GCSE help

[Lucyj80]

Hi, my son is moving in to year 10 and I wanted to get some advice on how he can improve his grades . He generally works hard and gets good grades for module assessments but not getting good results for the year end assessments. He does put the effort and I do feel bad that he's not seeing the results ! I'm worried with his GCSEs approaching ang wanted see if anyone else had similar issues and how they dealt with it ? Many Thanks

Hi OP. I used to be in the same boat. I used to work so hard but my grades didn’t reflect it. I think the most important thing is to make sure he is actually understanding what he is learning. When I look back I realised I was just somehow learning but didn’t understand what I was learning. If that makes any sense.

Thanks TK10! It does but he always says he does .. maybe his approach needs to change

Have his teachers flagged this up as an issue, that he is underperforming in end of year assessments? What are you basing this on, comparisons to class average or just raw marks? Sometimes a kid can get 80% in topic tests and 60% in an end of year test and this be fine because the end of year test was difficult.

If there is an issue, then it sounds like there may be a problem with his approach to revision. It is possible to do well on an end of topic assessment by doing some revision the night before, as the material is pretty recent and just needs refreshing. For end of year assessments, there is far more material and some of it will be from longer ago and need more effort. He should have planned a revision timetable for at least a couple of weeks before end of year exams, and hopefully longer, with more than one revision slot for each subject. Did he do this?

What have his teachers' said about what he needs to do to improve?
It's hard to tell from what you have said whether he doesn't understand some of the material or whether it's exam technique that's letting him down.
GCSE exams are not based on modules any more in England, they are linear. This means when pupils move to real exam papers rather than end of unit tests, they can be tested on more than one topic at a time: which is more difficult when they haven't completed the whole course yet.
If only some sections of a real paper are used then this takes no account that some topics could be more difficult than others.