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.

Does he get any access arrangements due his additional needs? Any support in exam technique?

The revision guides are commercially produced and sometimes are off the mark, DD's teacher said they were only good up to a grade B (6 I presume now) so not to rely on them. Dd got a*'s but I didn't buy the guides!

I have ADHD so i can sympathise that if its not something he loves then it's a real challenge to get any sort of focus going. I was very lucky that English and analysing fiction is something I thoroughly enjoy (I still do it now much to DH's annoyance).

But I do really encourage you to support him learning to revise in a more "critical thinking" way rather than trying to memorise things. Perhaps learning a new way to revise (tbh I wouldn't even call it revising, its honing a skill) could help him get back into it when he is ready.

For now, I'd leave DS be. Let him cool off and ask his teacher for additional support for his needs if be.

Did he revise for other subjects? Did that 'pay off'? If so you can explain that not all revision is used but that on average it benefits.
He will now also know the obvious themes better than if he hadn't revised so if they come up next year, his revision will still have helped.

I assume they will be looking at other texts in Y11 so won’t have time to study the texts from Y10 in much more depth.

Surely revision guides are just that guides. He will have different questions in the exams so needs to be able to cope with that. Didn’t cope this time but now knows how he needs to learn how to approach such a question.

Quick email to his English teacher. To explain exactly what you've said here. See what she says.

Actually I agree with JackieWeaver, whilst a tough question, you Really need to work on his resilience despite what you've just said about how fragile is right now.

"Most people who haven’t studied it, but have seen one of the films, could list times when people in the novel felt fear. "

I totally agree with the above. Even now I could write quite a bit, for that question, on fear.

He hasn’t revised one bit for anything else and given his past form will probably do ok in them. Yet more evidence that revision isn’t worth bothering with.
He absolutely loves analysing stuff, music, film, media but only as long as it’s of his own choosing. He is extremely demand avoidant so basically doing anything that is ‘required’ is a major issue. I bought the revision guides because he has nothing else to revise from, he’s never bright a single page of notes back from school. He won’t bring his art folder back because he is self conscious about carrying it- this is the extreme level of his anxiety.
This kind of thing just piles on top of his existing anxiety. I feel like he is at such a disadvantage due to his diagnoses that his potential will never be explored. It’s pretty depressing tbh.

He is not resilient and I have worked his whole life to build that up, he is under camhs and we are also seeing a private psychologist. It’s still tough going!

If he hasn’t revised why did he think he would do well in the exams? Maybe he just has to accept that English Lit is not for him

To be honest, I think you may need to think strategically.
What will he need for next steps?

e.g. if he wants to do A levels in Sciences he'll need good grades in them, but are there minimum requirements e.g. at least 8 at grade 6? If he won't meet that due to issues with humanities, is there another 6th form / provider with lower criteria, or can you talk to the school re taking him anyway?

Ultimately, the sky won't fall in if he were to fail English Lit. You may have more important battles.

There is more to life than GCSEs. My DD's MH collapsed at the start of lockdown, and we have ended up with her only being entered for 4 in total, but it is all she needs for college.

Being very blunt, surely it's better to have this in a y10 exam and be prepared for the possibility of a curveball question in y11 after having a chance to try this one, reflect, get feedback from the teacher and hear how everyone else gets on.

This is absolutely an opportunity to reframe his catastrophic intetpretation (and yours) of the exam and his performance in it.

@Palavah

Being very blunt, surely it's better to have this in a y10 exam and be prepared for the possibility of a curveball question in y11 after having a chance to try this one, reflect, get feedback from the teacher and hear how everyone else gets on.

This is absolutely an opportunity to reframe his catastrophic intetpretation (and yours) of the exam and his performance in it.

I agree with this, our mock exams were always horrific, much harder than the actual ones. (Older Scottish people will recognise the name Pillans and Wilson, they set prelim papers significantly harder than the real exams that many schools used). Prepare for the worst and the actual exam will seem easier. Maybe there is a case for also accepting that English is something that he will not excel at? We are not all good at everything and not everything can be learned by persistence and hard work. There are parts of my own discipline which I find very unintuitive and have always struggled with no matter how hard I work on them. Many of my students didn't do well at English in school.

I am being strategic by focussing on English. He is a brilliant writer and wants to go into journalism or similar so he really needs to do well in English. Sadly his school do a combined Lit/Lang (dd did them separately). He has no interest in science or maths and only needs to scrape a pass in maths, It won’t matter if he fails science.

Ah. That's a problem then.

Combined Lit/Lang is highly unusual.
Is it a private school / using iGCSEs?

All the pupils in his class with be in the same situation so try not to worry, if all pupils results are very low the teachers will look into it.

It will still be expected pupils will have read the text several times, they will have written several flexible theme (and setting, and character) essay plans AND practiced being able to adapt them to whatever theme question came up, even if it wasn't one they had studied before. Fear does not sound like an unreasonable theme for his text.

In both ds's interim and final assessments they were not the common themes he has revised for. In his interim assessment the theme did not match the text at all and it was a very tough fit. He was disappointed, but knew in advance it might not and adapted as best he could.

I imagined schools would be setting children up to succeed a bit more given the circumstances.

This implies the assessment should have been easy or the questions an exact fit. That is wrong. It is important pupils are given "fair" marks to match both their ability to analyse a text and how much thought and work they have put into preparation before it.

Surely if he is wanting to go into journalism then he will need to be a critical thinker and not slavishly follow exam guides

He has a year, which is half the course time to prepare for the actual exam. Much better to come up against difficult questions now and work out how to tackle them than be shocked by them next summer.

His grade on the mock isn't really important, what matters is learning from the experience.

English language gcse is ridiculously difficult as it requires so much to be memorized and at least one of his GCSEs will throw up a curve ball. But that's the nature of them. I'd really try to help him see it as a learning opportunity.

If he becomes a journalist it will have to be freelance in a niche area so he can write about what he really wants to. Maybe not an option, a fiction writer would be much better, not exactly going to pay the bills reliably tho! (The question of whether he will ever be able to live independently is a moot one).
Ds has only practiced writing answers to exam type questions a couple of times. He is not able to do schoolwork at home in general so isn’t able to get through the volume that most students do. He does need to practice this so it comes more naturally and he can roll with a degree of uncertainty.

What are his plans after GCSEs?

op is he doing combined lit and Lang for GCSE? That's v unusual. Or do you mean for A level?

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

Mmm, me too, but then I horrified my English teacher years ago by writing my mock English answer on a book we hadn’t covered in class, as I fancied that question more than the one we were meant to do.

However, OP’s kid isn’t like that. He is autistic and wants clear guidance on ‘learn this for this result’. Sympathies, OP. Mine loathed English, learning ‘themes’ and poetry in particular (‘Why does it all have to have a deeper meaning? Why can’t poets just say what they mean?).

Ordinary mainstream school, I’d not come across combined English lit/Lang myself either.
He thinks he did pretty well in the poetry section actually. He is perfectly able to concentrate long enough for a poem. A book that’s not of his choosing is a different matter. I suppose the problem is that he isn’t familiar enough with the story but refuses to read it properly or even watch the film. He is unbelievably stubborn, you can’t even begin to imagine!
I asked for a medication review because what he’s on at the moment doesn’t help his attention span at all, still waiting.

what board is that then op? AQA don't do a combined GCSE so I wonder why an AQA past paper question is set.

If he won't read the book then there's not much anyone can do really. perhaps his revision should have started with that. It also doesn't bode at all well for studying English Lit at A level, if that's the plan.

My DD could probably make quite a reasonable stab at Macbeth despite having missed all the teaching as in prep for doing it we saw it live, saw a live cinema screening, and then another live streaming over lockdown. (She then had to reduce her GCSEs and dropped Eng Lit.)