This year's GCSE maths.....

[BertrandRussell]

My ds's maths teacher has just told me that the 7000 odd schools that did the new maths GCSE as mocks recently achieved a modal score of 11% for paper 1. 11% ? Surely not!!!!!!

Wow. That is a lot of revision with so much time to go till the exams. DS still has lots of new homework so there isn't really much time for revision during the week. He's home about 5 and wastes a great deal of time to be fair, but still has about 3 pieces of homework to do a night, so I don't think he should be revising on top of them. A lot of them are 'revision' but some is new work.

DS only gets about an hour of homework a week. Nowhere near 3 pieces a night, more like 3 a week. So I guess it all balances out.

I guess it does, since the homework is all reinforcing stuff - even the new topics are things they will be examined on.

My ds school don't give homework it's mainly revision he just does about 3 maths papers a week 3 science pass papers or topic papers and english he just started doing recently recommended by his tutor cause he got a 5 for english but needs a 6 to get into his 6th form.

Other then that he comes back from school at 4.15 cause he has intevention everyday for different subjects he showers has something to eat relaxes for a bit at 6 he does a pass paper or revision till 7.45 and then he's free till 10 doesn't go out during weekdays not much time but Saturdays & Sundays he plays football for an hour and does light revision an hour each day.

Forgot to mention he teacher started school intevention saturday mornings 10-11 science cause he got a D for mocks so I can that's enough on top of that he's got an interview for 6 form on Wednesday any extra tips for my ds I'm more nervous then him and I'm only gonna take him not have an inteview.

He just finished his c.v bit ago correcting it bless him he's trying he knows what's best for him

Noble, I was wondering if you had any gut feelings as to where you think grade boundaries might be on the Foundation papers. I'm a tutor working with several students who are currently scoring between 30% to 60% on Foundation papers.. It is soo difficult to advise them. They would all have probably got Cs on the old style exams!

We can't even set grade boundaries on the mock paper with all the results data! (My school went for about 120/240 for a 4 on the Edexcel secure mock). All the papers provided aren't of a consistent difficulty though, so even grade boundaries on one set of papers won't transfer to another set - the marks varied quite a lot between the different papers on the secure mock.

30% won't be a 4, but if 60% doesn't get you a 4 then I think we're all doomed.

The second mock are out. I gave a modified version of a question to my further maths year 12 and year 13 group. Apart from those have learnt a little bit about Maths competition/Number theory, the rest were completely dumb founded. Surely, the real thing can't have questions like those :(

As far as I'm aware, Edexcel have already written the exam papers (months ago), and so the secure mock papers should be similar to the real thing.

I expect they are bricking it about grade boundaries given how poorly students did on the first mock. There was rather a pleading tone in the analysis when it suggested more than once that kids doing badly on higher were doing the wrong paper.

surely 11 is the median score, not the mode?

Definitely mode. Think the median was 17.

not sure how useful the mode is as a measure when there are 81 (?) possible outcomes.

It's not a random distribution though, it's a positively skewed curve with a peak at 11 marks.

Dd did another mock yesterday. No idea if it was an official mock but school have said the kids won't get the results from this mock, something about sending the papers back to the exam board. Dd reckons her school have been selected for a special mock to help the exam board out with something???

Anyway she says it was so easy. Stuff like a picture of a square and asked to name the shape. Then numbers like, 13, 6, 25, , 102. 7. And asked to put them in ascending order.

So the actual exam papers won't have been modified in light of the first set of mocks?

nightmare.

possum it sounds like your DD sat one of the new National Reference Tests. It's for Ofqual to be able to compare cohorts year on year to set grade boundaries instead of just relying on KS2 data.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/549975/An_overview_of_the_National_Reference_Test_final.pdf

You know, if I had no skin in this game, it would be really interesting........

You would have thought that the exam boards have had enough time to modify the level of difficulty in the exam papers already - Ofqual issued this report based on the first set of sample papers in May 2015;

www.gov.uk/government/publications/gcse-maths-final-research-report-and-regulatory-summary

I've just read a blog from a maths tutor dated Jan 2017 who says that he is surprised that some schools are still using old specification text books when the wording of the questions is quite different. He suggests buying a new style text book (with answers) and using this for revision together with the (few) sample assessment papers available and a new 9-1 revision guide.

The first set of sample papers from 2015 were binned for being too hard, the exam boards had to go back to the drawing board, then new sample papers had to be approved for each exam board and then the exam boards would have got on with writing the actual exams.

The maths tutor wondering why schools haven't bought new GCSE textbooks:

1. There's no money
2. The textbooks are shit. I mean really bad. They were written and printed before the sample papers were binned for being too hard, and so they are also too hard, in some cases ridiculously so. It's also obvious that they were a rush job. My school is teaching using a lot of internet resources.

The revision guides aren't too bad but still have errors in them (I flagged up a missing topic to CGP which they weren't aware of) but I think they were written and printed after the sample paper fiasco.

One of the maths teachers at ds's school used to mark GCSEs and told me he wished he still did because he might have more of an idea of what's going on.............

Earlier in the thread there was talk of more students being encouraged to sit the Goundation paper. Does that mean that it will be harder to get a high grade in the Higher paper if less students are taking it?

I wondered that errorof, having a high ability lazy as fuck year 11 who got around 75% in the mock which I was really pleased about (needs a 7, preferably an 8, to do FM A level). Now I'm wondering if most kids that do higher tier will be the able ones who'll push up the boundaries

Admittedly I'd rather be in this position than one of the borderline kids though, or one of the ones who are perfectly capable of maths, but cannot process the wordier questions.

Might also be harder to get an average grade on the foundation if a lot of kids who would normally do the higher paper have dropped down to the lower paper.??

Grade boundaries for 7+ won't be affected by middle students moving down to foundation as it will be the top 20% who decide the grade boundaries for a 7.

Grade boundaries for 4s and 5s could be affected by movement of students. However in order to attempt to make it so that the same standard is required of students to get the same grade on either tier, Ofqual have said that 20% of the marks for Foundation and Higher should be questions that appear on both papers. As well as looking at KS2 data, the exam boards will be looking carefully at individual results on these crossover questions to ensure that students who do better on the crossover questions at Foundation aren't awarded a lower grade than someone who does worse on them at Higher.

Thanks for the link to the national reference test noble, was wondering what it was she'd done.

Is the top 20% including all candidates or just the ones taking the higher paper Noble?