Advanced Information for the June 2022 A-Level Sociology Exams – what should you focus on…?

The AQA recently released its advanced information for the June 2022 A-level Exams, and for A-level Sociology this means telling students what the big essay questions are going to be on in each of the three main papers

  • (Paper 1 Education, 30 mark essay): Education policies – including policies of selection, privatisation, marketisation, improvement of outcome or equality of opportunity AND globalisation (few!)
  • (Paper 2 Families Topics, 20 mark essay): The family and social change, in relation to the economy and state policies
  • (Paper 2: Beliefs in Society, 20 mark essay): Ideology, science and religion
  • (Paper 3): Crime with Theory and Methods. 30 mark crime essay): Crime, deviance, social order and social control
  • (Paper 3, 20 mark theory or methods essay): Consensus, conflict, structural and social action theories.

NB These are ONLY the essays, the shorter (4/6/10 mark) questions can be on anything, and there is NO advance guidance on Methods in Context.

In short, the AQA are telling you content for about HALF of exams over all, so by all means spend a bit more time revising the above topics but you still need to revise EVERYTHING!

What should your revision strategy be given this advanced information?

This isn’t a typical year, now that you’ve been gifted the topics for the questions in advance, as this means many students will change their revision practices to focus on these ‘five known topics’.

This means that it’s advisable to spend proportionately more time on these topics to make sure you’re at the same level.

HOWEVER, I would personally (and humbly) suggest that you should also be practicing essay technique – focussing on how to USE the knowledge in these chosen sub-topics to answer specific questions precisely – this is what’s going to give you the edge.

Think about it – EVERYONE is going to know these topics better than in the typical year, so the standard student will be going into the exam ready to splurge all that knowledge down on paper – but if that’s all they do, they’ll get no more than a C grade (even though they’ll walk out thinking they’ve earned an ‘A’.

The mark schemes only give around half the marks in those essays for knowledge, the rest of the marks are for analysis and evaluation, actually using that knowledge to answer the question.

So make sure to practice those higher order skills too.

ANOTHER VERY IMPORTANT POINT….

When I say spend more time revising the topics above, I mean like spend about another 5-10% of the time on them – DO NOT sacrifice revising the other topics – collectively everything else is still worth half the marks, you simply have to devote almost as much time to these as well, because it’s still the case that anything else can come up in those shorter questions.

So personally I’d spend a fraction more time revising the above topics, but don’t shift ore than 10% away from all the other topics, and focus a lot on exam technique.

In short, don’t change much and do mostly what you’d usually do anyway!

Sources

Advanced information for the June 2022 A-level from the AQA.

The 2021 A-Level ‘Teacher Awarded Grades’ – Incomparable with 2019’s but more Valid?

Nearly double the amount of students received top grades in 2021 compared to 2019:

While a politician might try to convince you these two sets of results are measuring the same thing, it’s obvious to anyone that they are not.

The 2021 results are ‘Teacher Awarded Grades’, they are not the same thing as the 2019 exam results (NB this doesn’t necessarily mean the 2021 results are ‘worse’ or ‘less valid’ than 2019s, it might be the the former and all previous years’ results which lacked validity).

The 2019 results measured the actual performance of students under exam conditions, we can call those ‘exam results’.

The 2021 results were ‘teacher awarded grades’ based on some kind of in-house assessment, and marked in-house.

And this difference in assessment and marking procedures seems to be the most likely candidate which can explain the huge increase in top grades.

NB – this means there is no reliability between the results in 2020 and 2021 and all previous results, there is a ‘reliability break’ if you like, no comparison can be made because of this.

This is quite a nice example of that key research methods concept of (lack of) reliability.

The 2019 exam procedure

The 2019 results measured what students actually achieved in standardised A-level examinations –

  1. ALL students sat the same set of exams prepared by an exam-board at the same time and under broadly similar conditions.
  2. It is guaranteed that students would have sat these exams blind.
  3. All exam work was assessed independently by professional examiners
  4. The work was moderated by ‘team leaders’.

What this means is that you’ve got students all over England and Wales being subjected to standardised procedures, everyone assessed in the same way.

The 2021 Teacher Awarded Grade procedure

  1. Schools and teachers set their own series of in-house assessments, no standardisation across centres.
  2. There is no guarantee about how blind these assessments were or any knowledge about the conditions, no standardisation across centres.
  3. Teachers marked their own in-house assessments themselves – in small centres (private schools) this may well have been literally by the same teacher as taught the students, in larger centres more likely the marking was shared across several teachers in the same department, but not necessarily, we don’t know.
  4. There was no external moderation of teacher assessed work, at least not in the case of regular exam based A-levels.

You have to be a politician to be able claim the above two procedures are in the remotest bit compatible!

They are clearly so different that you can’t compare 2019’s results with 2021s, there’s been a radical shift in the means of the assessment, this is a socially constructed process of grade-inflation.

So which is the more valid set of results – 2019s or 2021s?

IF the purpose of grades is to give an indication of student’s ability in a subject then maybe this years results are more valid than 2019s?

I’m no fan of formal examinations, and the one big advantage of 2021 is that there were none, allowing more time for teaching and learning, and less time worrying about exam technique, and probably a lot less stress all round. (the later not the case in 2020).

This year’s assessment procedures would probably have been more natural (had more ecological validity) than a formal examination – it’s hard to get more artificial than an exam after all.

And of course the students are the big winners, more of them have higher grades, and no doubt those that have them are chuffed – and Ive nothing against more young people having something good happen to them, lord knows they have enough problems in their lives now and going forwards as it is!

The problem with the 2021 model is the lack of objectivity and standardisation – we simply don’t know which of those students would have actually got an A or A* under standardised conditions – certainly not all of them, so possibly we don’t know who is the best at exams.

But does the later matter? Do we really need to know who is marginally better at performing under the artificiality of exams anyway?

When it comes the job market further down the line, it’s unlikely that A-level exam performance will have that much baring on someone’s ability to do a job, so maybe it’s better that more students won’t have a string of Cs held against them as would have been the case for the 2019 and previous cohorts.

And someone’s ability to do a job can be determined with a rigorous interview procedure, after all.

The difficult decision is going to be what we do with next year’s results, assuming that exams are re-instated – IF the class of 2022 come out with a spread of results similar to 2019 rather than 2021, that doesn’t seem like a fair outcome to me.

Find out More

The Education Policy Institute has an objective analysis of the 2021 A-level results.

‘GCSEs and A-Levels scrapped’ – but I wouldn’t relax just yet!

So on Wednesday the government announced that exams in England and Wales are to be scrapped in favour of ‘assessed grades’.

But does this may not necessarily mean you’ll be able to chillax for the next 6 months!

Given that this government has a track record of being reactive rather than pro-active in responding to Covid-19 – lurching from one inadequate response to another and U-turning dramatically where education is concerned, I wouldn’t bet on GCSE and A-level grades just being put entirely in the hands of teachers just yet.

Sure, that’s the message, but I’d be amazed if this scenario doesn’t develop further over the next few weeks with the education department putting in place some kind of centralised dictate that all schools and colleges must subject their students to some kind of controlled assessment which are basically just like the regular GCSEs and A-levels.

And the nature of the assessment will be set centrally, by the exam boards, who otherwise will just be laying around idle for another year (no exams means nothing to do) – I mean presumably if the government are paying these boards’ wages surely they’re going to get them to bodge something together in the next few weeks.

There will probably be some degree of flexibility over when students can sit said assessments, and probably some kind of sampling and standardisation procedure put in place, but I can’t imagine that the department for education is just going to ‘let schools get on with it’.

I mean, they haven’t done that with lockdown in general, why on earth are they going to give schools an easier-ride now and ‘trust teachers’, they only did that last year under an extreme public backlash, so it’s highly unlikely they’re just going to allow teachers the freedom to just ‘carry on and teach and assess’ as they see fit all the way through to June!

Is it this year’s Scottish Exam Results that Have No Validity, or just the System Itself?

Now that the Scottish exam results have reverted back to those based on teacher predictions, students have done MUCH better than previous years, around 10-12% improvement, or over a grade compared to previous years.

To put this in a chart – here’s what it looks like: The middle column is what the results were last year, the last column is what they now are, with the government’s U turn.

2016-19 Ave2020 SQA moderated2020 teacher predictions
national 578.681.188.6
higher76.578.988.8
advanced higer80.484.992.8

To display this graphically – we’ve leapt from blue to yellow, while even with moderation (red) that kind of increase is just about feasible, even if unlikely.

It is highly unlikely that this year’s students on average would have achieved 10-12 % points higher than the previous year’s students, had they sat their exams, had there been no disruption.

Had they sat the exams, they would have been moderated by the exam boards so that the pass rate and A* rate was broadly in line with previous years, and then the spread of results would have probably also been broadly similar.

What’s happened instead this year is that we now have results based on teacher predictions, rather than ‘pure moderation’ by the exam boards, which broadly keeps things in line year on year.

In case you don’t know, what the exam moderating authorities do with actual exam results, is they look at the raw marks, and then tweak the fail/ pass and A* raw mark boundaries so that there’s a similar percentage passing and achieving high grades every year, but now they’ve had that power stripped from them.

Now the grades are based purely on teacher predictions and teachers always over-predict, it doesn’t take much explaining to figure out why – because of the competitive education system, and it’s one of the few rules you can bend as a teacher, so nearly every teacher does it, because they know every other teacher does it!

TBH I don’t think either system is that valid. You’ve seen the results year on year, it’s highly unlikely that there’s going to be a gradual trend upwards, without there ever being a single ‘spike year’ – but that’s what you get when exam moderating authorities ‘control’ the grades every year – a gradual increase gives the impression of credibility.

Teacher predictions might well have more credibility, because they actually know the students, but there is a problem of reliability when, for just one year, this year, 2020, you allow exam results to be determined by teachers, and then you get a massive spike compared to previous years.

Students who sat exams in 2017 to 2019 should be complaining

Students from the last three years are the one’s who are being harmed by this unjust political interference – not only do they now have a worse track record of exam results compared to this year’s students, these are the students who are now graduating into a world of contracted employment, so they’re going to have ‘worse’ results, and a longer period of unemployment on their CVs.

This year’s students by contrast, if they’re going on to 2-5 years of FE/ HE, the chances are the economy will be recovering by the time they graduate, so they’ll have a better education record and less of a track history of unemployment.

Glasgow Live: Exam Results Glasgow 2020

The Guardian

The BBC

The Scottish Exam Results: The real losers are last year’s cohort, and the next!

Now they’ve had a day to do some basic analysis of the Scottish exam results the newspapers have had a chance to put their spin on the story – and the narrative runs something like this:

First narrative – ‘Scottish pupils have had their teacher predicted grades lowered by the qualifications authority’.

Second narrative: – Poor Scottish pupils have had their teacher predicted grades lowered more than rich pupils.

Sources

Links to both the above are at the end of this article

This makes for a great story, but I think they might be misleading. As far as I can see, this year’s National Five Scottish students have done better than they would, on average, had they sat the exams.

If you compare the previous years’ results with the teacher predicted grades you get to see how exaggerated those predictions were…..

A comparison of previous year’s results with teacher predicted grades and the actual downward-adjusted grades

All of the data above is from the articles linked below – NB the blue column for the least and most deprived clusters is only 2019 data, A-C pass rate, and the exam results I’m looking are the National 5s, equivalent to the English GCSE.

What’s really going on?

  1. Teachers in Scotland grossly inflated the predicted grades of their pupils, by 10% compared to previous years on average.
  2. They exaggerated the results of the poorest students more than for rich students (bloody left-wing teachers that is!)
  3. The exam authorities modified the results downards, but the results received are still much better than the previous years, showing an improvement.
  4. The poorest students have improved dramatically.

Analysis

It’s highly unlikely that this bunch of students is hyper-successful compared to previous years, so thus unlikely we would have seen an increase in 10% points in the pass rate.

I think the real thing to keep in mind here is what really goes on in exams – pupils sit them, they are marked, and then stats magic is done on them so we end up with a similar amount of passes and grades distribution to the previous years – so it’s hard-wired into exams that little is going to change year on year.

That’s what we’re seeing here – the exam board adjusting to fit the results in with business as usual, but they’ve had to compromise with those optimistic teachers trying to game the system, and as a result, excuse the pun, this year’s Scottish students have done very well, especiallly the poor.

The students who should be angry are last year’s – they’ve lost out relative to this years, next year’s probably too, and those poor mugs actually had to sit their exams, and didn’t get four months off school!

This probably won’t be the way it’s spun in the media – it’s easy enough to find a few students a parents with individual axes to grind, against the overall trend of the 2020 cohort doing very nicely, thank you teachers!

Sources

The Scottish Sun

BBC News

Make your own exam questions

Generate your own exam questions for A-level sociology of education exam papers!

40 000 students should be sitting the A-level Sociology of Education with Theory and Methods Paper (7192/1) today, but they’re not because of Coronavirus.

In case you feel like you’re missing out, why not design your own exam paper and answer the questions for fun.

Below is a list of the main key words taken from the AQA’s A-level sociology specification, just the education topic:

A-level Sociology of Education Key Word List from Specification

the role of education

functions of the education system,

the economy

class structure

differential educational achievement

social class,

gender

ethnicity

teacher/pupil relationships,

pupil identities

subcultures

the hidden curriculum

the organisation of teaching and learning

educational policies

policies of selection,

marketisation policies

privatisation

policies to achieve greater equality of opportunity

experience of education

access to education globalisation

Make your own exam questions!

All you need to do to design your own questions is cut and past this list into this random word generator, click ‘create random anything’ and then you’ve got the basis for some 10 mark and 30 mark questions.

You have to be a bit creative to make up the questions, by adding in your own action words, but the question formats are quite limited in variety: 10 mark analyse questions ask for ‘two ways/ reasons’ and a 30 mark will ask to evaluate the extent to which something is true, so making up your own questions should be fairly easy to do.

Pupil Identities and the Functions of the Education system example

To take one example above, the generator randomly selected ‘pupil identities‘ and ‘functions of the education system‘, so two potential questions might look like the following:

  • Analyse two ways in which pupil identities might come into conflict with the functions of the education system (10)
  • Evaluate sociological perspectives on the relationship between the functions of the education system and pupil identities (30)

I’m not even sure if the above questions make sense, so answering them might be a challenge – maybe something about social control and hyper-masculinity and work related functions and class based identities.

NB both of the links above take you to two examples of 6 mark ‘outline’ questions I put together a while back, so they’ll give you some idea of how you might start to build up an answer to the more complex 10 and 30 mark questions.

Other random sociology word combinations I got:

  • policies of selection and pupil identities
  • social class and globalisation
  • marketisation policies and the hidden curriculum
  • policies of selection and the economy
  • the experience of education and the hidden curriculum
  • gender and the economy

Have a go, and post your questions below!

Remember that the AQA bots can’t distinguish between a sensible and terrible question so it’s best to be prepared for all potentialities – so why not have a go and generate some random questions, and have a think about the answers.

What else have you got to do after all, no Glastonbury, no Reading, and certainly no Gap Yah!

Keep in mind that this technique doesn’t provide you with an item, which you would need to use in both the 10 mark and the 30 mark questions in the actual exam.

Outline three ways in which pupil identities may come into conflict within school

A possible 6 mark question in the sociology of education exam. Unlike many 6 markers, this one lends itself to research studies!

Paul Willis: Learning to Labour – found that the traditional working class male identity came into direct conflict with the norms of the school – for the ‘lads’ he studied being male for them meant being cool, and not caring about school work. For them ‘real boys didn’t try hard at school’ and they were more interested in dossing around.

Louise Archer –found that girls that didn’t conform to traditional gender identities (passive and submissive) came into conflict with the school. For most of the girls, constructing and performing a heterosexual, sexy feminine image was the most important thing to them. Each of the girls spent considerable money and time on their appearance, trying to look sexy and feminine which gave the girls a sense of power and status. The peer group policed this.

Mac an Ghail argued that the African Caribbean community experienced the world in very different ways to white people – namely because of institutional racism in the college and he argued that any anti-school attitudes were reactions against this racism. He mainly blamed the school rather than the students

A level sociology exam dates 2019!

Just a reminder of the upcoming exam dates for the three A-level sociology exams!

  • 7192/1 Education with theory and methods 2h 22 May 2019 am
  • 7192/2 Topics in Sociology 2h 04 June 2019 pm
  • 7192/3 Crime and deviance with theory and methods 2h 12 June 2019 am

Do please make sure to check the dates for yourself!

Source – cut and paste directly from the AQA’s confirmed exam timetable!

Revision Webinars

I’m offering three revision webinars on the Sundays before each of the above exams.

For anyone signing up in the next week (before May 10th, I’ll also throw in access to eight pre-recorded revision Webinars covering the entire A-level sociology syllabus, available at this blog post (password protected: if you sign up for the three Webinars, I’ll email you the password!). NB six are currently available, 2 to be uploaded next week! 

Countdown to the first exam!

Just in case you weren’t panicked enough already…

A Level Sociology Revision Webinars

I will be running three A-level sociology revision webinars to cover both the core content and exam technique for the three A-level sociology exam papers: Education with Theory and Methods (paper 7192/1), Topics, focussing on the families and beliefs options (paper 7192/2), and Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods (7192/3).

EDIT (June 17th 2019) – These have now ended! 

NB – I will also throw in access to 6 hours of recorded Webinars covering exam technique for the three exam papers!

The webinars are 90 minutes long and scheduled for the following dates, on the Sundays before the relevant exams:

  1. 11.00 A.M. Sunday 19th May – Education with Theory and Method
  2. 11.00 A.M. Sunday 2nd June – Families and Belief
  3. 11.00 A.M. Sunday 9th June – Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods

All of these webinars will last 90 minutes during which I will provide a (necessarily) brief overview of the content within each topic, and a discussion of several specific exam practice questions. The main focus will be on exam technique.

Students will be able to ask questions during the Webinar, via text, and there will also be time for students to ask questions at the end.

Attendees will be able to download support materials in advance of the webinars, ask questions during the seminars via ‘chat’, and students will also be able to review the seminar afterwards as they will be recorded and stored on the site. Recordings will be available until the 16th of June (several days after the final A-level sociology exam).

Downloadable resources

The one off £29.99 registration fee not only gives you access to all of the Webinars scheduled below, the price also includes downloadable hand-outs with exemplar question and answers for all of the question types on the three exam papers. The documents included in this bundle include:

  • Exemplars of 4,6,10 and 30 mark essay questions for Education.
  • A hand-out on how to answer methods in context questions, with examples.
  • Exemplars of the two types of 10 mark questions and 20 mark essay questions for families and beliefs
  • Exemplars of 4,6,10 and 30 mark essay questions for Crime and Deviance.
  • Exemplars of 10 mark research methods questions
  • Exemplars of 20 mark ‘theory and methods’ questions.

NB – if you are already enrolled on my more extensive 12 week revision webinar series, you don’t need to sign up for this, we cover everything in these three webinars in the 12 webinar series, just in more detail.

For further details of my resources and work please see my blog – revisesociology.com

NB – I will also throw in access to 6 hours of recorded Webinars covering exam technique for the three exam papers!

Revising core themes in A-level sociology

There are six ‘core themes‘ in the AQA’ A-level sociology specification: 

  • Socialisation
  • culture
  • identity
  • Social differentiation
  • power
  • stratification

These six core themes cut across every compulsory topic and every optional topic (usually families and beliefs), and they can form the basis of any 10 mark or any essay question. Students should not be at all surprised if they see any of the words cropping up in one of the 30 mark essay questions.

NB – these themes should look familiar, as they are basically some of the core concerns of the perspectives: Functionalism and postmodernism tend to focus on the top three, Marxism and Feminism the bottom three, with interactionism sitting somewhere in between them.

Where 10 mark questions are concerned, I recommend trying to use these two sets of core themes to develop points you find in the item – ‘one way’ focussing on a Functionalist/ postmodern analysis, the other focusing on developing a marxist/ feminist/ postmodern analysis. To my mind, it’s easy to develop Postmodernism from Functionalism and Labelling theory from Marxism/ Feminism.

Where essays are concerned, the 4 boxes above might be used as a suitable structure for four paragraphs, again, in relation to the item.

Quite a useful revision task is to place different questions in the middle of the above slide and just talk through how you might relate the different core themes/ perspectives/ concepts to the question.

In future posts this month I’ll outline how I use this analysis structure in mainly 10 mark questions!