Anyone else's dc got lower GCSE'S results than expected?

Only one GCSE result this year. A 6 when DS was hoping for 8 or 7. He must have bombed the final exam badly.

That's such a shame for your DS. Can you request the scripts of a few that are the worst anomalies and go over them with teacher? It might not change anything but the insight might help him with future exams.

Exactly this. They may know they have bright kids but they can't possibly except in extraordinarily exceptional circumstances tell whether a kid in the top 4% nationally especially in circumstances where their education has been differently impacted by covid and the varying effectiveness of teaching during lockdown

My DS got low grades and we were really suprised he is very disappointed.
5 in maths when we were expecting 7/8 as this is what he achieved on past papers. Passed all sciences with a 4 but again we were expecting 6’s. He has been allowed to take a-level maths / bio and chemistry on a trial basis as they know he performed well prior to exams. Don’t really understand what went so wrong.

I am always amazed that schools even predict 9's. DD's highly selective indy would not, as they maintained that you never know how many in any one year will achieve the very top grades, so it is impossible to predict. So, if you were top of the class, you were predicted an 8.

DS was a mixed bag. He got an 8 and a 7 in his best subjects -both A level choices so all good there. I think he hoped the 7 would be an 8/9 like his mocks but he did say he found one of the papers harder than mocks.

He was slightly disappointed with triple science. He got 5/5/5. With favourable conditions they all could have been a grade higher - a couple were close but overall they fall within an expected range.

With hindsight choosing double science might have served him better because he's an above average achiever but not top end. That combined with staffing issues, strikes, extra bank hols last year probably tipped it.

Maths we were hoping for a 6 but it came out a 5. He put the most extra work in to Maths because he's not a natural and his class had so many supply teachers. We are both just thrilled he achieved a good pass that meets college requirements.

The only subject that felt really off to us and was a bit of an upset was English, specifically Literature. He's consistently achieved well and was expecting no lower than a 7 - he got a 5 which was a grade lower than Lang. He's always been better at Lit so for it to be so low and swapped around with Lang has felt weird.

He was 3 marks from a 6 so school are going to review for the chance he might go up a grade.

From reading here English certainly appears to be the most inconsistent result for students, good or bad so we are far from alone in this.

Schools are often willing to be flexible about A level requirements if the mark is borderline and the student can argue their case. Possibly even more so this year due to the overall drop. Would he be able to ask them?

Yes, in all of them apart from Science. His school have requested a remarking of one and I have been trying to contact the school about another that I want investigating, he seems to have dropped three grades which doesn't seem right considering this exam required a practical and course work. He couldn't have worked any harder, he went to all the early morning school revision clubs at 7.30am, he had a tutor for two subjects, he used to set his alarm early to get in more revision and would go to the library after school. Perhaps his revision skills just weren't great. But the marks he was awarded were all top end of the grade he received. It has meant that at the moment he can't study one of his A- Levels unless the remarking comes back with two extra marks.

My dc is at a high performing private school and the "radio silence" from his school on celebratory instagram posts and other similar schools reflect the "surprising" range of results with some subjects esp Eng Lang bringing a raft of low grades.

I think nationwide we will see far fewer top grades (7-9s)
Far more pass grades (4)
It's difficult.
At our school pupils who have been solid 9s for months hot 6s and 7s
Kids who didn't really work hard got 4s
🤷

If he has dropped to a 4 on a paper there is a possibility that they just failed to mark a question / enter it into the system correctly. Of course also possible your DS turned over 2 pages at once and missed a chunk out.

That is why it is worth getting the papers back first which is free. If your DS screwed up by missing out questions or misreading a big question so not answering properly it will save the review fee.

He'd probably like to know what went so wrong anyway.

Yes, although most people on here seem to think it is impossible to get more than one or two extra marks, exams office won't get back to me until 1.09 but have asked for that and one other.

Yes, he was predicted mainly 8’s and 9’s but came out with mostly 7,s…. but he scraped through to allow him to complete the a levels he chose. He didn’t perform as well as his brither did last year, but his older brother worked so hard. Rather frustrating as he’s naturally clever and could have done better. Hoping he matures in time for his alevel exams. He’s quite introvert and will find interview’s challenging.

I assume you are asking for the papers back in the 9/4 subject so you can ask for a review if needed.

Yes ds was expecting a very mixed set of results as he had a mental health crisis but the ones he was expecting to do well in (as in: did well in mocks and then came out of the exams feeling good about how it went) were several grades lower than expected. Hopefully this won’t affect how he feels about transition to sixth form.
Christ this has been an awful year for my family. Younger ds had to have a major operation a week before the exams.

DS did worse than hoped for. Very annoying. It wasn't entirely unexpected as he was a lazy arse for the last couple of months. Wasted as he could he done amazingly he's the cleverest of the 4 of them. His brother did much much better as he worked twice as hard. Finding it hard not to be pissed off with him.

Yes, three significantly down including one subject where paper 1 was a 9 and paper 2 a 4, in a subject where they always have 8/9s