Hiya, thank you for your message
I can provide a little more info too if you'd like from what I'd seen on results day (we went in to college to collect them).
I thought that was the case for 5-15 students too in a cohort. The odd thing is that my teachers didn't seem to have been overly generous, one teacher actually gave me my mock grade of a B in biology, and that was my mock exam in December, so if they were being generous they could have given me an A because I was achieving 22/25 in my essays for homework in biology and A's in past papers for revision in March. So I think a B was fair if anything without being too generous. However 2 students in our class of 13 achieved A*s in every single test and homework, and were downgraded to B's, because of that I'm assuming that's why everyone in the entire college for biology was downgraded. I think we just stood out as an outlier because there probably haven't been 1 or even 2 A*s in biology before at our college. However for chemistry, A's have been achieved before and yet I was downgraded from an A to a B and others dropped a grade or more too. One student who achieved A*s was downgraded to a C somehow.
I do like to stress that I think my college made fair predictions based on our effort, classwork and in some cases mocks too, out of a class of 13, 3 people getting A's seems like a lot though and this is why I feel the algorithm has seriously messed it up for schools like mine. Because other schools may have over predicted, but I would have been over the moon with the AAB for uni and I know I was one of the few people predicted grades like that.
I thought for any outliers they would look at the CAG and I had hope that because they said there would be a bit of weighting on the CAG, that we wouldn't be so harshly marked down. It's shocked me even more because this means that even the CAGs couldn't have helped in lessening the blow of the statistics no matter how realistic teachers make them, just goes to show how wild it is and I wasn't expecting it to be so rigid, these are people's lives and futures.
Interesting to see how it will play out given that mocks exams aren't standardised in any way, and my college uses high grade boundaries so we may not even be able to appeal using our mock grades. Oh my plan is to enter for both October exams and the appeal, in case one ends up working, but have to wait to see how it will work.