GCSEs 2018

[DoNotBringLulu]

Hi all, I am sure many of us with dc going into year 11 this year are trepidatious about teachers and pupils thrown in at the deep end due to the new GCSEs.

There is one thing I can do which I hope will help my ds (even though he thinks I'm mad!), which is to get hold of this year's GCSE English Language and English Literature papers, read the books and work through the paper myself - I studied English Lit at university over 20 years ago. I will know for myself after I've done this how difficult the exam papers are at least - I'm not sure who I can ask to mark it for me though!

Can anybody tell me how challenging the Maths and English papers were for their dc? I understand these were the two subjects introduced with the new format.

It looks like I got the wrong end of the stick. I don't remember where I read it but it was obviously wrong.
I tried reading the source material for a bit yesterday and it left me more confused.
It seemed to say some grade boundaries were set according to expectations and that the ratio of number getting grade : number getting 7 or 8 was set at 1:4

DD has a grand total of 3 exam free dates, 2 at the beginning & 1 before further maths at the end. They have to go to school every day, attending lessons until each subject has finished, so she essentially has a month of supervised revision. She has exams each morning, then the humanities all seem to be in the afternoons.

Any biology mock trauma has been quickly replaced by anxiety about her face. We suspect DD may have broken her nose last night by walloping herself with her racket at tennis. Perhaps if she's too embarrassed to go out, science revision will kick in!

Just heard on the news that in the budget schools will be given an extra £600 for pupils that take A level maths(don't know what they currently get) Do you think that some schools will now lower there entry requirements?

Stickerrocks how your daughter's nose is ok, bet she looks a picture

Stickerrocks oh my goodness that sounds painful! I hope she’s ok.
I haven’t seen the news yet about money for maths A level but suspect schools can’t lower entry requirements unless their current ones are very high as it’ll hit results?
DS is still plugging away at maths practice papers and it seems to be working. However he’s now hit an area he isn’t sure about and DH has promised to help once he’s revised how to do it. I suggested they watch Mr Heggarty videos but DH thinks he’s boring and should do jokes.
I’m starting to see where the dcs get their attitude!

She looks a bit like Shrek! (I do hope she never finds my MN account). I

You can either do maths or you can't and want to do maths or not. I doubt if many would be brave enough to take it if they didn't have a grade 7 unless they had just had a bad exam and had been predicted much higher.

The maths of the budget does not add up. Its obviously supposed to encourage schools to try to persuade more students to take maths. So, its looking for ones who are borderline in ability to be able to cope with maths, as those who can cope well are already taking it by and large.
That will mean extra work for the A level maths teachers but the money in't enough to pay for the teacher.

Say a school persuades a class of 20 borderline students to sign up for its A Level maths course, making a 4th maths set. The school will receive an extra 20 * £600 = £12,000 for those students, but they'll have to hire another experienced teacher who will really work her socks off to get them through the course. Where are they going to find one of those for £12k?

...or they will get another teacher with a lesser work load (Italian anyone?) or a Teach Firster to cover the extra maths set to add even more pressure to their daily lives!

to teach A level maths to students who wouldn't normally do it due to lack of interest / less ability??

I'm being dim... the teachfirster will get year 8 and year 9. Their teacher will take GCSE and the GCSE teacher will "upskill". Yes, I can see how it will really improve outcomes now!

DS is still plugging away at maths practice papers and it seems to be working
loose, that's really good. DS is not doing any practice papers yet at all. He still gets regular homework for all subjects so, to be honest, I don't know how he could fit in any extra revision in his daily schedule. Actually, he's not started official revision for any subject yet! So I just hope the school's homework counts as "revision"...

DS1 is expecting to/ will be very disappointed if he doesn't get a 9 in maths without doing any work at all. Maybe he's do a 5 minute read through the topic list just in case there's something he's unsure of, but that's it. He's good, but does that sound plausible?

Thanks drummers - honestly I think this is to make up for the absence of maths homework in year 10 so I don’t think your DS needs to worry at all! He’ll probably do a few papers closer to the real thing. DS is keen to track down the difficult questions he can’t manage at the moment and really get to grips so I do admire his tenacity!
mmzz - I do remember maths wizzes at school who never seemed to revise for it! Sadly I was not one of those...
I do feel very, very sorry for the poor Shrek! And I hope my dcs can’t see my account as well!

I think gifted students can get through GCSE without much revision. I remember a girl in my sister's year who would do no work, nod off in lessons and still got A grades. She's a film producer now. My ds will have to work hard for everything,

DS will have to work at everything else - his focus is on doing the things needed to get the higher grades (memorising quotes and poetry and working out the template for the 8 point questions etc). In some ways, he's in a lucky position, but there is one big disadvantage: there's limited scope to do better than expected but plenty to do worse. Everyone expects that he'll do well, so when and if he does, everyone will just shrug, but they'll be interested if he does badly at something. Maths is easy for him though.

I see what you mean mmzz. If you are expected to get a 4 or 5 then do better it is noticeable positively.

Well apparently DS doesn't need to go back to school after his last GCSE but they will still do rowing training (it's endless)/regattas.

mmzz to answer your earlier question, DS did a quick flick through of his maths night before the mock and he came top in year and awarded a 9, so yes it is possible but personally I hope that he puts in more effort for the real thing!

DD's physics teacher treated her nose as part of a discussion on forces & trajectories today! He decided it was merely squashed cartilage rather than a full blown break from the angle at which her tennis racket hit it. Hopefully DD's nose will help add a couple of marks to their final grades!

Snap mmzz. Her friend today was excited to hear about DD's science marks, but avoids discussing maths like the plague. None of them discuss their marks either, so they have nothing to benchmark against. We anonymise marks in exams where I work, but everyone can see exactly where they are in relation to the rest of the group.

DS3 is mid mocks and still doing the bare minimum revision. He'll probably still do well in maths like mmzz's DS but he should really be doing a lot more for his other subjects. He's just had a grade card through giving him predicted grades which seems odd timing before mocks are completed and marked. No real shocks, a few 8s in maths/sciences, a couple of 7s, and a few 6s, including Eng Lan and Lit. Not high enough to get into one of our local 6th forms, the super selective grammar where DS1 went for 6th form, but easily enough for his own school 6th. Hoping he pulls some of the 6s up to 7s but he won't without some better/longer revision sessions.

They are having a 'mock results day' in January so it will be interesting to see how he does in comparison to his teachers' predictions. However he does will be fine; if he does poorly it may give him a kick up the backside.

Interesting that grade boundaries will depend on the strength of the cohort. DS3's year had some pupils doing level 6 for KS2 SATs, more than the previous year group I believe. Will that make them seem a stronger cohort I wonder? Unfortunate if so.

The strength of the cohort is done nationally and ignores level 6 papers because it’s up to the primary to decide whether to enter kids or not for them. The top grades will be set by the formula so ignoring level 6 at KS2 doesn’t matter.

Does that mean that they calculate the % who got a 5a in the 2013 sats and use it to determine the % who will get a 7+ in the 2018 sats?

Then when they have worked out who is a 7+, they take the top 20% and give them a 9. Then take the average of the 7 and the 9 thresholds and make that the 8 threshold.

If not this way, then how does it work?

Sort of. They use a fine point scale for KS2 SATs rather than just a 5a.

When they said 'roughly the same proportion will get a 4+ or a 7+ as got a C+ or A+ last year' they don't mean exactly that, because they need to be able to adjust for a different cohort profile - for example the entries for MFL might be getting weaker on average because of the focus on the Ebacc. I think they use the KS2 SATs result of the current cohort entered for that exam and predict statistically what they would have got on the previous exam, in terms of C+ and A+ then fill in the other grades in numerically equal steps from there.

The formula for a 9 was changed, it's more complicated than top 20% of 7+ now.

We got parent's evening coming up, DS said I've got appointments with all my teachers, great I thought till he told me he never wrote any of them down!!! He's remembered all the times but not who we are suppose to be seeing.

I've told him he has to go back to all his teachers and find out his times, he's not happy, he just wants to roll up and hope for the best, the evenings a complete rugby scrum at the best of times!!

Same here. It's just a free for all. You just hover near a teacher and try to work out how many others also want to see her that were standing near her before you arrived.
By the end, you are trying to convince yourself that you do care about RE enough to wait another 20 mins.

This year felt a bit different though and I think it was because the teachers seemed to be interested. Previously, it has sometimes felt like they are racking their brains looking for something to say about a boy who is shy and makes reasonable progress.

We have an online booking method which removes the risk of dcs not making appointments or not writing them down but you have to be quick off the mark!
The actual night is always a scrum, but a fairly efficient one, just exhausting.