Year 13 2024 - General support thread part 2

[Rollergirl11]

All welcome as our young people head in to their last full term before the summer exams. Between UCAS applications, receiving offers/rejections, learning to drive and taking driving tests, revising for mocks and sitting them the pace hasn’t let up for our DC.

This thread has been a lovely supportive and immensely helpful place to talk as we guide our DC’s through this challenging time!

Old thread here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/further_education/4851165-year-13-20232024-general-support-thread?page=40&reply=132323436

Interesting - if it’s against UCAS code of conduct how do Nottingham and York dodge this?

Before a certain date - they aren't saying that though, they are saying that first come first serve on accommodation if firmed.
@Rainsdropskeepfalling DD said she just used Google slides then saved them in to one file as PDFs.

This. It's a technicality but not good of the unis to exploit it.

DS has 2 more offer holder days to go to this month then I think he'll be happy to make a decision. Well actually I think he would be happy now - it's me that's insisting he looks at the others to be doubly sure.
Accomodation for his probable firm opens in April, but as far as I can see you don't get to choose a specific hall anyway, just to say whether you want on or off campus and ensuite or not. That threw me a bit as at my elder DS's University you could book a specific room. (I picked one with a nice view though I'm not sure he was bothered!) But I don't suppose it matters really as all the halls look pretty similar.
I'm a bit worried about accomodation if he ends up needing to go to his probable insurance as it was the only thing we were a bit underwhelmed by and I am assuming that those who make it firm will get first choice. The cheapest rooms were tiny and the nicest ones excruciatingly expensive so I'm guessing they'll be what's left over. I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it!
Still, my DH got into his course on clearing, didn't know where he'd be living until he arrived and was of course allocated the grottiest, least popular hall on campus. But he had a great time and made lifelong friends there, so you can never tell.

We have a few offer holder days this month. DD put a last gasp 5th choice in two days ago and if she gets an offer there we will need to go and see it as haven’t been yet. It’s the closest to home of her 5 choices so not a problem.

One of the accommodation pick-me’s is likely to be DDs firm. 🙄

@mondaytosunday

Thank you!

A pretty good parents' evening for ds this week. His last one! He got ABC in his mocks which he said was commensurate with the effort he'd put in... 🙄

Still. The C was 1% off a B and the B was 0.8% off an A (he was furious they rounded down!) so I think we should be on target for AAA or A star, A,B which are his options for his Bath offer.

He basically did no more than 2 hours a day revision for these mocks so has plenty of time to expand his revision into! The head of maths who is one of his maths teachers said he has something special in him for maths and should be aiming for an A star!

It was a bittersweet evening. First in-person one since 2019. Rather frenetic but everyone pretty much ran to time and it was nice to see the teachers in person.

That's all positive @QueenMabby !

This is a short half term but it's been quite intense for DS, he was fine about the O rejection but has started to get himself in a flap over whether he will make the 3 As for his A levels. Given that he got 3 A*s in year 12 the only thing that will get in his way is burn out or getting over anxious which is always a worry for DS.

He has split up with his girlfriend because she was getting fed up with him focusing on his A Levels more than her and she really did have a point! We've had to have a chat with him about work life balance. He's cheered up a bit this week and has taken to trying to increase physical exercise which is always a good thing.

He has a group of very sensible friends, who barely ever go out and do anything. The most social of the group has flu so DS will be at home all weekend so I'm going to suggest we go into the city tomorrow to have a browse / some food or something to get him out of the house!

Not too long to go till half term!

Still another two weeks until half term here. DS had his mock timetable this week (for the week after half term) and the email said that after mocks there are only 8 teaching weeks until the exam season starts! I think he only has two exams in May and the rest are in June so after the summer half term.

Waiting to see if he gets offers from his two last minute applications and then he will see if there are any offer holder days he wants to go to. Hopefully they won't get all booked up! He doesn't want to talk about it much.

I've still got my fingers firmly in my ears over the amount of time left. DS's first exam is the Friday before half term. Just that one and then the rest after half term.

I'm going to sit down with him this weekend to help him sort out his revision from here on in. The feedback from his teachers was fewer past papers (that's basically all he does to revise) and more content learning. He basically got all the really hard stuff right in his mocks but not some of the easier stuff due to lack of basic learning in his revision.

Mock results out here too. DS did "okay" - he would have got into his preferred University if they'd been the real thing but only just and he is a bit annoyed with himself as he is capable of better. He says he made some stupid mistakes and messed up on timings in a couple of papers. But that's what mocks are for when all said and done.
I'm actually secretly quite pleased that he didn't do as well as he expected as he'd got a bit over confident once he got his very favourable offers and I think this will give him a better kick up the backside than any number of pep talks from me or his teachers. He only got B for his favourite subject where he should honestly be getting an A at the very least and unusually he wasn't top of the class so I think that has really stung. Hopefully this will now result in a bit more application to the job in hand!

My son got his mock results back too and unfortunately they were really good - A star A, A. He was really hard to motivate over Christmas and only worked at full potential in the 4 days between his first Maths paper, which went really badly, and the next exam. To be fair he did score his lowest mark ever in that maths exam - but it was maths that ended up being the A*!

He was a little disappointed to only get an A in History, but since they were only being tested on last years material it wasn’t a priority and he only really did carousel quizzes as revision.

Latin, was good. There seems to be a big step up between AS level and A2 for the translations in and out of Latin so he is in a very good place at this stage.

So the fight is on to get him motivated alas. Praying even harder that he gets a Durham offer as his next choice Exeter wants A, A, B with EPQ which seems far too obtainable. It is a battle for after half-term though as History coursework is taking centre stage as it seems he wasn’t in quite as good place as his first draft feedback led him to believe.

Another offer for dd who submitted last week - ABB orAAC.... which is interesting! She'd be comfy with an Astar, B, C offer! This is Loughborough.

Great news @GreatWorldAtlas.
Best laid plans and all that... thought we were pretty much prepared for DDs trip until she announced today her phone has died! I thought we could just get her a new one as her contract was up months ago but then she said she hadn't backed anything up in forever as no memory! So now booked a repair in central London tomorrow. It's going to take the afternoon - not what we had panned!
Meanwhile STILL nothing from Bath 🤨

Hello all- lots of good news it sounds like! Not so great here, ds got mock grades at 3-4 grades below his predictions and offers. Wouldn't have made even his lowest offer. He worked hard too. Timing and technique seems a massive issue. I wonder if I should have been more involved, but he's very independent and defensive most of the time. Two more unis haven't offered yet but they are both very popular so not optimistic and another AAB offer is no help anyway!

Oh no @aramox1 what a shame! Is he doing essay subjects? I seem to remember you saying from a previous post that he’s struggling to write enough in the time. Is he doing lots of past papers? That should help him with getting his timing better. Have his teachers given him guidance on where he’s losing marks?

Sorry to hear this @aramox1. Hopefully his teachers can sit down with him and suggest ways to tighten up on time and content but he'll have to work hard. Ds was borderline for one of his mock exams too so will need to work hard to make that a more solid grade. I wonder if schools are mostly using last years papers for mocks which resulted in a lot of pupils dropping grades in the real thing.

Congratulations to others getting offers.

Not great with mocks here either. The maths paper covered two topics they hadn’t covered in class yet (I suspect this was deliberate to enforce more independent revision) and one of the CS papers was a previous mock exam they had done for practice. So I’m not sure how good an indicator the results will be (don’t get them for another few weeks).

Still only 1/5 offers so that’s causing stress as well. So much pressure on these kids. Roll on the autumn when hopefully they are all settled at their chosen unis!

I think some things about mocks are worse than the real thing. Mostly they haven't finished the syllabi so are trying to combine learning new things with revision, and of course the time scale is very compressed. DS had 6 papers in 4 days for mocks whereas his A levels will be spread over about 4 weeks. He was exhausted by the end of mocks week - I don't think the actual A levels will be as bad.
It's obviously a concern if mocks haven't gone as well as hoped but it's not the end of the world. Still time to learn from mistakes and I'm sure there's room for everyone to improve before June. Keep positive everyone!

Oh, and remember too that even if the final results are not what's hoped for that's not the end of the world either. Obviously it's not what any of us want for our children, nobody likes to see their offspring upset or struggling, but failed A levels don't have mean they can't go on to successful and happy careers. My DH did badly in his A levels and ended up at a place he had never even heard of, never mind considered, through clearing. He had fun, got an average degree and got a job but didn't really find his passion til he had been working a few years. He is now an internationally recognised expert in his field - off to Canada as the UK delegate at an international conference in a few weeks in fact. Not bad for someone whose teachers told him on results day that he'd ruined his life. People mature at different rates. 18 is barely grown up. If they get what they need and the place that they want that's fabulous, but it's really not over if they don't.

Yes, mocks are worse than the real exams in lots of ways. They often haven’t had long to revise, haven’t covered all, the papers and understandably the exams need to be squashed into a short period to avoid a lengthy period out of lessons. I always think it’s particularly bad at GCSE when kids can have 25+ exams to sit!

One thing to remember is that grade boundaries shift each year and aren’t the same across subjects. A paper could be harder than sim e years, but people will do less well then and the grade boundaries will drop a bit. With mocks, some schools will be using the grade boundaries from last year or from 2019 pre-Covid or just using an arbitrarily decided boundary which doesn’t reflect the difficulty or ease of that paper. And often papers are put together from a mix of old ones, because the students haven’t yet covered enough to sit a full old paper. So then the grade boundaries might not reflect the difficulty of individual questions. Some places are a bit mean, in order rto sour people onto work harder and others a bit too generous to boost their self confidence. The point is, an A or whatever in a particular subject in a school or college mock could be quite different to the grade another school or college woukd award for the same work, even if the marks themselves were the same.

Agree - the point of mocks is to identify all the potential pitfalls before the real exams. So doing 'badly' means that you now have good info to help you organise your revision over the next few months. DD went down the 'do no revision and see what happens' route and now has a very good idea of what she does and doesn't know.

Also, if it helps, DS aka Mr Last Minute Bare Minimum got BCD in his mocks and AAB (exactly what he needed) in the real thing, so up 5 grades in total. There's still loads of time. His As were both within 5 marks of A* too, it's definitely doable.

Thanks all for the positivity! Frustratingly he's sure he's been 'working hard' - head down all xmas. I suspect needs to rethink revision technique though and perhaps listen to everyone's advice... Offers are still slow I think, pretty sure some places are only just getting down to it.

@aramox1 we're still waiting for mock results but echo others' comments, especially the compressed timetable point compared to the real thing. The key thing is to position the results in a motivating way...easier said than done sometimes I know but school will support him, as they have an interest in good outcomes too.

Yes, I like that phrase about ‘positioning results in a positive way’.
Insuppose some students need a kick up the arse to work harder and a bit of a shock won’t do them any harm. Others need a boost and some real encouragement. They don’t all take the same message from the same results. But I suppose that looking ahead, the positive thing is to have learned something from the mock experience and to have a sense of some specific areas to work on. If that’s the case, it’s been a positive learning experience and worthwhile. Hopefully that’s the case for them and they can then focus on finishing their courses and applying what they know they need to work on and getting ready for Easter and then study leave when lots of worknoresumably needs to happen. Will be glad when it’s over. DS is looking forward to a summer with no school work. Won’t that be lovely!