Gcse combined science - pls explain

[Dancingbea]

I am trying to support my Asd son get a clutch of passes. With most of the subjects I understand what he needs to know but I am at a loss with combined science - how do all the marks fit together? Can you do reasonably in biology and appallingly In Physics and still get some sort of pass. How does each of the 3 sciences feed into the 2 separate grades? Thanks in advance.

You study the subjects separately, sit separate exams, then they average the totals into 2 overall grades. If he has one very strong, or one very weak science, then combined science might not be the best option.

They sit two exams in Biology, two in Chemistry, two in Physics. The results are averaged, so yes, you can come out with something reasonable in the situation you describe. Depends exactly what the numbers are of course. As you probably know the result will be 44 or 54 or 76 or whatever; two grades (because it is worth two GCSEs) which you could see as 4, 4.5, 6.5.

You sit 6 papers.
They add up all the marks, and give you a grade corresponding to the total of all the papers. So, yes you can completely mess up a paper and ace another, and end up with a grade in the middle.

If it helps, think of them giving you a grade from 0 (0,0) to 18 (9,9) over all the papers.

Each subject, and therefore grade in that subject, is worth two thirds of a GCSE. So two thirds of a grade 2 in Physics, plus two thirds of a grade 4 in Chemistry plus two thirds of a grade 6 in Biology gets overall 44 in Combinedsciende .

Thats’s really helpful, thanks very much.

One thing not mentioned yet.

There are two tiers of papers, foundation and higher.
With combined you have to pick for the whole set of 6 exams, so either everything in foundation or everything in higher.

With the 3 separate sciences, you can pick per subject so eg higher for physics and chemistry but foundation for biology.

If he is very skewed in ability that might be something to consider.
3 separate isn't harder per se, it is more of the same. A lot to revise, and a lot of science lessons too.

Combined grading is not quite how titchy describes, if only because you can't get a 2 and a 6 within the same tier. In essence they add up all the marks for the papers and draw boundaries at different total mark levels. (So in essence comes to the same thing really.)

If he's in year 11 then it is too late to be looking at separate sciences now, as there is much more to cover. If he's in year 10 it's probably too late to switch.

@Dancingbea this might help with seeing how the marks from the individual exams are converted into 2 GCSEs. This is the June 2019 exam boundaries (boundaries change with each exam) filestore.aqa.org.uk/over/stat_pdf/AQA-GCSE-GDE-BDY-JUN-2019.PDF

Each individual paper is marked out of 70 and all marks are added together.