I know some of us have teenagers who work to capacity. But for the rest of us...

If I think dd can do better then I say so. Eg she is very good at languages but sometimes just lets things slide so I do say you could have done better. On the other hand she has recently worked her arse off to get into top set maths (maths isn't her thing) so I am always very supportive of her maths marks. I do try not to be at her all the time about revising but I do find it hard to be quiet

Like hassled - I usually start by asking how other folk got on - I don't mean named folks, but if my dc say "I got 43 in my test" it means nothing without context. dd2 is in Yr 10 - they often get given assessments which include things they haven't even covered yet , so if they get a good 50-60% of the marks available on the whole paper, it might well be that is pretty impressive if they've not covered a lot of the spec yet. OTOH, if everyone else is getting '1s' or '2s' and she gets a '4' or '5' , then we need to give her a bit more support to find what she's missed / not understood.
We usually have a chat about understanding where the marks were missed - has the teacher gone through it? Have they had their papers back? Do they know what they missed / got wrong? Was it careless mistakes or was there a question they just didn't get? etc., so they know how to get those marks next time. I don't see that the same as constantly saying "You could do better" though.

Yes, I'm sure it varies from state school to state school.

Dds school insists she does a gcse in Citizenship and another in RE. Then they more or less insisted she did triple science because she is capable of doing that. Then she had to do the other subjects to conform to the IB (or whatever it is). So she literally only had two options for subjects of her choice after all that = 12 subjects.

DD did 13
DS did 12
State schools always take more exams because they examine every subject in the timetable.
Private schools do not have to.

I would be quite happy if my dd was doing 9 or 10. However, as I have already explained, 2 of hers were not gcses she would choose to do.

12 GCSE's? Our school only lets them do 9 and I think that's plenty

Dawned and bibbity - completely agree with you both.

12 does seem a lot. Mine did 10/9/10and it didn't stop them fulfilling their potential.

Me too Bertrand. Unfortunately dd had very little choice about what gcses to do and 2 of those are compulsory in her school. She wouldn't have chosen them as options and wouldn't have chosen to do a gcse in either of them.

I don't say it to my dd, no. She's doing 12 gcses - she can't possibly work "just a little bit harder" in every subject, which is what her teachers are all urging her to do. Surely that is the sort of pressure we are talking about when we say our teens are under unprecedented pressure at school these days?

Full UMS isn't usually full marks though. There is redundancy at the top!

Ah, the beat the sister game.

Yup. Been there, done that with the GCSEs
DS did get more A* but DD got more subjects
they will still be bickering over that when they are 50

and she did 5 AS while he is doing 4
so come august the 18th I'll have it all over again if his grades are better than hers !

DH and I stay well clear

My parents put enormous amounts of pressure on me, and it led to me rebelling and intentionally doing fuck all coursework for my GCSEs.

DD is 10 and very bright, in the top 3 in her class of 30 for Maths, and top of the class in English. Her attendance this year has been a little low, due to various factors and when I was called in to see the head teacher, I made a point of mentioning that her attendance hasn't affected her attainment this year. The HT replied with 'yes but think just how much better she could be doing if she had 100% attendance. With children like her, we should always be looking at how much better they can do'

I mentioned that she got 53 out of 53 on her English assessment, so actually she couldn't do any better than that. 39 out of 40 on maths, and when we looked at the test paper it was genuine mistake on DDs part, it wasn't because she didn't understand what she was doing.

If they have done their best, that is all that matters. Sod all this pushy parenting lark, it just makes kids miserable.

Borders
DD's revision pages were stuck to the walls in every room.
I have no reason to believe DS is not revising but no evidence that he is

I tend to ask what they were aiming for, how they feel about their result and if they think it would be reasonable to do more or if that was the right balance between trying their best and keeping their sanity. By their teenage years they tend to know themselves fairly well.

In all honesty I can tell you that both my 17yo and my 14yo usually get about a grade lower than they could get if they worked flat out but I am fine with that, I don't want them to burn out.

Ds is bright but a lazy fucker. With a bit of application all of his mediocre grades could be good. He will learn the hard way when he has to resit next year...

No, I honestly don't put any pressure on him to push Bs to As or As to A*. But, he has huge issues around anxiety and perfectionism which we've been battling since primary school and we're finally starting to get the message across that all we expect of him is that he does well enough to be able to access the next stage of his education AND that he enjoys learning for learning's sake. For example, last night he spent some time researching the Spanish civil war because he was interested in it, not because it's on his GCSE syllabus (exams in four weeks). That's the kind of child and student I want.

I have one driven, one distracted...boy is driven, girl is distracted but it hasn't always been like this - they switched around in Year 8.

My ds has asd and an amazingly wonderful spoken academic profile.

So I get "I only got x amount on that test" which I reply - well then with hard work you can only improve and

"I'm doing different work in x subject because I can already do what the teacher is teaching" to which I reply - well that's an exam you can get top grades in if you put in the work which will help you get into college.

I try and find a balance. In ds first secondary he went to they put everyone's current score and target score on the whiteboard in order of achievement. Ds was always bottom in English but a quite a way. When being positive that with support and hard work he could catch up to his peers and achieve what they are ds noted straightaway that many of them were already achieving above his target and than if they make progress too he'll always be bottom. So I've had to adjust the wording to showing him he make the same rate of progress rather on focussing on bridging the gap.

I always ask if they did their best. If so, great. If not, how do they feel about that? They don't have to answer, just think about it for themselves.

My DC know that I got a crap degree after great O and A Levels. And that was because I didn't work at Uni. Too many other, more interesting things to do!

I've always said that it feels awful deep down when you get a mark or grade and know that you could have done a lot better if you'd tried.

Talkin. I also have one driven child and one more easily distracted. My son is driven, my daughter is not, but is very sociable. Which way round are yours.