Y11 2023-24 continued

[Techno56]

New thread for when the other one fills up, I need somewhere to panic away from my son 😁

DS has done maths Pearson Higher. He said it was okay but there were a few stupid questions. He wants to do A level maths so today meant a lot to him.

Ignore me, Pearson is Edexcel!

Mine home now and said maths Edexcel was crap-found it really really hard, left loads of questions out and ran out of time!

Was that the higher?

Edexcel IGCSE higher hard, according to DD. She’s a solid 7 or 8 normally. .

I have heard from maths - it was ok except she missed that there was a 4 mark question on the back page - she is so upset. It’s only 2% of the whole thing though all she can do is learn from it and move on.

DS said the last 4 questions of the Edexcel Higher were hard, but he says they've checked the answers (with their maths teacher) and he got them correct.

Yes, that’s right.

Well done to him @Newlittlerescue . Can he remember how many marks were available for the tricky circle one? DD says she won’t have got more than 1 on it!

I'll ask him (it might be a while before he replies, they've all gone to KFC (rather than revise for RE...)

@JessyCarr He says 5 marks were available.

Thanks @Newlittlerescue . Not a disaster then if she flunked it. I always think it’s a bit mean when they put one of those chunky 9-markers at the end!

I had a speak peek at the edexcel foundation paper. It looked hard to me, but I haven't studied any of it! The extra time people I was invigilating took their whole 25% extra, whatever that means.

they've all gone to KFC (rather than revise for RE...)

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Love this!

My DS did AQA Higher maths and said it was a dream - I'm just hoping he's right!

Now straight onto Chemistry and Geography for tomorrow.

Can I just say ... I think this thread has helped me massively so far! Thanks to OP For starting and all you lovely lot for the support and reassurance

TSR vibe is generally positive about AQA Higher and very happy indeed about AQA Foundation.

I checked last year’s Edexcel maths grade boundaries for the higher paper - out of a total 240 marks (for three papers), you were able to drop / lose around 66 (? From memory) marks and still get an 8. So that’s approx 22 marks per paper that you can lose, and still come out with an 8. Or 2/3 of a paper you can get wrong (if you get everything else in all the other papers correct)!

@Stoufer if you lost 22 marks out of 80 per paper that would be 27.5% wrong by my maths.

If a paper is really difficult, do the grade boundaries change?

I may be completely wrong, but I remember being told that the big questions at the end are the ones that differentiate between grades 7-8-9… ie how much you can attempt / get right will distinguish between what grade you get. My dc ran out of time in a big way in the year 11 maths mock, so didn’t really get on to the big questions at the end, but as he got everything else correct, he got a 7 as his mock grade.

@MoonKiss Yes it’s a factor, but there are other factors (such as how this cohort did in KS2 SATS) taken into account too so it’s quite a complex area.

Ds is edexel too and said the last 5 questions were really hard.

Yes - it is all approximate from memory! Just checked - it was 174 out of 240 for a grade 8.