Explanation of anomalous results

[cazien]

And what about these results (these are not my DC, just ones that others have posted):

Crypt: 166
Ribston: 206

Crypt: 172
Ribston: 381

Crypt: 237
Ribston: 74

I would have thought a candidate's ranking for Ribston would generally be higher than their ranking for Crypt as Crypt will include boys too. If both are ranking purely by overall score.

I can only conclude that schools have not used overall scores for ranks but have introduced an extraordinary scoring regime for each paper
I pity anyone trying to make sense of this years ranks - hope they have a supply of paracetamol

[Amber]

I pity anyone trying to make sense of this years ranks - hope they have a supply of paracetamol

I think the people involved in admissions at Crypt probably need rather more than paracetamol tonight. Just when everyone thought it couldn't get any worse after last year's fiasco. Seems it may be time for a bit of shake up in 'the system' or whatever we call it.

[mitasol]

Scores should not be adjusted to reflect oversubscriton criteria so I can only assume it is a ranking error.

[Amber]

Scores should not be adjusted to reflect oversubscriton criteria so I can only assume it is a ranking error.

Absolutely agree. It always looked improbable to the lay person (on here) - astonishing that no one spotted it until today at the school.

[Ellen-Jane]

After the Crypt error this info may be less critical, but schools ask for proof of PP entitlement before the test is taken, so that while PP doesn't affect scores, it can affect rank. eg, if Pate's qualifies 225 pupils, any with PP entitlement within that 225 will be ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. They might have otherwise been ranked in the 200s and just miss out on a place. They might also have been ranked in the top 150 anyway, so this wouldn't affect anyone else.

I don't know whether this rank adjustment is done by CEM or the individual schools. I would imagine it's done by school.

For Crypt, if they qualify 900 pupils, the PP adjustment could be critical. I don't know what percentage of places the schools have decided to offer to PP. It may be that Crypt adjusted all the PP pupils instead of a set percentage of them?

[Ellen-Jane]

Looking at the admissions policies, Crypt only uses PP in the event of a tie at the 150th place, so doesn't give PP any substantial advantage, while Pate's uses PP as a criterion to rank pupils.

I do wonder whether that's been the error, Crypt has maybe applied the same criteria as Pate's and has mistakenly bumped PP pupils up the ranks when their admissions policy doesn't allow this.

[authormum]

Using the scores posted on this website, I have observed the following:

2. If you sort by Pates scores, the scores for Ribston are in ascending order. We can assume from this that Ribston has introduced passmarks for each section.

In the Ribston email they gave the following info:

Standardisation: Each section of the paper is standardised separately. Standardisation takes into account the ability of the cohort and the age of the candidate.

[Lysander]

Just to round off this thread: the anomalies are now explained (see errors thread) in that Crypt wrongly ranked a lot of pupil premium children too high, and Marling, SHS and HSFG put all qualifying pupil premium children straight into their top 150, which causes odd looking results. With this information, the full set of results make sense.

[Legofan]

But for GSFG that only works if they receive less than 16 PP from within the city and under 16 PP from outside of Gloucester city. As soon as they have 16 pupils in this category the system falls down !

I can only assume the number of pp pupils that met the qualifying standard must be within the allocated places.

[steppemum]

lego - there are notoriously low levels of uptake by PP students.

Someone has posted this week that they asked, I think it was Tommies, and got told 13 sat the test last year and 2 qualified.

I doubt very much if the 16 max is ever reached