Year 11 GCSE thread continued!

[MorvahRising]

We seem to have reached the limit on the other one!

My DS did Edexcel maths last year, and I can say that the last few questions were hard then and are meant to sort the men out from the boys so to speak. At least there are only 2 papers now they have gone linear.

In OCR the last question was
express 1000/root2 in form a rootb

x top and bottom by root 2 to give 1000 root2/2
= 500 root2

surds are most definitely on teh syllabus!

It's OK Unexpected my DD thought it was great too

Oh dear - we can feel insecure together

If they don't get a C in GCSE Maths, do they have to resit next summer? Or can they take it again later this year?
Or does it depend on the individual's sixth form?

does anyone know because knowing would relieve the pressure on my poor DD who is convinced she has done really badly and is worried that she will be stuck doing maths GCSE over and over again for the rest of her life....

DD thought the maths paper hard in places, but not as bad as it could have been. She tried to count up her marks and thinks she has enough for an A, maybe an A*, depending on grade bounsaries. Is this the paper with the pigs? (Trending on Twittwr too, apparently!)

(She needs an A*, wants to do Maths A level).

Ds1 did AQA maths today. He thought it was ok - standard reply!

We had the pigs paper! DS is home and is hugely relieved and pleased, so like katymac and unexpected I'm not sure what to think - just glad he's happy as he's been so worried about it.

He said it was much better than expected and he even had time to go back and correct a few silly mistakes.

Now starting to a worry about the calculator paper on Friday which his maths teacher says will be more difficult than this one . . . Thanks Mr M

From what DD said the calculator paper needs to be a bit harder or the grade boundaries are going to be very high.

Their last question was sine, cosine graphs or something. She says set one were muttering about them as they were waiting to go in. She's never done them, but he dad has waffled about such things.

Well after forcing DS to actually go and do this Maths paper, he says the first half was easy, second half trickier.

Glad the school changed to EDEXL this year, so its the best mark out of both exams (he did Maths earlier this year too), rather then the latest that is given.. We wouldn't have risked it today otherwise.

AQA maths here. Universal opinion was that it was awful.

Why did I not know before today that DS has no idea how to do simultaneous equations?

He was very pleased with himself because 'One came up, and I bunged in likely numbers over 25 until it worked, and it did!' (and he got the right answer, I checked).

I'm hoping his illegible handwriting might disguise his method enough to get him a mark.

I can't remember what board he's doing (bad parent) but the final question was on 'y = a sin bx + c'

Despite claiming never to have seen anything like it before, he would appear to have made a good stab at it (b wrong but a and c right, if what he remembered was right).

Lancelottie ds says that was edexcel, the pigs paper and the one giving out prizes every 2014 seconds

Lancelottie - dd did edexcel today. She says it was grim and yes he probably won't have seen the last question before because she'd only seen it from the Further Maths works she's done. There was also a question which required them to be able to convert km in to miles first. This is NOT on the specification. Dd has made a stab at it based on remembering a conversion she saw on TopGear!

Sounds like everybody she spoke to was unimpressed.

Edexcel here and a very unhappy DD. She found it difficult, panicked quite a lot and then realised afterwards she made some silly mistakes on the ones that she thought were ok.

She will be happy with a C so hoping the boundaries and the next paper work in her favour (and everyone elses!). Most of her peers found it easy apparently which made her feel worse.

She is in the second set, along with others working towards A/B, so there were always going to be some questions she couldnt do as they choose not to cover A* questions in her set but are told to have a stab.

Really not sure what went wrong for her today but think it was a confidence issue as we have had this with maths all the way through, she can do it, but just doesnt believe she can.

DD also thought Maths paper was not the worst she had done but not the best. Agreed last question was impossible... she put the answer down as 42 ( the answer to the life, universe, and everything!)

Waves back to Nocomet. Glad to hear Maths went well for your DD.

DS was fairly positive about his (WJEC linear) and thinks he did enough for a C. There were some hard questions he couldn't do but he had a go at them.

I have seen both higher and foundation AQA maths (and just sat and done them myself!). (maths teacher)

The foundation was a very fair paper with no nasty questions. Most children I spoke to found it ok.

The kids did not like the higher paper, the way it was worded for a few of the questions wasn't great. The paper itself was overall not two bad except question 16 which was quite tricky involving a mix of trig and algerbraic fractions and surds. The last question was quite easy just worded horribly.

Best to luck to all your dc sitting their exams.

Thanks, Eat and MrsMaturin! DS was probably relatively unfazed because he hasn't a clue what's on the syllabus, so would have been cheerily having a stab in the dark at half of it.

I'm so pissed off with GCSEs & I'm not even doing them