DD works hard but when it comes to tests she doesn't achieve as much as she expects. She says the questions in the exam (same test sat across whole year) are a lot harder than the questions they cover in class and that some of the topic areas haven't been covered by her teacher by the time they take the exam.
We recently had our parent teacher consultation and the teacher started off by telling me how she like to focus the majority of her time on the middle range questions and not very much time of the difficult stuff. DD explained to her that often she goes over stuff in class that she already knows and she feels not enough time of the stuff that comes up in the exams. She said if she wanted to do harder maths she should just go on Hegarty Maths and that as far as she was concerned she was covering everything.
I wonder is it just me or how can a student who is not being taught how to answer harder questions, ever hope to answer the harder questions. Every time dd sits a Maths paper she comes out feeling like she couldn't answer most of it. Dd asked if the teacher can go over the test papers in class to help her understand where she went wrong, she agreed to that.