Year 11 2023-24

My guess is pro rata . So e.g. His marks totalled 80 - pro rata that would be 120, and then look up the grade boundaries based on that mark.

It could be ore clever though if the school know the grade profile per paper (eg if the missed one was harder or easier than the others).

So DS result for his maths came back as 2 marks off a 5.
I am baffled how they reached this grade though as they only did two papers?!
Im also baffled where that leaves him with regards to if to move to the foundation paper or not?

What have you said to her about it?

Having seen your other thread blue it isn't so bad as I thought at first. It isn't like she took crib notes in, she found the paper they would be using which is semi-public anyway and learned the answers. The main person she cheated was herself, as she now won't know what she could have scored in a fair test.

Oh no @bluetackaddict what a silly thing for her to do, was she panicking and worried about poor performance or was it more like stupid teenage behaviour (I know internal exam papers have been shared within our own school with the perpetrators egging each other on to use it) . I think you need to speak to the school and see what they propose to do about it and how seriously they take it, also how they think you should deal with it at home. It is probably more common than you think.

Oh no. At least it (a) it was a mock and (b) she was caught. Do you think she has learned her lesson? What on earth was she thinking!?

Thanks again Teen. That gives me something to start with! Maths in particular, there seems to be sooo many different things they have to learn it seems impossible to fit them all in!

Eng Lang can be revised for. They have to know what they have to do for each question type as it is very regimented.

I found the RE revision guides generally good too.

Yes it will for maths and science.

However for maths you need to do questions as picking out what maths is needed from the question is important.

For science everything is in the guides and nothing is unnecessary. Even throw away one line examples can appear in a multi choice question. Also practice identifying the more complex things for 6 marker questions,

Teen I'm finding your practical with emphasis on "specifically what are you looking at this morning " for example, suggestions, really helpful.

Question to the room generally - if we use our exam boars study guides as a template will it give us all the topics DD needs to look at in the case of maths and science? I think if we have a framework we know what we need to structure time around.

Revision plan suggestion.

Work out how many hours she can reasonably do after school / at the weekend.
From when you start until say end of Spring term, work out how many hours that equates to, allowing for days off etc.
Look at the topics for each subject (from revision guide contents) and estimate revision time needed.

Compare hours available v revision hours needed. Adjust as needed (and even consider eg abandoning the humanity if she doesn't like and its hard to learn).

Then looking 2-4 weeks ahead put subjects into the revision timeslots, but be flexible. Looking a week ahead put topics into the slots. We found a variety helped and thinking about which subjects needed the 'best' slots. If school set revision style homework that counts as revision time too.

(Also think about using some of xmas holidays, 2 hrs a day from 28th onwards would push things forward.)

Good point regarding Level 2/Level 3. I really hope she gets her 5 passes though. Her coursework is good which is a start!

Thanks for your suggestion re revising. That seems like a good strategy. I have said I will do a revision plan for her to start after her Child Development exam which will cover everything she needs to do between then and May. But that might take me weeks to work out!

Will it still be available in 2025 if she has to start at level 2?
If she wants to do it herself then i suggest you consider the following strategy:
You - what are you revising this morning?
T2 - biology
You - what topics
T2 - oh I don't know .....
You - OK lets look at the guide and pick one, Circulatory system

<lunch time>
You - OK let's test you on the circulatory system ...

She wants to do a BTEC in Health and Social care which needs 5 GCSE's at grade 4 and above (including maths and english). This is 100% coursework which will suit her MUCH better! Thank goodness they are not being phased out in 2024!

I've just had a chat with her and she is going to write down how she is going to revise for each subject eg flash cards or videos. Half the battle with her is that she doesn't know how to revise. I offered my one to one services but she declined. Said she would prefer to do it herself and for me to test her. Fair enough.

I've also told her she needs to at least sit the rest of the mocks this week (knowing she probably won't do too well seeing as she's not revised) otherwise she will be taken out of lessons to do them in the coming weeks and she's already missed loads.

pearl What does she need for next steps? Is she on target to achieve?

I was lucky, DD1 at GCSE level was very motivated to do the best she could. She was also helped by being pre-GCSE-reform so had controlled assessments to fall back on for some subjects.
DD2 however has always been much more reluctant to have me help...

TeenDivided - I would love to do this but she is quite reluctant. However, if she carries on the way she is, I think I will have to insist. She sounds very much like your DD1 - the eyes glazing over sounds v familiar! I'm in a position to do this as I only work weekends.

She has one proper GCSE in January (Child Development) and i am getting her to focus on that one for now as she has the potential to do well in this and then there is one over with leaving just 7 for the summer.

@pearldiamond With T2 are you in a position to help her revise? With DD1 I did most of her revision 1-1 with her, it made a tremendous difference as to what she could learn in any time slot. On her own her eyes glazed over / her mind wandered / she convinced herself she knew things. With me we would look at the revision guide, I'd ask questions and prompt, and we would keep going back until she could say the answers. It was very time consuming for me, but I was a SAHM so could do it.

Panic71 - T1 also wants to move down to foundation from higher maths. We will see what she gets in her mock and go from there i think. She is not a maths/science person but does really well in essay based subjects so wants to be able to focus on them rather than the STEM stuff. I hope the school let her!

Yes, she has rest breaks and is in a separate room.

Today she was meant to have Business studies and english lit mock but has not gone in at all.

She says she finds it too stressful sitting in the room whilst everyone around her is typing away (she is the only one not on a computer) yet she has finished in 20 minutes because she can't to it because she hasn't revised.

She has got processing difficulties and finds it hard to focus for too long and says her brain feels like it's going to explode.

I have said to her not to stress too much about these mocks but she really does need to come up with a plan of how she is going to manage the real things. She already only does 8 subjects (because I anticipated this kind of thing and we managed to persuade the school) and 3 of those are heavy coursework (for which she is getting distinction/distinction *)

It's quite stressful tbh! Especially when T1 is revising hard and doing really well!

@pearldiamond Does your DT2 qualify for access arrangements such as extra time, or breaks? If it’s not been looked into before now, I wonder whether breaks might help her. There’s still time to get these adjustments before the exams and they can make a huge difference. Worth looking into, at least?

There used to be. I was put into higher tier maths 35 years ago, got a D and then resat the intermediate and got a C.

My DS was moved from higher to foundation at the start of the year. I was a bit concerned as you do just need about 25% to get a 4/5 on the higher and about 60% on the foundation. He is much more confident on the foundation ( part of this is his teacher though and part of its because its a smaller class who all think hes some kind of maths genius after years of struggling at the bottom of the higher class!) But he did find himself overthinking the foundation paper in the most recent mocks as he'd been doing the higher for 2 years and spending ages on 1 mark questions ' because it seemed too easy' ( they start content in year 9) and had forgotten the easier stuff/didn't use his calculator in the calculator paper etc. There was some easy stuff they hadn't done either, which makes sense if they start on grade 3. He doesn't want to go back to his old class even if he does well in the mocks though, so hopefully, it will be easy enough with practice to get his technique sorted out. I would say if your ds was going to move the earlier the better as they need to do the lower stuff to get to the higher grade 4/5 stuff. Other than that I just don't know how it will pan out. Last maths paper today.

but he’s still struggling to get a solid 4 now in the higher

I think this is normally be a signal for dropping to Foundation.
I wish there was an intermediate tier.