the luxury of extorting the taxpayer by striking if any of these things come under threat.
I did the Leaving Cert a few years ago and teaching was the most popular career option among my peers. They want the holidays and the job security. They want it because it's a free ride. Very few of them seemed interested in teaching children. The unions have converted a once noble profession into a gravy train.
Sure. Nobody that age is obligated to go to school, none of them were obligated to attend online sessions. But the teacher is obligated to teach because it's their job.
Teaching is anything but a gravy train. It's unfortunate that you see teaching as such, and will probably be one of those people who spend the rest of their lives bashing teachers in the comments section of various media outlets about how easy they have it and how everyone is only in it for the holidays, when the reality is far, far different. Plenty of people leaving teaching because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector.0 -
Sorry it wasn't.Millionaire only not wrote: »Did it ever dawn on u the stress it put on students and if cancelling the exam only saved one life it was worth it .
"If it only saves one life..." is far and away the stupidest standard by which any policy could be measured.
There are LOTS of things we could do that would save WAY more than one life but we don't do them because it turns out there's a cost to everything.
How many lives do you think could be saved if we banned cars? Why wouldn't we? 148 people were killed in car crashes on Irish roads last year. Presumably we could save all of them if we just banned cars right?
We don't ban cars because as a society we've decided that the quality of life of the 5'000'000 people who's lives are better because they travel in cars as opposed to a horse and buggy outweighs the cost of 148 people dying. And the reality is that it's not a bad tradeoff.
If having the Leaving Cert go ahead meant more people die of COVID, that wouldn't necessarily make it a bad tradeoff.
Incredibly easy for you to say that when it's not your future that was on the line.Millionaire only not wrote: »It’s only a bloody exam get over it , repeat it if doesn’t suit u .
All these calculated grades have done is rob students of their agency.
For better or for worse, the LC is a 2 year course measured by a single exam. And the fact is that most people do most of their effective study in the final few months.
Past work is not a good predictor of grades in this exam. Changing the system like that in an arbitrary and unplanned way was the worst possible option.0 -
And most of those bailing out are the young ones that have recently graduated in the last few years. The market is flooded with them which is why it's hard to find a full time position. This is because it's become such a popular career option for the reasons I've outlined.rainbowtrout wrote: »Plenty of people leaving teaching because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector.
Yes it's hard to get a full time position but if you do, you have the security, the holidays etc.
Burnout? If a teacher is getting burnout it's probably not because of the teaching.
Poor working conditions? It's a school not a meat factory.0 -
yes i see all teachers driving fancy cars and living in big houses no need for summer jobs0
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Going back to OP, my daughter was happy with her leaving cert results in 2019, had hoped to study Medicine in NUIG, but came down a few points short in her HPAT exam that year and decided to take a year out to repeat HPAT 2020. She ended up with 728 (combined HPAT & LC) , the 3 previous years were 725, 725, 726 respectively so she was justifiably confident of an offer. Then the calculated grades came into play, we were assured they would rigorously apply the bell-curve from the previous 3 years to ensure fairness. We all know where this went. Points in NUIG med went up to 728 and my daughter lost out to random selection. She has no opportunity to appeal, resit in November or combine points. Points were so badly inflated, all the extra places created were taken up by 2020 candidates, very few trickled down to the intended recipients. This is the case for anybody using points from past LC. While I have sympathy with this years cohort of students, they have an opportunity to get the grades they feel they lost out on by resitting exams in November. This will likely distort next years CAO's and i'll lay odds that 2021 LC class will be in dispute about this imbalance. The students using grades from previous years are the real losers in this debacle and i'd guess most would happily swap places with the 2020 group.
That is hard, but I would be hopeful she would get a second/third round offer.0 -
Sorry it wasn't.
"If it only saves one life..." is far and away the stupidest standard by which any policy could be measured.
There are LOTS of things we could do that would save WAY more than one life but we don't do them because it turns out there's a cost to everything.
How many lives do you think could be saved if we banned cars? Why wouldn't we? 148 people were killed in car crashes on Irish roads last year. Presumably we could save all of them if we just banned cars right?
We don't ban cars because as a society we've decided that the quality of life of the 5'000'000 people who's lives are better because they travel in cars as opposed to a horse and buggy outweighs the cost of 148 people dying. And the reality is that it's not a bad tradeoff.
If having the Leaving Cert go ahead meant more people die of COVID, that wouldn't necessarily make it a bad tradeoff.
Incredibly easy for you to say that when it's not your future that was on the line.
All these calculated grades have done is rob students of their agency.
For better or for worse, the LC is a 2 year course measured by a single exam. And the fact is that most people do most of their effective study in the final few months.
Past work is not a good predictor of grades in this exam. Changing the system like that in an arbitrary and unplanned way was the worst possible option.
How dare u , I spent 70k bringing my child through secondary school only not to secure enough points last year .
I wanted her to go foreign she decided to repeat . if she had remained at the same grind school I have no doubt she would have been no better off than the year before because we were nobodies in that school !
Not one phone call did we receive after last years leaving to ask how she is what did she do ! Thanks very much for your fees now piss off .
All they wanted was pictures of there 600 point students for promotion. They even split up a set of twins because one didn’t get over 600 the other did.
My point is we had to lick our wounds go back and repeat and thankfully were over the 600 mark this year . Thanks to sheer work on my daughter’s behalf , teachers can only do so much !
As for ur remarks on stress and suicide how many do it every year and at least we didn’t hear of any this year !0 -
rainbowtrout wrote: »Teaching is anything but a gravy train. It's unfortunate that you see teaching as such, and will probably be one of those people who spend the rest of their lives bashing teachers in the comments section of various media outlets about how easy they have it and how everyone is only in it for the holidays, when the reality is far, far different. Plenty of people leaving teaching because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector.
There is one thing I notice though, almost all the teachers I know, and I have loads of them in my family, in laws and as friends, have at least one of their children, almost always the girls, who followed them into the teaching profession so I think that means it's not that terrible as jobs go, or anywhere near.0 -
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There is one thing I notice though, almost all the teachers I know, and I have loads of them in my family, in laws and as friends, have at least one of their children, almost always the girls, who followed them into the teaching profession so I think that means it's not that terrible as jobs go, or anywhere near.
You could say that of many professions.0 -
And most of those bailing out are the young ones that have recently graduated in the last few years. The market is flooded with them which is why it's hard to find a full time position. This is because it's become such a popular career option for the reasons I've outlined.
Yes it's hard to get a full time position but if you do, you have the security, the holidays etc.
Burnout? If a teacher is getting burnout it's probably not because of the teaching.
Poor working conditions? It's a school not a meat factory.
And you'd be qualified to make that judgement how exactly???0 -
rainbowtrout wrote: »You could say that of many professions.
Not if their parents are describing it as a job they may want to leave "because it's hard to secure work, poor working conditions, and burn out and there are better opportunities for them in the private sector".0 -
It's difficult to overstate just how catastrophically terrible the decision was to cancel the LC exam.
And even more so because of the reason they did it - to appease opportunistic students that saw a way to get their exams cancelled and fought for it with all their might.
Agreed and even worse, there was no need to cancel them, except pleasing the media rabble.0 -
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Your description of the way it was calculated is something I've read, and a better description to how I've represented it. But it just doesn't sound right, maybe in the algorithm the class ranking had a skewing affect, but it still doesn't explain how schools that typically perform well ended up performing well below how they normally would. You would think that a school at the top of the league table in the leaving cert would also be in a similar position for the Junior cert. Their class average would therefore be higher and their predicted grades would reflect that, but that's not the reality of what's happened, not in my experience.Imhof Tank wrote: »@ Gerry T
Not sure much of what you say about “the national average” is correct.
Say you have 30 students in a subject class, St Killian’s or anywhere. As far as I understand it the algorithm was based on a weighted combination of:
- teacher estimated marks and class rankings; and
- how that set of 30 students did in their 5 core junior cert subjects (not just German which may explain the St Killian’s case and which could have been any school, say grind school students coming from elsewhere for LC)
So, say that set of 30 students scored an average of 75% across their 5 core JC subjects then that is the coefficient for those 30 students in the subject in that school, and the teacher estimates are then crushed to yield that same average of 75%, pushing the higher scorers down and the lower scorers up - moving everyone in the group towards the average point at an equal rate.
Trying to read the department’s guide to the standardisation model is torture but if above is even broadly correct then rather than being judged by the national averages including DEIS school results etc, each student is being judged by reference to himself and the other 29 in his class. And if you do 6 subjects, then you are a member of 6 different class sets, working to 6 different average JC 5 core subject coefficients.
I'm sure someone will do a detailed analysis, and it will be good to get a better understanding of what happened, who were the winners the losers. That's all academic and I hope what happened this yr isn't repeated.
Finally on a number of the past couple of posts, can we not descend into slagging off teachers and how committed they are, like any profession there are those that coast and those that pour themselves into it. Teaching is no different. It's a hard job and this utter mess is not their making or fault. (no, I don't teach!)0 -
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I dont know about this calculated grade system at all. I think its very hard on students.
I have to say that if my teachers were calculating my grades based on my mocs and final 2 years in school id have been a miserable failure. Up to then I had never studied a day in my life. The teachers in most of my subjects even told me to drop down to lower level because I would fail everything at higher level.
I finally awakened after a dire performance in my mocs, stayed doing higher level and put my head down in the last couple of months before my leaving and ended up getting the points i needed for my desired course.
But based on my previous performance I would have been marked down from A's to C's and B's to D's in most subjects.
And I probably would have failed History and Irish. I eventually got a B1 in History and a B2 in Irish. I was a total failure up until after my mocs. And the amount of my friends who normally did very well but didnt get over the line in the actual leaving who appealed solely based on the fact they did worse than me was kinda funny. They probably would have been better off in the end with predicted grades.
But its a harsh system. If i was doing the leaving this year and was disappointment with them id go straight for the re-sitting.0 -
bobbyy gee wrote: »
How does that figure align with previous years.
My daughter is going into LC this year.
Some students locally aren’t accepting offers but will reapply next year because the points for courses will fall back yet they will retain their higher points giving them a better position.
Surely this is a minority ? Surely it won’t be enough to distort next years system too.0 -
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rainbowtrout wrote: »Teachers were doing online classes, or are you just one of those keyboard warriors who likes to jump on the teacher bashing bandwagon?
Lots of students chose not to do online learning, but you'll never hear that in the media.
Not all of them, some only sent emails, and very little work was checked.
And don’t forget, a lot of people didn’t have access to WiFi or laptop.0
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