dave_aw

Yeah, we've noticed this problem. Some departments argue that their lower levels reflect the reality that it will take a whole year for students to be achieving their target levels. To compensate for this we've introduced interim targets for the first term or first half of the academic year that are one or two grades (or levels) lower. Then the calculated residual is more of a reflection of if that department feels the students are 'on track' or not. We're also moderating on a whole-school level. Heads of year are noting discrepancies from just looking at the traffic-lit columns of assessment data - some subjects are all red, others all green! We're just feeding this back to HoDs and they're gradually adjusting their mark-schemes and/or implementing interim targets. It's a slow process but we're getting there, I think.

Wow, what vbscripts are they? How did you do that?! Sounds wonderful! Recently I've been doing a lot of work with calculating residuals - in fact our whole assessment system now compares 'tracker' assessment data with predicted grades. It was all getting far too complicated until recently i changed all of our gradesets to A*=8/A=7/B=6 etc. for GCSE, A*=6/A=6/B=4 for AS/A2 and KS3 Level 8=8/7a=7.66/7b=7.33/7c=7 etc. This way I have a single 'residual' aspect for each subject which is marks-decimal and this is simple a DIFFERENCE column of tracker-aspect minus prediction-aspect - this gives us, say, +1 for 'exceeds target by one grade' or -0.33 for 'misses KS3 level by one sub-level'. The great part is that staff can just hit "summary" on any marksheet and get a mean residual for each class, and they can filter whole-subject sheets to get mean residuals for sub-cohorts (like SEN, G&T, EAL, etc.). I also use nested-if-then-else aspects to traffic-light these residual columns. I've just developed some SIMS.net reports that suck out all this residual data and shove it in to a series of Excel pivot tables automatically to let the Heads of department, heads of year, and senior management analyse their data by ethnicity, by staff member, by class, etc. It's all quite new, but proving very popular. But I'd definitely ditch the 'standard' gradesets that use UCAS points or similar otherwise you have huge extra hassle of taking the 'DIFFERENCE' and dividing it by 20 or 10, or whatever.

Yes, the documentation is there. Go to the User Posts menu, select File Sharing. Click on the download file button and browse to resource 507. Hey Presto!