GCSEs - can bright children wing them?

[bendmeoverbackwards]

Had some problems recently with my 15 year old dd and school. She is on the autistic spectrum and had some mental health problems at the start of Year 10 (so 6 months ago) resulting in erratic school attendance. She is managing to keep up but her attendance averages around 50%.

I am obviously quite worried about GCSEs next year. She is very bright and so far has done very well at school with not too much effort. I'm wondering how she will do next year if the pattern of school attendance continues.

Some people I speak to (including my own older children!) say that GCSEs are actually not that challenging for bright students. My oldest dd did pretty well and she admitted she didn't work that hard and she is probably not as bright as my youngest.

I know my dd's health is the most important thing and that GCSEs can always be done later on but I don't think spending more time on these exams is the best thing for her. She just wants them over and done with so she can get onto the next stage.

It was 20 years ago now so may or may not be relevant but certainly did. I skivved off most of year 10/11. Did a bit of revising from those books you can buy and passed all of them.
As an adult now, I’m under no illusion that had I have studied harder I could probably have been an A* student but realistically, I don’t think it would have changed my life path in any other way. I never wanted to go to Uni etc.
I do wonder if I’m on the spectrum a lot these days tbh.

I think a bright child can probably do reasonably well without putting in much effort BUT they need to have covered the syllabus. When she is off school is she catching up on what she has missed?

They need a base level of knowledge, especially for Maths and Science (and subjects like History which require factual recollection of events and dates etc). The analysis side of things is very wingable for bright pupils, though.

She does seem to be. Lots of teachers put stuff on Teams.

I think comments about them being easy are only to be considered at all if they have been made since the recent GCSE reforms (ie 9-1 grades). The older GCSEs had considerable coursework / controlled assessments so the final GCSE exams had much less importance.

I think a bright child with good attendance could do OK (4-6s) without any external work as what is taught & revised in school would probably be sufficient and retained well by an academic child.

I don't see how any child with 50% attendance would cope without considerable self study at home. For example there is a lot of content in even combined/dual science, and of course even more if doing the separate science GCSEs.

I don't think GCSEs are particularly challenging for bright children, no. My dd quickly figured out that she could be quite strategic in the way that she approached them, and this freed up a lot of time for her to focus on her other passions. She did work hard, because that's her natural inclination, but I think she also knew that she could do well without working quite as hard. I think quite a few bright kids manage to coast through GCSEs and then get a bit of a shock when they get to A-level and the demands are a bit greater.

Yes @Mumwantingtogetitright there is a big jump between GCSEs and A Levels. And right now I don't think A Levels are right for her in spite of her intellect. I want her to consider other paths.

It depends what grades she's aiming for. I think a bright child can wing it without much work if they don't mind getting 5s and 6s, maybe the odd 7. To get 8/9s you need to put some effort in.

She is certainly capable of top grades but with everything else going on, that's not a priority right now. I'd be happy if she got mostly 6s but I mostly want her to do reasonably well for HER self esteem.

Yes def. one of my DDs had attendance issues, hated school and still managed to get a good set of GCSEs.

A levels were a completely different matter though!

Personally I think it depends on what you consider ‘winging it’. Like yes, if I’d ‘winged it’ I’d have got Bs &Cs maybe (old school GCSEs) but I worked and got As and A*s, and I was considered intelligent in a good grammar school, so I suppose it depends on perspective.

Yes. Autistic myself and spent most of my time staring out of the window. Was homeless and in a squat when I took my exams. All fine. Got better marks in my a-levels when I taught myself from books.

my only words of caution would be that modern HE seems to have closed so many doors to bright students unless you’ve got those nicely ticked boxes. It’s so very much harder to progress these days - whereas when I was young, you turned 21 and it was game on for uni even if you’d fucked everything else up.

i did my GCSE last year and i did wing them and ended up passing them all except geography and got a 9 in RE. so in my opinion GCSE is not as difficult as adults make it out to be

Some bits of them, probably, but a lot of GCSE requires decent knowledge of the topic/facts. If she's missing a lot of class time, there's a lot of background knowledge she could miss even with catch up work. Does she have textbooks? Decent revision materials might help bridge the gap enough - I remember CGP books being recommended for revision when I was a teenager, if they still do them

Winging GSCEs when bright and capable, absolutely.

Yes, A-levels are a totally different kettle of fish.

i missed a lot of my GCSE work due to covid and did not catch up but i ended up passing all of them except geography and got a 9 in re, i am not going to lie that they are harder then a few years ago but they are easy to wing and pass

erm. Last year was exceptional.

1. no final exams
2. teacher assessed
3. inflated grades.

Did you go to NLCS ? Their top grades for A levels went from 30 something % to 90%.

Plus, did you learn any critical thinking? They clearly are hard for many many teenagers. Only about 2/3rds pass English & Maths.

I know they've changed a lot, but I certainly did 20 years ago. I got straight As/A* and never really put any effort in.

my school did do final exams and based my grades off of that as they wanted us to get the most realistic grades possible, and i also missed a year on work as i went through a bad mental health stage in lockdown and barley did any work and i passed my gcses perfectly fine by winging them

Realistically, she can "teach" herself and get pretty good marks if she's bright. Just make sure she has access to resources. If she's only spending 50% of school time actually in school, you need to make sure she's spending some of the other 50% studying at home, plus the usual evening/weekend studying. She's not going to "do well" if she's not actually spending the time at all, either at school or at home.

The CGP revision guides and exam question books are excellent (and pretty cheap) - not as "wordy" as proper text books, so a lot quicker to work through. They're really good for Maths, sciences and geography. Just make sure you buy the right ones as there's different books for different exam boards.

English and History is more difficult as there's a lot of choice/options, so you'd need to get specific revision books for exactly the right options/choices. CGP still cover most things, but you may be best getting something like York notes for English Lit and specialised "subject only" books for the history options chosen. Even with the same "book" in Eng Lit, some exam boards have slightly different exam questions and marking schemes, so you (DD) needs to research that too, as that's something she may miss by not attending lessons and it's harder to pick up the differences between exam boards without being taught. Last thing your DD needs is to "waste" time studying things that aren't in the exam or practising answering the wrong kind of question in the wrong way!, so she needs to be clear as to what topics/modules/Lit is being examined and tell you so you can get the right resources for her.

From my own experience, you can doss off for most of the time and cram in the last month or so, but will be left with a false sense of security and fall flat on your arse come A-levels. I wouldn't worry to much, but i wouldn't tell her that and would encourage her to do catch up work at home from now on. If nothing else to teach her good study habits and to work at things for the longer goal.

Basically all of this. There's a much bigger focus on knowing lots of content so she'd need to have self taught that.

If she's bright she can probably get some reasonable results without full attendance and effort. If she can get admission to whatever post-16 course she wants to do, nobody's going to bother much about the GCSE results after that. Maths and English are the important ones to have, as they're often specifically required; other requirements may be waivable if circumstances are explaned. If she's not on course with maths/English (perhaps they have some exams this term to check?) then it might be worth looking at a bit of tuition.

I helped DD revise for her geography GCSE, and when she sat down to try a past paper, I had a go too, and I got a 6. I didn't do geography at school beyond year 9, so that was based almost entirely on general knowledge and flipping through the revision guide quizzing DD (although I did remember oxbow lakes from school). So that shows that a fairly minimal amount of study can get a bright kid quite a long way.

I think there's a lot of built into lessons by teachers exam prep and revision at GCSE level.

So where there's a good teacher and department - I'm less worried than were there is a department is disarry with many teachers having been off sick for long periods including head of department and then acting head and there been month of supply. That subject is going to take a lot more work.

I'd also make sure the stuff on teams is done if work and more than just glanced through if notes.

You may be better of apporaching her teachers and seeing what they think and how much they feel the 50% attendance impacted in her- has she caught up are there areas of weakness.

But yes it is possible to do well at many GCSE if bright with little extra home work.

Only once her (excellent) results were safely "in the bag", did my eldest admit she wished she'd been allowed to do her physics GCSE early in yr 8 (before she left prep school) - they'd had an enthusiastic science teacher, she was good at it, and felt there was very little extra she'd had to learn after that. I think she was probably right and could still have got 8/9 in it at that point and done something else instead thereafter. (these were "fully reformed" GCSEs done the year before covid)

If your daughter is indeed "very bright" then I'd agree that excellent GCSE results should still be possible with a little bit of strategy. At the top level it is more about exam technique, understanding the mark schemes and how to write answers appropriately to those schemes. I was going to say, aim to focus next year on exam question examples for each topic and then on past papers, and use any extra time / energy to go into more detail on subjects she might do for A level. Then I read that you think she may need to go a non-A level route at this point in time, which makes the latter suggestion less relevant for the time being.

I suspect the very bright child could actually get 4-6s across a range of GCSEs attempted in year 9 with not much specific preparation, to be honest. I have been lucky that DS is at a school that takes students as far as they reasonably can, then makes sure they know what is actually on the exam papers. He has not found starting A levels any particular step up, just a comfortable and interesting progression, as far as I can tell.

Very best wishes for finding ways to keep things steady and manageable for your daughter, I guess what she needs is comfortable 7s or better and then to draw a line under this phase? Working out a good "next step" may also help with motivation. Assuming her school are reasonably supportive then that sounds do-able even with a lot done from home.