But schools can modify the questions or produce their own?

Long experience of the SQA suggests that if they’ve issued something it’s best to use it rather than go off piste. They’ve got a history of saying ‘use your professional judgement’ then later on saying ‘we didn’t mean like that’. I hate them but they are very good at producing exam papers and making ones own assessments is not as straightforward as many teachers seem to think, especially so in a situation like this where the stakes are high and you may face scrutiny. There’s also a workload issue, why make your own when one has been provided? Obviously some had tought their courses in a way that meant that with lockdown gaps the SQA paper wasn’t suitable but most could use it with only minor alterations.

Why do teachers take any criticism of some of their colleagues as a criticism of all teachers?.

So no. teachers are not that good, they don’t know their students.

and laughing at the inevitable is hardly spitting the dummy champ

Have you seen anything that suggests appeals will be for anything other than admin errors

It’s all still under wraps but I think there will be huge demand for independent adjudication and it has to be the SQA who do that. As their MO throughout this and before the pandemic has been to put as much responsibility on schools and do as little as possible themselves I don’t have much faith in them to do the right thing here.

Also, did you do their online consultation about appeals? Three options and only one was close to something that looked like independent adjudication, the others were basically ‘you guys sort it out yourselves while we fanny around in the background writing guidance documents’.

Appeals will be a mess with teachers taking flack.
Appeal 1: final grade and actual grade don’t match, admin error school/SQA agree and sort.
Appeal 2: little Jimmy didn’t get the grade he needed in assessment. Find evidence to support upgrade, which won’t exist because we’d have used it. Teacher error in not giving enough assessment opportunities of the correct standard.

As for changing questions, it has long been held that you can change part of prior-verified questions as long as the question stays fundamentally the same. Eg in chem changing a Mg ion to a Ca ion or numbers in a calculation, which is what I’m doing for a AH paper.

little Jimmy didn’t get the grade he needed

Here I suspect it will be grade they wanted, and that some of our parents will capitalise on the difficult year and just appeal anything below top grade in the expectation of moving up a grade or two.

We’ve history of that in Dunblane anyway. Rumor is our appeal  numbers on a normal year are much higher than average.

Yes wanted/needed. SQA took speculative appealing out a couple of years ago. No doubt there will be some cases where it is appropriate but this year evidence will be sparse.
I have a lazy pupil who does better in exams than work through the year would suggest (SQA want evidence based judgement). I know they’ve got an online tutor and due to flunking the “prelim” have been hitting work hard (concerned for mental health) but if they don’t make it to the next assessment I have to use the poor prelim and they lose the place on the high tarriff uni course.

When I say perform better we only have 1piece of evidence for this from two years ago and although you can be trained to pass N5 you need ability to pass AH.

100th – I know parents of a few like that… I’m not sure what they expected when exams were cancelled, its not like last time when it was a bit of a surprise and you might have been resting all your hopes on pulling off a miracle again – its was entirely predictable that exams might be cancelled and they were fairly early on! If you got Prelims in your are better than some schools. There are pupils at my son’s school in S6 who probably got lucky with the debacle last year and on hearing exams were cancelled again seemed to assume everything would just be OK again – but seemingly haven’t been that engaged in learning! At the opposite extreme there are pupils who have unconditional offers (so don’t need a grade), have plenty of evidence and are still stressing the “assessments” like their entire future depends on it!