Preparing for assessment: Centre assessed grades

Looking back on the centre assessed grade (CAG) process last year and the chaos that ensued, it is difficult to not be rueful. This is especially the case when I remember the painstaking, highly rigorous and lengthy process we undertook to assess which grades our students should achieve, a process which involved a day off timetable for all teachers to conduct meetings in which we discussed every single pupil at length before arriving at both a grade and rank order. These results were then scrutinised by a CAGs committee and then possibly returned to the department for further discussion and amendments, before finally going back up the chain of command and eventually being signed off by the headmaster.

We were extremely confident that our results were ‘correct’ and, unsurprisingly, the results were not materially different to those of previous years. I found it, therefore, painful to see that once CAGs were applied post ‘algorithm-gate’, in contrast to our results, the proportion of students achieving grades 7, 8 and 9 across the country at GCSE increased by 5.2%. Why had we been so fair?

However, the process did have lessons to offer both for this year and more broadly for the way we deliver our examination courses.

I have always been an advocate of working especially hard at the beginning of the course, particularly in coursework elements, which are so important in our subject. This insistence on having performances recorded early and compositions well advanced meant that we had a large body of evidence to draw on when trying to justify the grades we had assigned to students to the CAGs committee.

This year, even with the reduction in the coursework requirements, I have again insisted on students advancing as far as they possibly could with compositions and recording performances as early as possible, in case we were again forced into lockdown. For once my students are grateful to me for pushing them hard early in the course, and even though a large proportion cannot access either their work or the software programmes they were working on, we still have an almost complete set of coursework to help with whatever grading we will have to undertake in the summer. I know that in many schools, leaving the coursework to the very end of the course makes a lot of sense – and is often a necessity given the starting place of many students – but early completion does have (and in my opinion always has had) great advantages.

This remarkable period has also highlighted the strong benefits of cloud-based products for the completion of coursework. At school we have, for many years, used Sibelius and Logic as tools for helping with notating and hearing back compositions (note the careful wording – these programmes are not where the composition takes place!), but during lockdown Logic, in particular, has been a stumbling block. Many students do not have access to an iMac, let alone the very expensive Logic. The education version of BandLab has been very helpful in getting students in Year 10 and below used to using DAWs, and Sibelius First has also been invaluable, but many of my students are now making extensive use of MuseScore, which as a substitute is excellent. Both of these programmes are free, which obviously makes them a good option for many schools.

Having to work from home, though, has made me go ‘back to basics’ in many of the composition tasks I have set. I have for a long time suggested that students compose for their own instruments and for limited forces more generally, and while at home (with the limitations of Sibelius First meaning that it is only able to use four staves, for example) this has been an easier and better way to work. At GCSE (and for many A Level candidates) this approach will produce much more concise and coherent compositions and I will be insisting on this way of working in the future once COVID is but a memory.