Low Mock exam result but pass prediction

[Richard2022]

My son just got D,D,E in his mock A level exams but is still predicted a C,C,D. Is this optimistic from the school?

This fairly typical?

Thanks

That's not necessarily much of a leap. It's hard to say though, as it depends on the structure of the courses he's doing, what has to be covered next year, whether the Y13 content is harder and what they were tested on in the mock etc.

I think moving up a grade is fairly common.

I did a levels 10 years ago. But i will always remember my mock maths exam. I got the highest grade a C. One person got an E. The rest failed and got U. I got an A in final exam. Everyone did better. I hadnt started my revision yet so i knew it would be bad but it made me revise harder. Use it as revision motivation.

It could well be a very realistic prediction; you'd expect some improvement (although it may depend a bit on what they set as mock and whether the year 13 topics are harder - DD's year 12 mock for one subject was the paper she was always going to do best on, so she could easily have come down).

Schools are often generous on their UCAS predictions - if you think someone is 90% likely to get a B and 10% likely to get an A, but they would need an A for their favourite degree course, you don't want them to miss out on the offer.
It may be worth talking to the school about how likely they think he is to get those grades, as that might affect the balance of courses applied for, and particularly choosing an insurance offer. For instance, if all three subjects are "might get this grade on a good day with the wind in the right direction", you might want to make sure he applies for a couple of options which allow for a bad day with the wind against him! If they're all "he was only 3 marks off so he's bound to improve that much", then an insurance offer which only allows for slipping on one or two of them might be fine. You'll probably have more mocks before the decision on which offer to use as insurance, which will help.

Afaik mock results are often quite a bit lower than the final result (curious how his school can be doing meaningful mocks at this time of year). For some subjects a lot of the exam prep is doing past papers, they won't have been able to do those properly yet.