hahaha .. that got your attention …

Today Ofqual published the transcript for the below video on the DFE publications page of the DFE website -> here. No offence to Ian Stockford … I think you did a cracking job and “big respect” to you for doing this but there are a couple of things that I picked up on that I really can’t just ignore.

(1) Ian uses the following to clarify, that the assessment standard is linked to “demand”: “the assessment standard – or how demanding a particular assessment is” and goes onto say that it is “very challenging to define right now”

(2) It is mentioned that the “notion of demand is often confused with difficulty” … ok so I’ve noted the potential confusion. He then defines demand as “a judgement of cognitive processes a student has to carry out to answer a question” and difficulty as “an empirical measure of how successful a group of students were in answering a question”.  Dear reader … is that clear to you? You got it?

(3) Right … um … so what I don’t get is if you are saying it is challenging to define “how demanding a particular assessment is” how can it be the case that “judgements of demand can inform part of the accreditation process whereas the actual difficulty cannot”.

(4) There is a bit about the amount of pre-accreditation work that was done, including making a point that consultations took place. Stating that the “extent of pre-accreditation work has never been done before” is a bit of a red herring as the level of change that the new GCSE involves should require an amount of work never been done before. Its massive.

(5) The paragraph about all the work done pre-accreditation having  reduced “variability in the assessment standard between the specifications” (remember assessment standard = demand) goes onto say that “it wasn’t intended to limit valid differences that will inevitably occur”. You what? surely it depends on someone’s definition of “differences” … what are the tolerances?

(6) This is the bit that I don’t get … “Accreditation is also an opportunity to give consideration to the level of demand and the comparability of demand across the different qualifications as far as is possible at this stage with the evidence available” (nice caveat at the end there by the way!). Hang on … it shouldn’t be JUST “an opportunity”  to “give consideration”. OK so maybe I’m picking holes but I suspect that someone has tried to break down maths concepts and problem solving into a “tick list” that needed to be included in the SAMs to get accreditation without due regard to the “holistic” view of all the SAMs together.

(7) The transcript/video states that “accreditation isn’t a comparability exercise but the expert panel did give attention to the level of demand across the different specifications submitted by the different exam boards”. AND ???? AND???  (I have a feeling that one or two of you that read this are probably part of this expert panel, but would they be prepared to give their view of the accreditation process? what is the background of these “experts”? I would never consider myself an expert, far from it but I’d love to know what one looks like)

(8) Not sure I would have used the following phrase: “a number of submissions for accreditations from each board” because a “number” could be 1, but for most people would suggest lots more than there actually were. As far as I know there were 2 from OCR and AQA (having been accredited on their 2nd attempt) and 3 from Edexcel (3rd time lucky!).

(9)  Towards the end the transcript/video reiterates that Ofqual is confident with the decision to accredit the qualifications, and uses another nice caveat “the judgements are made at a particular point in time, based on a particular set of materials”. Nice!

(10) There is then a load of piffle about how they have recruited over 4000 students for the research programme, and they will tell us more as their research progresses. Still doesn’t account for why there was just 5 days to enrol on the programme – wasn’t a last minute thing or owt was it?

There are of course assurances that the accreditation process is robust and I am not saying otherwise … and as always just the ramblings of a mad woman!

Note 1: if you haven’t a clue what the palaver is all about, click on the blog page above and basically scroll through my posts for the last few weeks.

Note 2: INTERESTINGLY … comments have been disabled from the youtube video below. I wonder why? hmmmm

Note 3: I am soooo pleased that I did a post yesterday sharing my latest “bread and butter” worksheet idea (For Grade C and Beyond) because for a fleeting moment I’m starting to bore myself with all these Ofqual shenanigans. But never fear I do have a very high boredom threshold and we are nowhere near it yet!

If any of the above quotes are wrong its because I’ve used the transcript to quote (just hoping it matches the video!)