Calling noble or other Maths teachers

[titchy]

Edexcel A Level this year - significantly harder than previous specs? Likelihood of grade boundaries plummeting?

Have a v worried ds who needs a B but reckons has only managed 45% on the first two papers... if tomorrow's is similar he's had it hasn't he?

I do OCR but I know a teacher who teaches Edexcel. Not sure what they thought of the real papers but I know they thought the practice ones put out by Edexcel were horrendously difficult and that they thought grade boundaries would be on the floor.

I’ve seen on twitter that students have complained massively about the exams being hard, and there’s the usual petition to award target grades etc.

I’d tell your DS to sit tight, he’s certainly not alone.

After Paper 1, my son told me that his teachers regarded it as the hardest A level paper they had seen. Then came Paper 2, which was harder.

I think it may be a similar tale with Edexcel Further Maths, which my son also does.

Noble, I'd be interested in your views on what the grade boundaries are likely to be like for the OCR A level. I have a DS who needs a grade B for his first choice university and has found the first two papers really tough.

The Edexcel papers so far have been absolute stinkers! I feel really sorry for the kids and have my fingers crossed that tomorrow’s will be better...

TheFrendo interesting you say paper 2 was harder. I'll tell dd2 who was the nearest to devastated after an exam on paper 2, because she felt she'd done really badly on that one, but hadn't found paper 1 that hard. All her friends had come out saying paper 2 was so much better.

Hopefully the mechanics/statistics one will be fine, it's usually her best paper. She did go in laughing as just before she left, she had a panicked text from a friend saying the paper was leaked and someone had sent it.
He hadn't read all the way through the question. The first bit looked like a normal question. About part C it went on to something along the lines of "If there are 5000 maths students. 3386 are on twitter and 2 people have hacked the exam. What's the likelihood of the exam being cancelled due to it being leaked? Part D was If it is leaked, estimate the number of fucks Edexcel gives."

He was genuinely in a panic, and she had to calm him down.

Well ds much happier with paper 3 (though now worried the leak will mean the grade boundaries are ridiculously high!) - reckons 70%, so could well be ok!

Fingers crossed for all.

Well - I have finally braved it and tried to do the dreaded Edexcel paper 2! Actually - it was OK. I only teach half the curriculum (shared classes) but I have done all questions apart from the parametric equations and the last one which I though was best to leave after 2 glasses of wine but pretty confident I could be successful tomorrow! It is long, and there is a lot of 'reading' which we mathematicians do not really like but the twitter stuff I read about the content not being correct for the curriculum is rubbish.
Not seen the applied paper but really hope it was kind, I'd like the students to finish on a positive.

The edexcel ones are NASTY!
I don't teach A level but the staff who do said most of the content was second year stuff with very little AS Level. Our students found it hard to access because of this.

I hope the boundaries are low!

I would love to get your opinions on the difficulty of the Edexcel FM papers, including further pure, which my son says was quite hard.

Ooh if anyone has a copy of the papers id love to look at them (sheer nosiness)...went down the rabbit hole of the sample papers the other night...it’s been a very long time since I did maths!!

But from what I’ve heard the papers have been bloody awful...those poor kids!

Oh and having had a nosy at the spec...does anyone ever just do the 4 further pure papers? The 2 optional ones definitely have stuff in that didn’t exist when I did a level...a lot of that looks like first year degree stuff!