Leaving Cert Corrections, Must be 1 Fail?!

Tet2015

My teacher was talking to me about how if most papers in her set are A's then she must fail the lowest. So let's say 9 papers get 90% and 3 get 59%. Those 3 papers will be failed.

Is this actually true or is she messing with me?

Doctorhopeful

Tet2015 wrote: »

My teacher was talking to me about how if most papers in her set are A's then she must fail the lowest. So let's say 9 papers get 90% and 3 get 59%. Those 3 papers will be failed.

Is this actually true or is she messing with me?

it's not quite that simple, but i believe that's essentially what happens.

In each exam the chief examiner determines the rough ratio of A/B/C/D/Fails he/she needs. After a sample of the papers are marked, if very few people are failing or very few people are getting A's, they'll adjust the marking scheme to correct the ratio of grades.

In your theoretical case, no one is failing, thus the marking scheme would be considered too lenient. It would be changed so that less points are given out for certain things until a certain amount of people legitimately fail it.

I think that's how it works :P

spurious

What happens is, if the usual fail rate for a paper is 3%, then the bottom scoring 3% of papers will fail.

Gulfstream757

spurious wrote: »

What happens is, if the usual fail rate for a paper is 3%, then the bottom scoring 3% of papers will fail.

How far will they drop a grade to get a fail?

spurious

In my correcting, I've never had a paper that passed that was dropped to a fail. The traffic was always the other way.

Gulfstream757

spurious wrote: »

In my correcting, I've never had a paper that passed that was dropped to a fail. The traffic was always the other way.

That's very re-assuring thanks!!

spurious

People really need to leave out questions (or go horribly wrong in all their answers) to fail.

randylonghorn

Tet2015 wrote: »

My teacher was talking to me about how if most papers in her set are A's then she must fail the lowest. So let's say 9 papers get 90% and 3 get 59%. Those 3 papers will be failed.

Is this actually true or is she messing with me?

That is not accurate at all, I think you must have misunderstood her.

The bell curve is applied *nationally*, not to each individual set of papers corrected.

It is perfectly possible, for example, for a pack of say 30 Hons. History papers from one school to have 30 students achieving an honours grade (if they deserves it). The picture nationally will even it out, and it is at this level that adjustments will be made if a particular exam is throwing up results which are either unexpectedly high or low in comparison to the yearly norm.

linguist

What randylonghorn said! There is a national marking scheme and a bell curve of marks is achieved on a national basis. There is no basis for thinking that any individual examiner would be expected to align with the national bell curve - that would actually result in some people being marked harshly and others leniently! All that examiners are expected to do is apply the marking scheme fairly and without exception.

There is a huge amount of information available regarding every aspect of the SEC's work on examinations.ie. If you're not getting on with enjoying your summer - which you should try to - you could certainly cure insomnia reading through it. There really is very little that's not in the public domain about the exams these days. However, it is true that there are still some teachers, mostly with no experience marking (!), who will spout the greatest nonsense about the process. Inevitably, the ones who end up stressed out are their students. I've never understood it!