GCSE supporting - to half term, and beyond!

[SheilaFentiman]

Making a new thread to support half term revision and the set of GCSEs afterwards!

Same here @Blubell46 ...

Complete radio silence from DS on Geography. Combined Science in the next 15 minutes.

DS2 has Biology 2.
Not his strongest subject although he said to get a 9 you need to get 62%+.
Does anyone know of this is true?
When I said that seems very low for a 9, DS2 said it’s because there is so much information to learn for Biology.
Is he talking nonsense?

Yes he is right. Not sure exact grade boundaries for that exam board. But it is pretty low.

It is pretty low - not sure in exact number but around that I think.

My DD spent ages telling me how bad she was at science because she hovers around the 50% mark - turns out it's not actually that bad when we looked at grade boundaries.

Dd said Geography was good. In Biology now.

Ds said geography was ok but 1 hard question! No mention of elephants!!!

A quick Google found this on gcsescience.com, but no year or refs given

AQA science percentages

I guess it'll always be a case of take it with a pinch of salt.

The Edexcel grade boundary for a 9 in Biology in 2019 was 157 marks out of 200 or 78.5%.

To get 9-9 in Combined Science in Edexcel in the same year you needed a mark of 264 out of 360 or 73%.

In 2002 to get a 9 on Edexcel Biology you needed a mark of 165 out of 200 or 82.5%. Grades of 9-9 that year needed 73.8%.

Do you know what board he is sitting?

I think it’s AQA.

AQA grade 9 boundary last year was 66% and 67% in 2019.

Digital Tech went well. Apparently there wsa a bank of about 300 questions, of which ten were generated at random for each candidate when they logged in, so everyone in the class had a different 'paper'. He finished ten minutes early and sounds happy. Much better day than yesterday's misery!

That sounds fancy!

Ugh. Biology did not go well. First time for tears.

Apparently it was incredibly random and nothing came up that was on the checklist (whatever that is) she was revising against.

That's going to ruin the weekend revising vibe 😩

@Fifiellz sorry to hear that - what board was your child writing ! This is the weaker of DD's sciences so hoping it goes okay

AQA

Oh no - AQA here as well!

And here. I thought it was and hour and forty five minutes?

She messaged me at 14.47, literally the minute she got her phone back!

I thought it started at 1.30pm?

It's 70 minutes for combined science papers

AQA biology here started at 1.30pm so not finished yet but this is the first one I was nervous for DD as she really wants to do Alevel but they barely finished the syllabus

AQA single/Triple is longer

They can start no earlier than 1pm and no later than 2pm.

You can't leave an exam in the first hour, so this prevents early people being in contact with late people before they actually sit the exam.

(DD's college resits start at 9.30 not 9am as that is when their normal college day starts.)

Oh, yes DD did AQA foundation

DS said it wasn't good too @Fifiellz. I've tried to reassure on the basis it's one paper out of 6 so if chemistry and physics are okay, then hopefully it won't bring the overall grade down too much