GCSEs 2018 (11) Big week coming up

[mmzz]

old thread

DS creative writing with the surprising ending borrowed quite heavily from watching the detectorists series together, especially with DH
Hoping this won't matter too much!
Fortunately he didn't go as far as having a magpie nest in an old oak tree filled with a hoard of gold coins.
Just the odd ancient coin discovered and this a surprise because usually he just found modern coins and ring pulls.
I guess we all have to find our creative inspiration somewhere!

DD1 reports that Geography was a lot of writing and was the first exam where she's still been writing when time is up. But she did - just - finish.

In Eng Lang she employed her strategy of writing about something really traumatic, on the basis that if she makes the marker cry, they will have to give her lots of marks for emotive language. (And then she read through what she'd written and made herself cry!)

I'm torn between admiring her thinking and feeling slightly disturbed about her calculating approach. She has sometimes written some quite disturbing and frightening stuff which makes me wonder what's going on behind the apparently calm and law abiding facade.

(I won't tell her the news about Ozymandias!)

Maybe dd will end up an author AChicken?? I know a (quite famous) author who writes very gory graphic books. He is a lovely, gentle, kind family man!

Cherryburn I think that's exactly how it should be done, doubt that it will be though.

DS thought English was ok, he did the picture of the old man. Not so pleased with geography mainly because according to him all the cool facts he'd learn't he wasn't able to work them into his answers, but seems he still had plenty to say........another two down just 9 more to go!

Phew! One English language paper done!

Dd is fairly upbeat. She did a story about a refugee fleeing a country because she risked being shot for trying to get an education. The unexpected ending was she thought it would be much better but when she got to Europe she ended up in a refugee camp and was starving.

It all sounds ok and gave her a chance to bring lots of politics into it which will have helped her creative juices. She said she used some similes and some good punctuation too. She thinks it was probably worth a 5.

Geography also went ok. She was doing WJEC. It was on hurricanes and we'd only talked about Puerto Rico this morning so she included that.

All in all a good day and she's now in bed having a night off. Back to it tomorrow.

I suspect AQA will almosy have to apply UMS system to the individual poem questions and therefore that poem alone will have a higher threshold to get good marks than the other

Hmmm not sure whether you can apply different boundaries to just one question ...I assume the boundaries are applied when all papers/exams are consolidated...so the only option they can do fairly is just withdraw the question...and mark on the rest of the exam.

If I were AQA I'd divide into two halves: those who did the Ozymandias question and those who did the Singh Song question. If there is a correlation between Ozymandias and the higher scores, then they have a choice whether to moderate down or break the grades into two halves so, half the 9s go to Singh Song and half the 9s go to Ozymandias.

Naughty, naughty AQA though!

teenmum you could also change the mark scheme for that one Ozymandias question??

Ofquals response says that the question was very similar, does that mean it was the same poem but not the same question as in the specimen and if so how different were the quesitons and answers??

I think it means it was the same poem and almost the same question i.e. if you'd done the sample question in detail class, it wouldn't take much to modify it into a really good answer for the exam question.

The rough thing was that in DS's class at least the students least liked Singh Song so were least likely to have focused their study on it, never mind have the teacher draw their answers out of them.

Really don't know but I would have thought it was possible to cut the numbers that way, i.e. isolate that question and look at the disparity in marks (if any) but I'm not sure. Any English Lit markers reading?! Loose do you just mark Lang? DS didn't do that board, but this sort of thing drives me mad. Along with the inaccuracy in marking of papers in general. I think I saw a stat that said something like 25% of re-marks resulted in a grade change last year (across gcse and A Level)

A teacher at DS's school set the same questions for mocks and a test on 3 consecutive occasions and still an awful lot of them couldn't get it right ..........

I've finally spoken to DS2.

He felt that English language went well.

Human geography was the paper he was most worried about out of all his GCSE exams. He said it was his hardest paper so far, but it went better than he was expecting.

He has tomorrow off then Thursday is Maths, which he enjoys.

I also think AQA should do the UMS calculations separately for the Power & Conflict candidates and the Love & Relationships candidates.

I thought UMS no longer existed for GCSE 9-1?

Alexander and Chicken - DD is the same. Not asked for a bit of help with Music, despite the fact I teach it! She hasn't really enjoyed the course much, sadly, as she loves performing but not the rest of it (despite the fact that she actually wrote two excellent pieces!)

and Cub - I don't think DD has listened to any of the set works since covering them in class (at least, I think she's covered them in class despite the fact she said her teacher barely turned up to lessons, letalone 'taught'!) She only finished her revision mind-maps this afternoon, despite having had all of last week. Music is one of the subjects she should easily gain an 8 or 9, but this listening exam could well undermine that goal.

And she has two Spanish exams beforehand, too.

She really has improved in her specialist subject, though, in the past 10 days - bl*&^%dy Dan and Phil and all other sorts of mindless YouTube stuff...

All the best to your musical DCs - hope they don't bring the grade boundaries up too high for my DD!!

If not UMS, then whatever method they use to establish grade boundaries.

DD2 hadn’t seen the sample paper so couldn’t take any advantage in terms of the Ozymandias question. I guess whatever rationale they apply, will need to take account of the fact that not everyone had a beautifully prepared answer up their sleeve and thus could possibly plump up their marks.

callitwhatyouwill DS2 hadn't seen the sample paper either, so didn't have any advantage over the Love & Relationships candidates.

The advantage of that is that he revised Ozymandias, whereas some pupils who had that question for their mock may have been tempted not to revise that poem.

Yes, my impression from talking to friends is that there is huge variation in who saw/practiced/ had as a mock the Ozymandias question. Ds had Ozymandias as a Y 10 end of year exam but other sets didn't. At other schools no one had looked at that particular question. So there is likely to still be a big variation in depth of answers.

That's the problem with a cock-up like this. It will have created an advantage for some DC but not others, and there's no way of disentangling the effect. Even if they just completely disregarded that question for everyone, that's not fair on DC who would have scored highly regardless. The answer is to avoid the cock-up in the first place, which you would have thought shouldn't be that difficult, given they have a whole year to get it right.

English Lang has brought sunshine to our lives today

Dd wrote about a train journey and then she said it ran out of steam [boom boom as Basil Brush would say)
Ds2 in a different exam hall same exam wrote about an evil old man who was a Mafia criminal and had "wrinkled feet". How did you notice his feet I said, why were they bare, surely he would have been wearing socks? Oh, he said they were wrinkled under his socks
one of the tweets apparently was "I was wondering how an old person looked so I stared at the invigiliator for ideas" (the invigilator was probably in their mid 40's) charming!

No mention of Geography or how it went, she's on to Spanish...ds2 is just relaxing as he has wednesday free to revise Maths and another Eng on Friday.

I did think that AQA would do something about the Ozymandias question. I invigilated the mock and when I opened the paper I was actually worried they had given me the mock papers to hand out because I remembered the question!
DD happy with English and Geography. She wrote about a girl with a red balloon which she has done for every mock this year. A clever trick her tutor told her about. It pretty much can fit into any scenario. Lots if chat on Twitter about Mr Fisher makes for hilarious reading. Geography was odd apparently with a maths question in there about an upper quartile or something. She knew it though! She's cooked loads of sugar free cookies and made us dinner and now off to dance. A positive day.

with the AQA perhaps the way to do it is to give a few extra marks to the low ranking Singh songers and not to the low ranking Ozymandiasers and then at least some of the disadvantaged candidates will be less disadvantaged, without jeopardising the marks of those who worked hard for Ozymandias or those who aced Singh song. After all the whole thing is a lottery anyway, who your teacher is, how good your school is, did your parents help you. You can never really level it. Or does that solution not work mathematically [mathemically challenged here]