Question for English teachers - is this normal in GCSE English exams?

[Scroo]

My DS is in year 10 and did his exams just after half term. They were 'mock' mocks ie they're past GCSE papers and the exams are full length.

He gets 25% extra time so is in a separate room with a few other kids.

In his English lit exam, they had to write 4 essays (a 2 hour exam normally but he got 2.5 hours). In all his other exams, he was able to decide how long he wanted to spend on each bit of the exam, revisiting stuff if he needed. In this one, the examiner made them stop writing the essay they were working on at the end of the half hour and then move onto the next one. At the end of the 2 hours, they weren't allowed to go back to their earlier essays so just sat there for half an hour (he says they were allowed to revisit their last essay but he didn't have much more to do in that one. He did want to go back to earlier ones but says they weren't allowed).

Is this normal? It didn't happen in any of the other exams and they weren't given any warning.

I don't know if this also happened in the standard time exam and he doesn't want to ask his friends.

To avoid being That Parent, is this how English lit exams are run in the actual GCSEs? And what's the point of extra time if so?

Sorry this is so long! Didn't want to drip feed.

In the absence of other replies, IMO, he should have got his 25% on each essay. So 37.5 mins per essay.

There was an English paper this year I invigilated that was in 2 parts, and the papers were switched half way through. But I was under the impression this was a covid allowance.

The extra 30 mins should have been split over the 4 essays, so he should have been told to move on to the next after 37.5 minutes.
a major balls up by the exam team.

The papers are however long they are... 1h45 or whatever ... and the ET is added to that. It's then up to them to manage it.

Was it the aqa modern texts and poetry exam?

I'd query it, especially with his extra time not being added to each section.

In the actual exam he will have full control over his timing, no one will stop him/ direct him in any way

You can use your time in an exam however you want. In fact as far as I know it’s not allowed for invigilators to tell students how long to spend on a question within an exam paper. They can also do the questions in any order they want.

That's not what I would have expected, I would have expected the students to use the whole time as they wish, including the extra time allocation.

I wonder if, because it was a mock, the invigilator was instructed by the teacher to make sure the students spent their time evenly on each question. But for your son that should have been 37.5 minutes on each, as @KarrotKake says, rather than 30 mins then stick the additional 30 mins on at the end of the last question.

Don't be afraid of being "that parent". Just ask for clarification as to whether that was something done just for the mocks, decided by their teacher, or if it's how the actual exam will be run too.

Invigilators shouldn’t be doing this (though my a level kids would find it useful). If all the extra time was given to one essay then the invigilator is not only incorrect but also stupid. You need to raise it with the exams officer do it doesn’t happen in the real exams.

That potentially sounds like what we call a ‘walking talking mock’. It’s where we walk them through each step of an exam paper I.e stopping them when they have had their allotted time for each question etc so they get used to timings for the real exam

I invigilated GCSE English Literature for a candidate allocated 25 per cent extra time. It was entirely up to the candidate to decide what part or parts of the paper they chose to spend the extra time on.

I know your son was sitting an internal exam rather than a real GCSE but I would query it.

Yes agree, most likely a walking talking mock where they are walked through the paper and shown how much time to allocate for each essay.

AQA paper one (shakespeare and 19thc) is 90 mins for two essays (just as an example). And in the actual GCSE they can allocate the time and any extra time as they see fit. It is a good idea tho to allocate a certain amount of time, esp if they struggle to keep to time - better to stop an essay unfinished and start the next one than spend most of the time on one essay and leave 10 mins for the second.

It was AQA (Shakespeare and 19th century). He didn't have 'walking talking" mocks for any other of his exams though - he's sitting 10 GCSEs in total and that was the only one this happened in. It would have made a bit more sense if he'd had 37.5 mins per essay.

He really needs that extra processing time. Which is why he gets extra time in the first place!

Thanks - I will email his English teacher. May be that she's not aware but I don't want it to happen in the actual mocks and I want to reassure him that he is in charge of his time.

I’m with @GrainOfSalt

Head of English for 15 years and I know that the students are NOT stopped and told their time is up after each section/ question
one of the things they neeed to learn are to
timings

25% is added on overall

There should only be two questions for each candidate to answer on that paper. I examine it.

Oh! So he will only have 2 rather than 4 to answer in the actual exam?

To be honest, this has probably all been explained to him but he's not great with complex verbal information.

Thanks very much everyone. I've quizzed him a bit further and it wasn't the invigilator (who was the same person the whole way through and works in the SEN dept) who decided they should be stopped after 30 mins on each question, it was Mrs ... Someone whose name he can't remember. Not his English teacher though.

I will email his teacher now. Thanks so much - I often get half a story which makes it difficult to know whether it's worth contacting the school or not.

Shakespeare and the c19 will have 6 Shakespeare questions and 6 c19. He only does one of each.
Where 4 questions came from I don't know... unless they made a hybrid paper of some kind.

Should've said... the 6 will be on different texts. He only does "his" texts.

As MrsHamlet says, two essays for Paper 1 and there will (with AQA) only be one question on each text, so no choice. If he has studied Macbeth, he does the Macbeth question.

There is a choice on Paper 2 - two questions on each 20C text and a choice of any poem studied to compare with the poem on the exam paper.

For one of DD's English GCSE papers this summer, there were two sections and they were issued and timed separately. I think this was a covid change, to do with the fact that they were studying two out of poetry/19th C text/"modern" text, so I don't think it necessarily makes sense for year 10s to be doing the same (but might be why invigilators did it that way).

But of course the 25% needed to be applied to each section. At one point, DD said they were all going to have to sit there in silence in the middle of the exam while the extra-time people had their extra time, but then that changed and they just swapped the papers over later for the extra-time people.

Yep changes for 2022 of dropping a choice of 19c, 20c or poetry text, were for this year only, back to normal for 2023 with all texts needing to be revised and being examined on.