GCSEs 2018 (8) Dozens of DCs, 1 DH and Flashcards in the fridge

[mmzz]

Previous thread

Yes dgd liked both Frankensteins and Romeo and Juliet themes. She was just disappointed she couldn't use quote about flowering pump!

That's just where I'm going now lobster its lovely outside!

Phew survived !! Answered three questions.

Pimms ( small glass) a slice of homemade Victoria sponge cake and tuna and cucumber sandwich. I lead such a hard life!

Well done Oratory!

I just checked again and there's a lot of tweets saying the AQA R&J question was: How does shakespeare present relationships between adults and young people?

Oratory1 - good news.. DD was pleased that the character was Crooks but wasn't entirely happy about her Anthology comparison ..apparently, the first question was about Purple shoes...but glad that is another subject finished...

Straight home and now on the laptop doing Physics revision.

Well Done Oratory's DS! Huge relief for you!

Sos that sounds heavenly right now!

Not heard from dd but she & aCouple of other’s had phones confiscated last week for having them out in School.

She did R & J & Inspector Calls today (Edexcel)

AlexanderHamilton Your DD is doing iGCSE? Because AIC is on Friday, but R&J is today

Dd (also dyslexic - extra time and a laptop) found CIE English literature okay. Poetry analysis was preferable to the extract on 'Secret River' which she found hard (she dislikes the book ) but still doable. Apparently she managed to include reference to onomatopoeia in the poem - just boggling at what a dyslexic spelling of that might look like

No normal Edexel. Unless she got it wrong & Christmas Carol was today oops if so - hope it didn’t throw her off.

She wants to take English Lit for A Level too.

Nettles I expect he remembered enough - and examiner will reward what he did know!
I'm pleased about Frankenstein question as it was the last thing I revised with one of my students
Second - all of Paradise Lost! I am really impressed!

AlexanderHamilton sorry that will be me confusing things. AQA would have been A Christmas Carol and R&J today, with AIC on Friday.
I was talking about the wrong exam board.

Thanks Teen and others - I really felt you were all rooting for him this morning !! Yes he said Purple Shoes was a bit weird but hopefully he wrote something - a few weeks ago that would have really thrown him, then he said he could have done either of the Of Mice and Men ones (Crooks and Loneliness).

It is confusing - the exam boards offer pretty much the same novels and Shakespeare plays but their papers are in different orders and ask the questions differently!

Phew - Edexel paper 1 is Shakespeare & Post 1914
Paper 2 is 19thC & Poetry.

It is so confusing!
It would make so much more sense to me for them all to do the same exam in each subject. I still don't really understand the reason for multiple exam boards

AQA English today for DD2 - Romeo & Juliet & Pride & Prejudice. Her verdict (brief as she’s going into Geography) was it was okay but the questions were weird

I am thankful for different exam boards - on the whole CIE has been great : 30% course work in history, 50% in English language, and in English lit a 'friendly' text (Secret River - my dd seems to be the only dc who dislikes it, but she dislikes reading in general) with no need to memorise poems plus an open book for Macbeth later this week.

We've also done AQA, OCR for PE and have Edexcel for Maths

I'm confused about the different exam boards too, especially as some children get open book exams and coursework while others don't. It doesn't seen equal or fair. Who decides what school does what board?

Only independent schools tend to do the IGCSE (CIE).

I personally think open book exams for English helps facilitate greater depth of underStanding. Closed book seems a backward step.

DD's English was open book and coursework (Edexcel iGCSE), although she would have preferred exams rather than coursework. The school had a choice with the same board 100% exam or 40/60% coursework/ exam...given it was a new exam I think they probably aired on caution and opted for coursework. The grade boundaries are higher where coursework is part of the exam.

Theimpossiblegirl the schools decide themselves. Sometimes the individual departments decide between the exam boards for their subject.

The exam boards are all competing businesses. They all want to sell their services to schools so they try to make the courses as attractive as possible to the decision makers within a school, whilst satisfying the exam board regulator (JCQ)

As far as i know what the head of department at A. N Other school considers is:-

• What course do they already have most of the materials for?
• What are their teachers interested in - choosing books for English, topics for History and Geography etc
• What course do they think they will get better results on?
• Is the GCSE respected? (They pretty much all are but for a while they weren't which is why so many independent schools took the iGCSE route (I think)).
• Which course is most likely to not have exam date clashes (i.e. which exam board is the rest of the school using?)

^^ But all of this is just my impression!