Audio lesson · 10 minutes
How your data becomes your results
Achievement rates are calculated from the ILR. Understanding the cohort is what turns an unexplained rate into an explainable one.
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Chapters
- It is calculated from your return
- Understanding the cohort
- Improving the rate honestly
Transcript
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Introduction
Qualification achievement rates: how your data becomes your results. Achievement rates are calculated from the ILR. Understanding the cohort is what turns an unexplained rate into an explainable one.
It is calculated from your return
The calculation forms a cohort of aims expected to complete in the year and measures achievement within it. That means three data problems move the published rate directly: aims with no outcome, aims left open past their planned end date, and planned end dates that put an aim in the wrong year.
Understanding the cohort
Reconciling your own cohort against the calculated one, and accounting for every difference, is the exercise that explains most of the gap. Often nothing is wrong: the two are counting different things. Where the difference is caused by planned end dates that do not reflect the actual programme, that is a data problem and it is fixable while the year is open.
Improving the rate honestly
Recording missing outcomes, closing aims that should be closed, and setting realistic planned end dates are all legitimate and often substantial. Moving planned end dates to shift aims into a different cohort, without a genuine change in the programme, is not. The distinction is whether the data change reflects a real change.
Read it instead
Qualification achievement rates: how your data becomes your resultsThe written module carries the same content at three depths, with the worked examples, the pitfalls and the sources.
Sources
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