Should I encourage DS to ‘give up’ a GCSE?

[Elisheva]

DS starts his GCSEs in a couple of weeks time and he is getting increasingly anxious. He is not a natural scholar and finds study hard.
I am wondering whether to advise him to focus his revision on key subjects and effectively ‘give up’ on the others. Obviously he will still take the exams, but he is unlikely to get a high grade on them even if he works really hard so it seems sensible to focus his remaining time on improving the subjects he is good at. Or is that a crazy idea after spending two years studying a subject?

For those saying “you will never need to reference your GCSEs again,” I did a job for a foreign government recently, and had to list all my qualifications back to O Level, despite having three A Levels, a degree, and two postgraduate degrees.

Assuming that you will never need to reference them again may not be wise.

In the OP’s shoes, I’d have a word with the school and ask their advice.

I didnt say it was fraud to leave resits out of your CV. You can edit your CV any way you want.

I said it is fraud to leave resits out of an application form that asks for ALL GCSE grades, such as UCAS, and many others.

In this case it certainly is fraud, and you can be taken to court for fraud in your UCAS application.

Drop it! We are focusing on maths and english and anything else is a bonus. College will take him on for engineering apprenticeship even with threes. My son is stressed out and just keeping him motivated to get into school is a challenge when they're thrashing them right up to the wire. He's not academic, a summer baby who will still be 15 when he finishes. It's a lot for them. He's had enough of school.

Very well said!

My son is currently A level exam year, it’s very risky going for minimum number of GSCE as the competition is fierce for Uni places, more then we realised.
For Leeds Finance courses some are having to send proof of GCSE Maths & English at grade 7 or above before getting an offer, he’s got his offer thank goodness but his friend only got his offer a few weeks ago as he had to send in certificates.
GCSE results certainly are counting for higher education so please don’t assume they won’t be.

But surely in this case it would be better to sacrifice your 9th or 10th GCSE in order to get the English or maths grade up to the 7?

I agree though if getting 6,7,8s it may be better to entirely drop a subject coming in at grade 3 than take it and have the 3.

Mainly though (ie excl Oxbridge plus maybe 3 others) unis look at 'best 8' GCSEs if they look at them at all?

Definitely.

Much better to get solid grades in most than awful grades.

Definitely.

Yes I agree, my post was replying to the poster who said no one bothers with GCSE results, I was wanting to advise it can effect their uni applications. I don’t think it linked as a reply 🙈

@Elisheva Don't forget that there is May half term in the middle of the exams which means your child can leave some of the revision until then for those exams after half term.

Both of mine had an exam timetable up but also a list of what papers were after half term. There are 7 days including the weekend for post half term topics. Plenty of time for final revision for those.

And yes, they can sacrifice one subject by not putting as much effort in as they could to bring up grades in other subjects.

Thank you, this has been so helpful. I think we’re going to focus more time on the core subjects but still do a little revision for RS and Geography, especially in the days just before the exams.
In the course of thinking about what’s best to do I’ve discovered that they haven’t even finished the curriculum for Geography yet, so that’s another thing to consider. They only finished Science the week before last so there’s obviously so much content to cover.