VALUE ADDED MONITORING
The department makes extensive use of the college's value added monitoring to monitor student performance on coursework, mock exams, external exams, homeworks, tests, as well as each monitoring grade. This means that students performance is continually being assessed against their target grades. We start this process in November of the first year, and only really finish the value added analysis in August when the A Level Results are published. The department was commended in the last inspection for its scrupulous monitoring of students performance.
All students GCSE points on entry are entered onto the departmental database (Excel) in November of the first year and students value added performance can then be evaluated by sorting the data in either ascending or descending order of GCSE points score. This is a quick and easy way of regularly monitoring student achievement within a value added context.
For example, looking at data set (1) (An Excel spreadsheet) which shows the 1999 exam results, the last two columns on the righthand side have been used to identify who underachieved, as well as students who exceeded their minimum expected target grade. Thus, for example, whilst at face value a B or a C at advanced level may seem highly respectable, and indeed for some students is, we would expect a student with say 39 GCSE points to achieve an A grade as a minimum, and a student with say 32 points to achieve a B as a minimum. As a department we use this results analysis to identify strengths and weaknesses in our teaching in terms of students GCSE points on entry.
Data set (2) shows the cumulative picture that you can build up from this analysis of student performance based on GCSE band on entry.
Similar analyses are done on student coursework, and even retention (data set (4)) in terms of premature leavers from the course. See data set (3)
The Department|Resources|Value Added|Year 1|Year 2