 [NB. this blog was updated with Q6&7 on 25 August] Ah, who doesn't love that famously dull election slogan from Warren G Harding? Still it won him the Presidency, so it'll do for me, It has been a long time since I posted a blog here! This is my endeavour to get my brain back into work mode after the summer break. I will hopefully be giving some more updates on the SHP Curriculum PATHS project here soon. More on that here: Curriculum PATHS - Schools History Project If you have followed my blog in the past you may be aware that I did a similar analysis back when the current GCSEs were first examined back in 2018, and again in 2019. The aim was to look at how the new exams compared to the old ones and the potential impact of any changes. You an find it HERE. We then had a long break due to Covid and the ongoing impacts on the awarding of exams. Today I want to revisit some of the questions from 2018 and look to explore what this year's GCSE History results might reveal about some of the main history specifications on offer for GCSE in England. I will be addressing the following questions. Please do scroll down to what interests you. I have included my short takeaway answer as well as a longer analysis.
As ever, I am grateful for any comments or questions you might have, and am happy to chat further about any of this. These days you can find me over at Bluesky @apf102.bsky.social on Bluesky. Full disclosure: as an SHP Fellow, I am of course connected with the OCR History B (SHP) specification. That said, I and the SHP Fellows do not set the papers, this is done by OCR. The aim here (as you will hopefully see) is to offer an honest analysis of the results for HoDs and others interested in exploring the bigger picture of the history exams over the past few years. Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to AQA who put all their data in XLS format, making this job infinitely easier!! Read on for more... Q1: Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers? A1: There is a general increase in History entries overall. Meanwhile Edexcel continue to dominate History GCSE. Other boards have seen some minor movement, though OCR A looks to be in trouble still. On the broad scale it looks like raw entry numbers for GCSE History have risen since 2019, with over 30,000 exams sat in 2024 compared to 26,000 in 2019. However it is worth bearing in mind that the number of pupils in each school year is different too. When you factor this in, there has probably been a slight decline in history entries as a percentage of overall GCSE entries this year (37.6%) compared to 2023 (38.5%). However both years are up on 2019 (36.3%) (1). Overall History seems to be going strong and continues to be the most popular optional subject at GCSE (after English, Maths and Science). This trend has been roughly the same since RE dropped from that spot in 2018 (2). On a board by board basis, Edexcel continues to be extremely popular (6) and remains the dominant board for market share. AQA (4), OCR A (8) and OCR B (8) saw growth in entries, with OCR B beginning to grow its market share again from its low in 2022. OCR A and AQA saw a small decline in overall market share (4 & 8). Q2: How do this year’s results stack up against the pre-Covid years? A2: It’s pretty similar now! There was a fair bit in the press this year about overall results dropping. Interestingly, the history grade distributions for England were pretty much back to 2019 levels by 2023 (1). This year there has been a tiny bump upwards compared with 2019, with around 10% more pupils achieving a grade 9, and 5% more achieving a 7 or higher. As expected, the percentage of pupils passing at grade 4+ is almost identical now to 2019 (1).  Q3: Which board got the best results? A3: This is not really a good question to ask. You can’t really answer it as results have a statistical link to the prior attainment of the exam board's specific cohort. As interesting as this is, it’s really the wrong question to ask. The distribution of grades per board is largely determined by the statistical connection to pupils’ prior attainment from KS2. This means that results distributions reflect the prior attainment of the entries more than anything else. How this will work as the Covid SATs years begin to bite is anyone’s guess. So, what we can probably say is that centres doing OCR A tend to have cohorts with higher prior attainment and that therefore a greater proportion of higher grades can be awarded. Overall, Edexcel centres seem to sit most closely on the national average for prior attainment (by inference), with AQA centres sitting slightly above average and OCR B centres slightly below. There’s not a vast amount in it though (1-8). Q4: Which exams were the most and least accessible? A4: It’s complex but papers continue to be much less accessible than their pre-2018 counterparts. However, both Edexcel and OCR A seem to be heading in the right direction. There continue to be differences between boards, but this is more variable over time, though AQA have consistently sat at the bottom of the table for accessibility. This is where things get quite interesting. Although it is impossible to say which boards get the best results, we can make some inferences about which boards have the most and least accessible exams. To do this we can look at the raw marks required for each grade boundary. Because the grade distribution is a (mostly) statistically tied variable for each board, the marks required give some sense of how easy or hard pupils found the papers. To put it another way: if around 65% of pupils are expected to pass at Grade 4 or higher, then the raw mark boundaries need to be adjusted to ensure this will happen. If pupils find the papers accessible then they are more likely to do well and therefore grade boundaries will need to rise to ensure the correct grade distribution. If pupils find the exams hard / inaccessible, then the grade boundaries will need to come down for the same reason. Seemingly oddly then, high grade boundaries actually suggest a more accessible exam. Low grade boundaries the opposite. Now working all of this out is actually quite tricky as GCSE History has a phenomenal number of paper combinations and therefore grade boundaries. AQA alone had 156 possible combinations of papers and therefore 156 different sets of grade boundaries. Compare this to most subjects, which have 1 or 2 combinations and you get an idea of the challenge. Boards do not release the numbers of pupils who sat each combination so arriving at an overall grade boundary average is technically impossible. For the purposes of this study I have had to average across all the different options, which is a bit of a fudge, though at least one I had to do for all the boards. It may have been illustrative to look at some of the most popular combinations, but without knowing what these are, I'd rather not speculate.  If you look at the chart you can see that there are some big differences. Using our measure, Edexcel comes out at the most accessible exam across all grade boundaries with pupils at Grade 7 requiring 72.5% of the marks (5) compared to AQA’s 63% (around a 15% difference) (3). At Grade 4 the difference is also pronounced with Edexcel pupils requiring nearly half marks at 48.4% (5), where AQA pupils needed only 34% of the available marks (a 42% difference) (3). If we look right down at Grade 1 we can see that Edexcel pupils were on average picking up 18 marks over their papers (5), whilst pupils in the other boards were scoring as few as 9 marks for the same grade (3, 7). We cannot be sure why pupils scored so badly at the lower end, by the fact that marks are so low at Grade 1 boundary (and even Grade 4) suggests that many pupils failed to finish papers, or possibly failed to complete whole papers. For anyone who has worked with pupils who lack confidence, non-finishing and being put off by difficult questions can be a killer in terms of examination success. The difficulties AQA and OCR B pupils faced could be down to any number of things from poorly written papers, poorer preparation, unclear mark schemes, poorer marking teams, or just too much content to cover. Edexcel are doing well to buck the trend of low grade boundaries, as you can see in the chart comparing 2019 and 2024. Here, the higher the bar at each grade, the more accessible the exam. It is disappointing to see OCR B, who were right at the top in terms of accessibility in 2019, slipping down to third place here. However, compare all this to 2017, when the percentage of marks required for the old Grade G were upwards 20-23%, and you can see we have a long way to go to make these exams accessible for all (3-8).  Q5: Which units were the most and least accessible? A5: It’s hard to draw concrete conclusions from this data set, but there are definitely some interesting potential trends across the boards. If you are on the fence about a unit, it might be worth comparing its historic performance too (see Q6 for an example). Give me a shout if you need a hand with this, or chat to your board rep. This year I have decided to delve a little more into the components of each exam to see if there are any patterns in terms of accessibility. This is monstrously complex to do due to the fact that these grade boundaries are notional, so don't exist in reality, but also because of the sheer number of possible options and combinations, meaning it is not always possible to pick out a single unit performance. Again, AQA made it easiest to see this data. I also do not have good year on year comparisons for all the units. All of that said, there are a few small patterns which seem to emerge relating to papers and individual units for each board. I will be using the same metric for assessing accessibility as in my response to Question 4 above i.e. the raw grade boundaries can reveal a little about how accessible pupils found each component (paper). The higher the % of marks needed for a grade, the more accessible we can assume the paper must have been. The color coding represents how far each grade boundary % deviated from the overall average. Green = a higher boundary / more accessible paper; Red = a lower boundary / less accessible paper. AQA Components There were a few interesting results from the AQA units. It’s worth noting that the actual difference was only a matter of a few marks, so take all these with a pinch of salt (3). 
Edexcel Components So this one was really fascinating in terms of how the different papers played out. Again, the difference in grade boundaries was not huge.. just a few marks, so don’t read too much in here (5). 
OCR B Components Once again, OCR B Component boundaries offer some interesting, but tentative insights. Grade boundaries did vary a little more, sometimes up to 8 marks between units (5). 
Q6: Are there any historic trends with unit accessibility? A6: There’s not a lot of data to go on and what there is does require a degree of speculation. Most units seem to have varied in different ways over time, as we might expect. However a few papers do seem to sit either on the more or less accessible side of the spectrum more consistently. It’s worth a deeper exploration of these papers, their questions and other related issues. I don’t have the capacity to examine the historic data for all the units here, but I did want to provide a few examples of how this can be done so HoDs can maybe do the same with their own options. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the more extreme units to see if they performed differently over time. In each case, I will be comparing the unit grade boundaries to the average grade boundaries for that year. If the grade boundary is above the average, we can assume the paper was more accessible, if it was below, then it was less accessible. As AQA provide all their data in Excel format, I am using their units for this. It saves a LOT of typing! It’s worth noting though that the reporting of grade boundaries at unit level was different prior to 2020 and I have ignored the two main Covid years of 2020 and 2021. I would be interested to know if these observations about accessibility match with people’s experiences of student reporting of perceived difficulty (rather than results which are modified to reflect the difficulty). AQA Restoration England This was a unit which came out as a real problem in 2024, with all grade boundaries sitting well below the average. This does not seem to have been the case historically. Last year the paper was about in line with average for the board, and in 2022 it was slightly more accessible for students at the lower grade boundaries. It is worth noting 2022 was a reduced exam year however. AQA America 1920-73 This was the unit which appears to have been statistically the most accessible in 2024. Going back we can see that this was has been true, though to slightly different degrees going back to 2021. A notable result is that the grade boundary for a 4 in 2023 was 11 percentage points higher in this unit vs. the average grade boundary (43% vs 33%).  AQA Elizabethan England This was another unit which seemed to be quite accessible for pupils in 2024. It’s history is much more mixed though. It looks like pupils struggled a bit more with last year’s paper, which saw lower grade boundaries across almost the full grade spectrum. 2021 was more similar to 2024. AQA Norman England, c1066–c1100 I suspect this is quite a popular option but one which was a bit of a struggle for pupils in 2024. Looking back we can see that the 2023 paper also seemed to be a bit more challenging at grades 4 and below, and a little more accessible for those at Grades 7 and above. Meanwhile in 2022 the paper sat more on the average. Maybe no real pattern with this one. America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation I also wanted to look at the American West unit, given my own interest. This one seems to have the most erratic pattern – which maybe also reflects the feedback I often get. This year the paper was about average for most grades but possibly a little more accessible around the Grade 4-5 mark. In 2023 however, those looking at grades 5+ seemed to struggle more. In 2021 it was the lower grades which proved more accessible, with the top being around average. AQA Inter-War Years 1918-39 Another one I suspect is a popular option for people. I was mainly interested here to see how it has fared over time. Not lots to say here really. Maybe a slightly more accessible Grade 4-5 I 2024 but the other years are not far from average. AQA Medicine The thematic studies seem to have fared least well in terms of accessibility in 2024 so I was interested to see if these have been different over time too. The 2024 paper seems to have been trickier for those looking for Grades 7 & 8 especially. However the 2023 paper shows a more accessible paper, especially for those at Grades 3-5. Meanwhile the 2022 version was much less accessible for all grades 4+. Q7: What made papers harder or easier?
A7: I’m afraid this is a bit of a trick question. I would be really interested to do some analysis of the different papers in light of the statistics we have on their grade boundaries. The differences might be down to question wording, content choices, available scope for answering, or a range of other things. If anyone is interested in looking at some historic papers for a unit together, I would love to hear from you. Concluding thoughts Thanks so much for reading this far. I hope this tentative analysis is of some use to people as they start heading back to work and thinking about the GCSE results. As ever, if you have any questions, or just want to chat exams, please drop give me a shout on Bluesky Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky For more of my blogs on exams why not try: Dealing with the disease: The urgent need for exam reform (andallthat.co.uk) Examinations: The Gilded Age (andallthat.co.uk) References All accessed on 24-26 August 2024.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Image (c) LiamGM (2024) File: Bayeux Tapestry - Motte Castle Dinan.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Archives
August 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
