To have not known kids have to attain grade 4 in maths?

[Pepperpotladles]

I did not know this!
I have obviously been living under a rock.
So today someone told me that if kids get grades 1, 2 or 3 in their maths GCSE, it is compulsory that all these kids have to keep on studying GCSE maths until they achieve a grade 4 or above, and they have to keep trying to achieve this up until their 25th birthday.
Is this true?!?
I can't believe my ears.
What about kids who simply can't achieve grade 4 or above in maths, for any number of reasons?

You do need to know whether you are talking about Higher or Foundation papers.

Sorry, Higher.

I did similar stuff.

@RampantIvy who accused you btw? I assume other parents when you told them how much revising your DD did?

Why do you think that a child who is working towards a grade 4 would get all those marks? I suspect you are also quite poor at assessing the difficulty of a question - the conversion graph has a tricky scale and also asks you to work out a value that doesn't appear on the graph. The mean question requires you to know about the impact of outliers. Your money Q6 uses 'credit' 'debit' and 'balance'. Q15 I suspect tripped up an awful lot of kids, very tricksy.

A kid who is going to get a grade 4 has to know some of the trickier topics because they aren't going to get full marks on the easier topics. I've got a current group some of whom will scrape a grade 4, some of whom who will just miss it and some who will miss it by miles. The ones who have the best chance of scraping a grade 4 do know Pythagoras and other grade 4 topics.

I didn't say a child working towards a Grade 4 would get all those marks.However, I do think that a lot of topics on there are covered in KS2 maths - and again regularly at KS3 and in GCSE.

I am also quite capable of assessing the difficulty of a question.

And thankyou for mathsplaining about the conversion graph.

Q15 - yes, I bet it did trip people up.

The mean question just requires people to understand that sometimes a mean isn't useful.

However - do you think that there is a lot of stuff in that paper that is covered extensively in KS2 maths?

That's the question. I think there is a lot of stuff in that paper that is covered in KS2.

And then in KS3
And then in GCSE

The same stuff again and again and again.

There's even a question on edges of a triangular prism.

What do you think of Q18?

Worth 6 marks

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/p28bar15/green/9b429174169effa582d6d1bf9aea89777ea0e7eb.pdf

It's a 2 way table.
Pupils have to work out 4/9 of 36 and then complete the table.

Then some probability.

How many of your pupils would struggle with that - and what would they struggle with?

And Q23

A value for money question worth 5 marks

I am also quite capable of assessing the difficulty of a question.
And thankyou for mathsplaining about the conversion graph.
Q15 - yes, I bet it did trip people up.
The mean question just requires people to understand that sometimes a mean isn't useful.

"mathsplaining"

You said "Get those right and you have about 38 marks - and a lot of that is covered regularly in KS2 maths." and now you're admitting that kids aren't going to get all those marks.

And as I've said before, covered in KS2 maths doesn't mean learned in KS2 maths, and it definitely doesn't mean remembered from KS2 maths.

And it doesn't mean that they don't need to understand any of the more difficult topics to get a grade 4.

You said "Working towards Grade 4"

The point is - it's covered in KS2, covered in KS3, covered at GCSE

Covered again and again and again. I don't know how you can keep make it interesting for pupils when they are doing the same stuff again and again

But pupils still struggle to remember / apply

You can read the examiners' report for yourself

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/p28bar15/green/73a9338732e85a74859119202001c59b741ac89f.pdf

Seems like quite a few struggled with that two way table.

Why do you think that is?

Covered regularly in KS2, fractions are covered in KS2

How many times can you do a 2 way table? And it's the kind of thing that is cross curricular

I don't remember. It was 9 years ago now.

I've just looked at the value for money question.

First you have to have reasonable literacy (not great for dyslexic students).
Then you have to identify and do all the required calculations correctly.
And you have to not get 'lost' part way through the question.

Any individual step might be relatively simple but not panicking at the complexity, and then staying calm and ordered throughout the question (especially if you have largish handwriting so run out of space) can be quite hard.

Doing all this when you have just attempted 22 previous questions can be a big ask.

Just because children are taught stuff in primary does not mean they have internalised it and can remember exactly what to do as they progress through secondary.

It seems that one was well answered

Students were able to make good progress in this familiar style of problem-solving question. A large number gave fully correct or almost fully correct solutions with a few just making an arithmetic slip or selecting the wrong answer.

Not all students understood the idea of ‘Buy one, get one half price’ for shop B and some had them all at half price or seven at full price and one discounted.
For shop C, some students used 0.16 for 1 6 and lost accuracy.

Many students worked out the discount for one or two packs and thought this was the total cost. Weaker students simply 16 from £11.40.

Is the above test representitive of a grade 4 exam?

It's a Foundation GCSE paper covering up to Grade 5

The AQA paper is one of 3 a student would have to do and get around 50-55 /80 on each one to get a grade 4 at GCSE. So they have to sustain over a variety of topics for 4.5 hours in total.

In y11 they therefore have to do this whilst simultaneously doing 8 or 9 other subjects, revising for all of them, doing upwards of 20 exams in total. For some getting a grade 4 in maths would be, as mathematicians say, trivial. For others it is an insurmountable mountain.

I get what you are saying entirely. I left school completely with very little in the way of qualifications, having packed most in at age 14. Partly down to this sort of pressure.

Personally I think some subjects where I was extremely weak at like languages should have been dropped at age 14, and emphasis put on to Maths and English. We do seem to have high expectations of how much some people can learn in a relatively short time.

I'm an author. No maths needed (until I have to do my tax return, but two of my kids are accountants, fortunately!)

ETA - my degree is Creative Writing and Critical Practices.

Is there an answer sheet to the test?

Because it's not a straightforward two way table, is it? It's weird.

First issue is that they work out 4/9 of 36 - where does that go in the table? It doesn't at all. It's a total, not a value. The 'twice as many milk chocolates as dark' also relates to totals and not values in the table. The question would be made easier by having totals for each row and column on the table. Even then it's quite fiddly. Pupils would expect to work out the twice as many milk as dark using the table, but they have to go back to the question instead.

Question 15 is one where the answer will depend on the how a pupil thinks critically.

To my mind the probability of any one number on a dice coming up remains the same every time. No matter how often a number has been repeated before.

I'd have said it had a 1 in 6 chance of being number 5.

and other situations happen too.

My son had a serious illness and missed 5 months of Year 3 plus all of Year 4 except after Easter which is when he has recently gone back. Obviously he has a long time until GCSE's but imagine if that had happened during Year 9/Year 10?

@Kirbert2 I agree there are other situations too. Although someone with a medical condition meaning they miss that amount of school would meet the legal definition of having SEN.

Examiner's report says most pupils gave a relative frequency, which is entirely unsurprising.