Largest ever up-tick in GCSE maths standards?

Well done to him.
You deserve to be very proud

I'm going to boast now as I'm a really proud my but my ds got 197/200 for his Maths exam and a grade 9.

He did further maths and 'only' got an 8 - he said that was really really hard!!

I'm really proud as I recall being called into school when he was in year 2 and basically being told he was thick and way behind the other children.

The real questions posted seem pretty tough to me! (Not the made up ones.) I took Maths O level in 1977 and got a B (good result for me, it wouldn't have taken too much to pull me down to a C, and there was never any realistic chance I would get an A). Then I gave up Maths with a sigh of relief. I was good at arithmetic and not too bad at algebra, but geometry beyond the very basics, calculus and trigonometry were tough. For some reason I really struggled with graphs and there was always a graph question, so that reduced the pool of questions I could choose from.

Anyway, for what it's worth the only question I can remember from the papers we took (I think there were two) was an easy one at the beginning - something like if you bought a sheet of 64 stamps of such and such a value and paid with a £5 note, how much change would you get? So easy questions have always been there as a way of ensuring most kids will get at least some marks and to give the nervous candidates some confidence that they really will be able to cope with at least some of the questions. (Mind you, this was before the days when calculators were allowed in exams, so you either had to be good and reasonably quick at mental arithmetic or write the sum out on the rough paper.)

Well done to today's 16-year-olds for coping with all of this. I take my hat off to them.

ETA: we had log tables in the exam! I'd forgotten that. I think some of the real maths whizzes in my year had slide rules instead. Forgotten skills now.

Great result @CoolFans . Mine was chuffed to get a decent 8 as she was very unsure after the non calc paper that she'd make it. And wants to do A level.

Why did they do away with the intermediate paper out of interest? It’s the one I did in 1994 and the max grade I could get was a B which I achieved. Seems a shame not to let children try to achieve a 7.

The higher maths paper is HARD. Saying that DS dropped only 22 marks in his papers getting a high 9. So proud!

My daughter did OCR. I dont think her school did well in Maths as a whole. I heard Edexcel was very hard too. Dd got a grade lower than usual.

@Beaa82 yes grade boundaries was 12 marks lower for a 9 this year (Edexcel) so the papers were harder.

The Maths papers were HARD this year. Dd and all of cohort found them harder than any previous past papers.

Still like that. But you'll be surprised how many get those things asked questions wrong as they rush. And I was counting in that time !

I think we expect the first few questions not to take much thinking, or time. Later questions, generally, would be increasingly difficult and take longer. That’s reflected in the mark scheme.

It’s way back, so may not still be true, but at one stage the first questions would be set at the lowest level available for that paper, so 1 for Foundation and 4 for Higher. (I think)

😁 it is very good. Also free on Physicsandmathstutor if don't want to pay

PS @dustabsorber this is one question so would have about 5 minutes to answer it (unless you wanted to leave others blank).

🤣

I can live with that. We used Save My Exams and the revision notes and additional resources were worth the £60 even if I had known all of that!

I copied 2n^2
Dustabsorber thought it might be 2n^2 + 1 (13:17)

My first, disappeared, one said it was 2n^2 - 1. (posted before 13:30, I think, but probably while dustabsorber was writing her solution so they didn’t see it before they posted)

Not sure I want to tell you this but they are all available for free. Just google the exam board and past papers. All there either mark schemes and examiners reports. Free.

The resources for kids these days are phenomenal. If you want to support your kids and you have the £60 for an Ed tech subscription, you have access to every paper, every mark scheme… nothing like that existed when we were kids

This is total bullshit.

When did you last look at a paper?

Firstly, plenty of kids couldn't do this.
Secondly, that's one small section of maths. It doesn't mean those kids could do the full curriculum.

It is one thing to do the bits of maths we use in everyday life. The kids doing the higher GCSE paper are doing things that really don't crop up in their lives.

@dustabsorber question is not wrong 😂

I seem to have found a glitch in the MN system.
My first reply to yours was that the question is 2 n^2 - 1

I replied again to the same post with the screenshots, and that’s deleted my first reply. I think. (working on a small screen)

See screenshots (when they load) of the question and the mark scheme (with solution) for that question.
The link in my original post takes you to more examples. This is 2019H paper 2.

I would also have expected some comment about one sequence increasing and the other one decreasing (however expressed) to confirm that there’s only one solution.

He always wins the Maths prize at school. I am not sure if he gets one from the exam board?
Now he will aim to get 100% in A level Maths and Further Maths.
A very talented lad, he got straight 9s in all his subjects. He has a great future ahead doesn’t he?

Brilliant. Congratulations to him. Will he get a prize?

Just to be clear, numbers passing or achieving particular grades are no longer pre-set. That’s known as norm referencing (ie. the top 10% will always get an A etc) and stopped in 1988 (I think) when they moved from O levels to GCSEs. GCSEs are criterion referenced (ie. everyone who gets this many marks will get an A). So the numbers passing/getting top grades will vary from year to year.

Realistically in practice the marking teams will use a combination of norm and criterion referencing and should be alert to the fact that one year’s paper may be particularly challenging/easy.