For noblegiraffe..summer maths exams

[Pottedpalm]

Care to hazard a guess at topics which might NOT be on the list in February?
My money is on Vectors, Differentiation.. Won’t hold you to it, mind!😂

I think it is best to ping her with @noblegiraffe

The list of which content the A-level exams will focus on? I don't know how they can do this for maths. We've been told that we have to teach the full course, but we won't have finished by Feb.

So if in Feb they say 'we will focus on ' then won't schools just not teach numerical methods? And the schools who have already taught numerical methods be cursing themselves?

Or will they say 'the main focus will be calculus and trig but any other topic may come up' which is basically the same as every other year and doesn't tell us anything.

I really want them to say 'forget about the large dataset, it's a complete waste of time'.

@noblegiraffe
I agree on the dataset; I wonder how much money was wasted on that.
Sorry, I didnt make it clear, I meant GCSE not A level,

Ah you said differentiation so I assumed A-level!

I genuinely don't see how they can ditch content at GCSE.

At foundation anything they could usefully ditch would be grade 4/5 stuff like trig but then that can't be ditched as it's also on the higher paper and if they ditched grade 4/5 stuff from the higher paper, what would the weaker candidates answer?

And if they ditch harder stuff from the higher paper then that's not fair on the grade 4/5 kids who have no concessions and it's not very good for supporting transition to A-level for the top kids.

I wondered if they would just cut the non-calculator paper? Same content but just a bit easier as you wouldn’t need to be able to add fractions or do calculations with Standard Form without a calculator. Since we won’t know till February the pupils would already have been taught this content and we would just need to make sure pupils could do all content with confidence on a calculator.

I agree that maths seems hard to fillet.
DS2’s school has suddenly put some extra exams into the schedule in a fortnight, but have announced that it will be not the whole curriculum, as a mitigant. The maths department’s briefing was quite petulant and the list of what is included or not from the last two years’ internal syllabus is madly unhelpful. It mostly excludes stuff that wasn’t in the gcse syllabus at all, or things that one would have to revise anyway as they build up to something that is included. Plus vectors! So that’s one chapter we can leave out

So I don’t see how it works either and suspect that trying to pick things out from the eventual guidance will be much more effort than just making one’s child revise the whole lot.

@noblegiraffe

I really want them to say 'forget about the large dataset, it's a complete waste of time'.

Oh yes -that would be my vote