To tell you to tell your teens to read the f*****ing question!

[BorrowedThyme]

I'm spending hour and hours and hours combing through GCSE papers back from the exam board cos mum says Jonnie has told her he had written loads of high quality answers and should have got higher than a 5...

YES! Jonnie has written loads and loads of very high quality content, showing excellent understanding, recall and application of the subject

NO! his answers don't in any way match the question that was asked, so no! he gets no marks for said answers.....

FGS - what a total waste of time and energy for everyone.

And I have spent my entire weekend on these wastes of time

My last lesson with year 11 was always 'how to lose marks' and not reading the blankety blank question properly was way up there! I marked Maths and the number of marks lost stupidly astounds, simple things like if you want to change an answer make sure you cross out the original!

I would imagine ( as someone who once did the cursed exam marking) that virtually everyone who has read exam papers at one stage or another wants to smash their head through the nearest window when they read the hundredth ' this is everything I know about x' or some other mistake that the pupil has in all probability been told about 1000 times. Years ago, one of my students forgot to turn over the paper to the last question. It's stupid things like this that is do frustrating.

to be fair, half the posters on mn don't seem to have actually read the opening post before they reply, despite presumably also going through 14plus years minimum of education, so perhaps it's too much to expect of teenagers!

YANBU. Everyone ever sitting an exam needs to be told this. Once you've answered the question you should always go back and reread it to make sure that you have in fact definitely answered the question that was asked. So frustrating seeing able students miss marks they could have easily got if they'd just gone back and checked the question.

Idiots' night out it seems!

Not really, given it’s mostly teachers who will be reviewing exam papers - either before an official review request is submitted or as part of their job with an exam board 😂

Why??

Silly response.

So why would a parent telling their teen have any greater impact, given that’s the title of the post? I totally get it’s frustrating but putting the onus on the parent to hammer the message home seems a bit odd, when teachers have much more regular discussions with pupils about exam techniques.

Yep. That's what we need, more teachers leaving the profession.

Op, if you are so short of time, why is this your second post on this subject?

who else is going to do it? who else is going to get scripts from the exam board and work through them in the hope that there is an opportunity for a remark to increase that person's grade? And you realise that the OP has probably spent hours on this over the weekend, time she could have been spending with her own family and friends rather than looking after the futures of the children she teaches? You realise that this is entirely voluntary, unpaid work? And then idiots like you come along and tell her she should be doing another job? It's absolutely a fair point to be making. All too often, students bomb on their grades because they have answered the question they want to answer, not the one that was actually asked.

this is precisely the reason why teaching is in crisis.

You owe the OP an apology. A big one.

There was someone else moaning about reviewing papers earlier. Next year teach the class to answer the question?

We say that in acronyms to our two as on 12 and 13 then spell it out with out the swear but say its the swear seriously most annoying thing is not reading the question

Maybe students should read the questions. YANBU, OP! I'd be tearing hair out.

The school should just say sure - pay for it yourself and get it remarked

Maybe they read it and didnt know the answer so wrote anything down in the hopes of getting a mark . Like they are told to do

I think if I was in the position of my son not getting the expected (given by the school) grade for an exam then before I approached the school asking if they could submit it for a re-mark I would have a very good talk with my son to make sure it was a valid re-mark NOT a case of not reading the questions.

I am not sure where you are in the pipeline OP. Are you the teacher of the students who took these papers? An independent exam marker?

My older son is 24 now so I imagine things have changed, but I recall being told that the school would only submit a paper for a re-mark under exceptional circumstances and that it was very unusual for grades to be changed.

When I sat my nursing finals a lot of us, who had struggled a bit with theory, passed, and a lot of clever students failed because they didn't read the question properly, and wrote what they knew about the subject but not about what was asked, the clues were there in the questions but they missed them. It's more common than you'd think

Same but same!

Yes, that’s the reason they didn’t answer the question. The OP forgot to teach them to do it. Kids always do exactly what you tell them, and she was very remiss.

Honestly…

A parent telling won't have a greater impact, but it will have a cumulative impact.

Exactly what I was thinking 🤔..

I love the assumption that Jonnie hasn’t read the question because we didn’t tell them to … because teens are a well known group of children who hang on their parents every word .

I get your knackered but this isn’t the parents fault like your shit pay , long hours and pathetic school budgets aren’t either .

I once invigilated a German "writing" exam where one pupil was busily answering the questions in English.