Year 8 exams

[QuirkyBrickSwan]

My child is in year 8 and has exams in 2 weeks. They have been told that it will cover material from year 7 as well as year 8 (and they had 2
lots of exams in year 7). Is this normal! It’s a ridiculous amount of revision required and I don’t actually see how it is helpful! (Note this is across all subjects, not just maths etc).
Am interested to hear comparisons from others with year 8.
ps - state comprehensive school.

Why do they need to revise so much? They're about checking understanding, they don't have any impact. I don't remember ever revising for end of year/in year exams mock GCSE onwards, yes

The exams include knowledge tests on history geography, languages and other subjects so they will be tested on dates / vocab etc - that will require revision as that’s not checking understanding- it’s remembering!

My DS did them last year. I did get him to do some revision, not loads but a refresh on each subject. He did pretty well and it didn’t stress him out.

This isn’t a new thing, I remember having exams every single year at secondary school in the 90s.

I would expect (and want) exams but it’s the expectation to remember subject content from over a year ago. It’s that bit I’m curious about for other schools?
When I was at school and learnt about the victorians in history, I wasn’t tested on the romans from the year before as well!

It's practice for when they have to sit GCSEs and remember content. It's a good practice run with none of the jeopardy as they don't actually count for anything.

I've worked in a grammer school for 20 years. There have always been end of year exams for each year group. Usually content from the start of year 7 is assessed in years 7, 8 and 9, so an extra years worth to remember each year) and then in years 10 and 11 content from those years is assessed. GCSE exams assess multiple years work so students need to practice revising and improve their recall.

For MFL for sure they have to examine all years' work. Maths and Eng lang too.

Are they going to be asked questions on the texts studied in Eng lit last year? And last year's history topics? Tho tbh that makes sense too as it’s only January; not a huge amount covered this year so far.

It’s not a bad think to look at last year's work and recall it; you have to do that in year 11 after all. And in fact in year 11 as noted above you are drawing on five years of learning in some subjects (science, MFL, maths, Eng lang at the very least).

This. I wasn’t actually overly bothered about my son’s results, I just wanted him to start learning revision techniques and what worked for him and what didn’t so when it really starts to matter, he knows what to do.

I suspect many younger posters (which is almost everyone of secondary age or younger children) who haven't been through the modernised GCSEs yet with a child have no idea quite how much content there is in GCSE these days and the impact of terminal exams and no coursework has.

Students need to learn how to revise. Far better to be learning this in y7,8,9 than in the GCSE years themselves.

Still too many students have kids in y11 who are floundering as they always winged tests lower down the school so never learned decent techniques.

Thanks all, this is helpful, we’ll do the best we can do but not go crazy, I just wish they could tell us these things with more notice! I went to a session at the school last year on exams and revision and no mention of this so it’s caught us completely off guard! And it is different to when I was at school before GCSE years.