I have come up with a not very pretty solution of appending a 1 to the start of the predictions for each batch.Might be worth investigating further, as seems a bit buggy, but might be my implementation 
# Here is the method call to calculate the prediction for each essay converted to its corresponding score scale
    #############################################################
    # also here is my unpretty solution for strange behavious of first value disappearing from predictions when evaluation step is called
    predictions = torch.tensor([1]+[self.get_actual_score(score,set_) for score,set_ in zip(scores,sets)], dtype=torch.int)

Thanks again,
and sorry for so my replies to my own responses in one thread
Cameron