So how should gcse students approach exams which are published online

[GoWalkabout]

Dd2 has exams after Easter, and as I understand it the exams will be published online by then. Obvs she will prepare well over Easter, she's done well so far and feels confident she will get good grades. Teachers will indicate the topics in advance.
She will obviously make her own mind up, and I think is not inclined to pre prepare model answers. So far she is also not particularly inclined to look at them in advance. It just seems hard to determine the right balance between giving yourself a heads up in preparation and making sure that you are not actually disadvantaging yourself? I'm not even sure what I would do if it was me.

Err... if they are online, I would look at the questions, revise those topics, practice answers. Do the calculations, see if the answers make sense. That's what most people will be doing. Craziness.

Are you sure the school will use the published ones? There are still secure papers from June 2019 and November 2020 which they may use. If so then preparing by looking at these questions and mark schemes might be a waste of time and prevent revision which may help with the unfamiliar questions.

However if the school are using them and everyone else is looking at them because they’re freely available then she’d be putting herself at a disadvantage not looking.

@CrumbsThatsQuick

Err... if they are online, I would look at the questions, revise those topics, practice answers. Do the calculations, see if the answers make sense. That's what most people will be doing. Craziness.

This.

National exams will ultimately be bell curved. Your goal is to do better than X proportion of others. One sure fire way to disadvantage yourself would be not look at advance published material if it's available.

I predict an overwhelming amount of resources that it will be impossible to learn it all or predict what questions each teacher will use. Hopefully students won't bother and instead will revise and learn the stuff they have been aiming for.

@Gladioli23 They aren't being done nationally this year.

There won’t be any bell curving this year though as schools won’t be sending results to the exam boards to let them allocate grades. Schools need to allocate their own grades using these papers to help. This is why many schools are using the secure papers instead.

Interesting

As far as I can tell there is a mix of schools using a mix of evidence, based on

• no official end of year exams, but own set mini tests / mocks / coursework

• end of year exams with published questions

• end of year exams with secure papers.

What a mess

It is a total mess. And pushed to schools to decide so they can be blamed instead of the government.

[quote HercwasanEnemyofEducation]@Gladioli23 They aren't being done nationally this year.[/quote]
Apologies, I assumed I had missed the latest ram based development. Presumably there will be some method of benchmarking though, at least within schools if not between? In which case if the school IS planning to use the online papers (but I can see that you would need to be absolutely certain of that) then making best use of that would still be to your advantage?

There will be ranking/grading within schools yes.

I'd discourage students from doing this. There is nothing that says your school has to use the materials from the exam board you have been entered for. You'd be foolish to learn the OCR stuff and then your school has used edexcel.

I think it's the right decision to release the material. It would have been impossible to keep secure.

It feels weirdly low key for 'the end of year 11' but I suppose like last year the sixth forms and colleges will be flexible on grades.

If teacher knew a student had obviously memorised the test as got higher grade than normal, what would they do?

That's what happened when half the year sat mocks at home, some people wrote identical 'model' answers but obviously not their own work.