How common is it to get an exam question on topic not covered in revision guide or class?

[Trevors]

So ds just had yr 10 English lit exam. Essay theme was something that isn’t mentioned anywhere is his revision books. It hadn’t been covered in class teaching either.
I’m guessing that once in a while this could happen in a real yr 11 gcse exam but in that case the students would normally have had two full years of teaching so should know the text really well. Current year 10s have had nothing like the teaching they should have had over one year.
What would be the motivation for school setting an obscure theme like this? Ds is really disappointed. For the very first time ever he actually did some revision but now he feels like he wasted his time as no matter how throughly he might have revised he would never have covered this. So, in his eyes now, all revision is pointless and all teachers are just trying to make life difficult and catch students out.
He has been struggling so much with his mental health over the last year, like so many teenagers. This is a blow to his confidence that he just didn’t need right now. I know lots of you will say life is tough, they have just got to suck it up, but honestly, I think they have sucked up enough shit over the last year and this was just unnecessary.

By the way, my ds is in top set of its relevant and he was still completely flummoxed. Hardly wrote anything apparently.

Top set and totally flummoxed by a question about fear in A Christmas Carol? I mean this kindly, but I think it’s his resilience you need to work on.

Most people who haven’t studied it, but have seen one of the films, could list times when people in the novel felt fear. With his revision, he should then have been able to build an answer around that. I think the message here is to get him to read and reread his English books (not the revision guides) so that he develops his own views on them.

Had the school recommended the revision guide? We don’t. We tell pupils to rely on their own books and on the set texts themselves.

It is not uncommon and students can only fully prepare for so many actual questions and apply elements of those in other answers. Drafting model answers is only part of revision. Sounds like an over reliance on what is being taught rather than reading and thinking around the text. There is often a choice of questions in an exam paper so candidates can pick one they are most familiar and comfortable with.

My top set struggled with it as well jackie. I had several girls in tears after that exam.

As it turned out they did reasonably well because the grade boundaries were low but I’m not sure if or how that will apply here.

It's not that obscure a theme. There will always be an element of the unpredictable in exams. Calling it a 'shitty' question is a bit . If they had been told in advance what to revise for it wouldn't really be an exam would it?

There is no choice of question. Those students though who sat it back in 2018 had benefitted from two full years of learning without the disruption and trauma caused by a global pandemic so were obviously in a far, far better position to tackle it. Even without the pandemic these are only in year 10.
Resilience-wise, Ds is actually mentally quite vulnerable at the moment, he has really struggled with the stress of the pandemic. I know he is not alone in this.
Surely, the point of teaching to a syllabus at all is to tell students what to revise?

I’m coming at this from a different direction, so feel free to tell me this is irrelevant. Should every student be able to answer every question? One of the functions of an exam is to differentiate between students of different abilities, to do that some questions have to be hard. I set university exams and there is always a question that I have to work very hard on to get the right answer, that I expect maybe one or two students out of 100 to get right.
Back in the early Middle Ages when I did school exams the questions were always “unseen”. To be frank I could write an answer to a question about fear in A Christmas Carol and I haven’t read it for years (I’m an engineering academic now). What would be necessary is a good knowledge of the text and experience of answer that style of question. So knowing how to structure the answer, how to include quotes and how to focus on what is asked. That’s what practice questions give you. We had an amazing English teacher who totally banned revision guides, because he said they taught to the test and narrowed your understanding and that is not the way to get an A in English, it’s sad if that is no longer true. I did get an A as did pretty much my whole class.

My point is that I believe this would have been a reasonable, though challenging, question to ask yr 11s in 2018.
It’s not so reasonable to ask it yr 10s in the midst of a global pandemic when they’ve missed huge chunks of schooling and are inevitably stressed.

They have to memorise quotes from the whole text relevant to the one specified theme, to compare and contrast with the given single extract. How can they memorise quotes for any and every possible theme?

OP, the students who did it in 2018 also did it as their actual GCSE rather than a lower pressure end of year exam. Getting a tough question in a mock is nowhere near as upsetting as getting one in a paper which can determine your future employability (for students on the pass-fail boundary).

I understand what you are saying about the disrupted teaching and difficult times, but it isn't as though students normally spend the whole two years studying one text while your DS has only had one. He will have had fewer texts that he needed to know thoroughly.

I'd encourage him to wait until the marks and grades are given out. He can then discuss with his teacher if there are better ways to revise for English lit if he feels like his current revision didn't help him at all.

The problem was, it wasn’t an exam in the usual way and so I do think putting students at a disadvantage is a bit shitty, although I wouldn’t use this word.

In 2018, the CC question was one of five - Shakespeare, CC, modern text, poetry and unseen poetry.

I’ve just logged in on the laptop and this is the question. The extract is when Scrooge meets the ghost of Christmas future.

Write about how dickens presents what Scrooge is frightened of in this extract and how dickens presents Scrooge’s fears in the novel as a whole.

The fact is many students found it tricky and the grade boundaries indicate that. For a grade 5, you needed 76 marks (62 for a 4, 91 for a 6.

In 2019 that was 68 for a 4, 83 for a 5 and 98 for a 6. I’m not trying to be patronising here but for anybody who might not know, those grade boundaries are because a certain percentage of students have to get each grade. So it does indicate the 2018 paper was a tricky one. And the OPs DS is at another disadvantage because proportionally each question counts for more. I also had students who barely wrote a thing for that question but came out with a good grade because they made up for it on the others.

I think it would be worthwhile politely querying this.

Yes but chloe the grade boundaries reflect this and also, it was spread over five questions, not three / four (not sure which, sorry.)

Just want to say, I was thinking the same as Chemenger

10 years ago when I did GCSEs, part of the suggested revision processes was to sit and think up of themes that may crop up in a text, the more obscure the better, and then write notes about that. We were encouraged to not to revise from what we have learnt in class but rather practice our critical thinking skills. Sure, remembering certain extracts and quotes certainly helps with writing a good answer but the critical thinking aspect is what really needs practicing.

Actually sounds like a really good question, fear crops up loads in the novel.

I suppose that's sort of irrelevant now for your DS but going forward perhaps frame to him how revision isn't pointless, this challenge has shown him what he needs to practice for the future.

That question is fine. Pretty much half the question is focusing on the given extract - which he would have had right there in front of him - and incorporating language analysis of it, alongside contextual discussion. As far as linking outwards, thinking about Scrooge's fears isn't difficult.

You are getting very het up about a lack of total spoonfeeding here.

Why was that a particularly challenging question? Surely fear crops up a lot in the book!

Has he read the full book at least once rather than the booklet of revision notes and sample quotes.?

I think that was the problem with that question: it encouraged a very rudimentary sort of ‘Scrooge is afraid of the ghost of Christmas future because it is scary / can’t see it’s face / doesn’t speak’ and so on.

Higher end students probably would be able to come up with amazing responses about the psychology of control and fear of poverty (you can control money not people) etc.

But that’s a big ask for a student who is plodding through GCSEs!

With that being said I missed this was year 10. I wouldn’t worry if it’s just a mock but I would consider a tutor as the teacher telling them to memorise quotations suggests they aren’t brilliant to be honest.

For ds this single compulsory question accounts for 50% of his grade. In 2018, it would have been 20%.
Sadly, ds has autism and adhd (hence the massive anxiety and his difficulties focussing). It took me so much hard work to convince him to revise in the first place, it’s going to be virtually impossible to do so in the future after this experience. He is very demoralised by it. I imagined schools would be setting children up to succeed a bit more given the circumstances.

I think it would be worthwhile politely querying this.

Good idea, throw even more problems to deal with at the teachers.

shock horror - teacher gives Y11s a past paper as an assessment that they haven't done before.

enough already.

So what themes would have been discussed in respect of the book instead? I would have assumed that was an obvious one.

kaptain I think if you are teaching your students in a manner that is frankly crap you should bloody expect parents to query it!

Sorry kaptain, just to clarify, I don’t mean you are crap - that was a general point.

You don’t have to be horrible about it but I do think this is unfair on the students, although as you’ll note I did revise that suggestion when I realised OPs ds is year 10 not 11.

I think in some ways the school have done your DS a favour. he now knows that exams can be a bit unpredictable and the best thing is to make the best of it. Take a deep breath, realise everyone else will be finding it hard, note down anything relevant, and formulate an answer.

In 2015 when DD1 did her GCSEs there was a maths question 'Hannah's sweets' which loads of students got in a panic over. It didn't faze DD as she was used to having questions she couldn't do, so missed it out and carried on. (It wasn't actually hard, but it mixed up probability and algebra in an unusual way, but working through it methodically it was relatively straightforward imo).

It sort of happens quite a bit in science. the question will ostensibly be about something they haven't learned (e.g. polar bears) but will turn out to be about evolution, or pressure or something.

Ultimately the better your DS knows the texts the more likely he is to be able to talk about any random theme they come up with.

How often are they doing assessments? Is this an end of unit assessment or a mock. In my subject we have assessment about once a month.

Surely by yr 11 they have had a further year of learning and are more mature so it’d be a better question then?
My point is that he is likely to disengage from the whole process now, I can’t tell you how much effort I have put into encouraging and supporting him due to his difficulties so I guess that is why I am so “het up”.
He is very intelligent. dd got all 7’s and above at gcse, he is certainly at least as clever as she is) but exams are a massive challenge so he tends to panic.