GCSE and A Levels are they age standardised?

[Taf90]

Hi everyone! Hope you all are doing well. This is my first post in the group. I wanted to find out if GCSE and A Levels exam scores are age standardised like the 11+ exams? Thanks in advance!xx

I complained about it

More so due to the behaviour which was obviously the schools responsibility

I dont give a shiny shit if one child takes an exam early...very well done them

I have an issue with an entire cohort

I thought due to the increased content of the new GCSEs it wasn't as common to take them early.

I know DS's school has started to teach GCSE content in Y9 just so they can fit the whole syllabus in for Y11

Looking at the case of exams being taken in the 'correct' year, A-levels and GCSEs probably should be age standardised, by which I mean that adjustments should be made according to when children were born in the academic year. There is still a residual effect at GCSE of being younger within a year group.

Relative to children born in September, children born in August are:

6.4 % less likely to achieve five GCSEs or equivalents at
grades A*–C

Around 2 % less likely to go to university at age 18 or 19, and
around 2.3 % less likely to attend a high-status Russell Group
institution if they do

www.ifs.org.uk/comms/r80.pdf

I think half the problem here might be parents and some teachers thinking you can’t be stretch if your not studying for an exam and that doing GCSEs early is how you extend able children. That’s very easy for a school to play to when ‘advertising’ for parents. It’s perfectly possible to add depth and breadth to the curriculum in most subjects without sitting GCSEs early.

We did single science GCSE in year 9 and this was in the 90s. Because I’m summer born I was 13. It was the whole year group.

They only entered us for the foundation paper so the best mark you could get was a C, which I got and which I omit if I ever give my GCSE and A level scores!

The school did it because it was a necessity to have a science GCSE and after that we could pick single sciences but I actually think it was a very poor decision that the school took as making the wrong choice at age 13 as for what science you wanted to take next year would preclude you from doing a-levels necessary to go to medical school for instance. (I know you can do science foundation courses later but it’s a faff). We should have all done double science gcse in year 11.

My cousin did his maths gcse at age 12 or so. I have no idea why, some kind of bragging thing for the school I guess. He did fine but didn’t get the top mark (I’m not sure if they had A*s when he was 12 as I know they were quite new when I was in year 11) so had to re-do at 16 anyway.

I liked getting a couple of GCSEs out the way early, meant I could drop French and learn a different language that’s been way more use