Are GCSEs always this close together?

[Loiolo]

DD is in Y11, I've just been having a look over her exam timetable and it seems so intense.
Her first exam was Biology on Friday, then she has an exam everyday this week (she had 2 today) covering English Lit, Classics, French, History, Maths and Chemistry. Then next week it's the same with English lit, Classics, Physics, English Language and French. Following week Maths, Spanish, then finally a week day off on June 5th for the first time since may 10th!
Is this normal? Obviously after that she still has more to go!

I didn't do my exams in the UK so this seems so foreign to me. Is it normal to be this intense and have an exam literally everyday?
How can I help make sure she doesn't burn out in this time?

One issue with coursework, even when it is sat in class under exam conditions (as for MFL until 2017) is that plenty of schools would cheat – in MFL, teachers giving the students too much support, right up to giving them a pre-written text to copy out, so the playing field was not level. Teachers were not supposed to have input into their students’ pre-test drafts but I don’t know any who didn’t give some support there. At my school we always held back from doing more but then that put our students at a disadvantage against schools where teachers were less scrupulous. At least the exam is fair, though I do agree that it is a lot.

@Panicmode1 one reason for spreading out separate papers for the same subject to some extent is in case a student is ill (this may also be a Covid hangover) – they will hopefully be better in time to sit the second paper.

Wrt the Eng lit quotes (and I realise this is a bit late as one exam was yesterday!) I was talking to DD (Eng lit grad and did amazing in the first Eng lit GCSE of the new spec) about this last night. She agreed with me – it’s not about learning great scads of quotes and the examiners certs don’t want you to quote five lines of R&J. What they want is a few words or even just a single word to support your point – so you might talk about Lady M asking to be full of “direst cruelty” to show how determined and evil she is.

Wrt to clashes as mentioned by @IbizaToTheNorfolkBroads – even with multiple exam boards, all the (for example) maths papers are on the same day – just for the very reason that students sit with a range of boards even within one school, so if OCR Eng lit was at the same time as edexcel maths, it would cause an issue.

@Stoufer I also did O levels (Boomer) and I certainly had English lit exams. I recall knowing a particular chapter of Silas Marner almost off by heart – but then I have always had a good ability to rote learn. Deffo no coursework for those. This was in 1980 - when did you take yours?

I did GCSEs in 1991, we did nine subjects, there were no exams at all for English lit or lang, drama the exam was optional (you could do improv instead). Geography had a coursework element, and possibly biology had some coursework too. We did maths a year early.

So with my choices I only had GCSE exams in five subjects in 91 - history, French, Latin, geography, biology. Some had more than one exam though.

I did o levels and I am pretty sure they were after half term and only lasted two weeks. Dd has 21 exams over five weeks and 8 exams just this week alone. It is ridiculous.

I was similar a year later. I did physics and chemistry as well as biology and there were two or three papers in all of my subjects.

DS has 26 exams in total. 8 this week for 7 different subjects! His life would be so much easier if they weren't quite so spread out. Next week is just as bad but but he at least has a day free each week after half term.
Someone up thread said the last exam was 18th June but further math paper two is the 19th which I think must be the final one. He start on 3rd May!
DD has hers next year then we'll have two years of A levels 😔 didn't even cross my mind all those years ago that this was in store for us.

1987 - it was the last year of o-levels, and some of them had migrated to a sort of hybrid type exam (16+), which disappeared the following year when gcses started. English Lit was 16+ and was just coursework. I did Eng lang exam the year before, so only actually sat 7 o-levels / 16+ in 1987… quite a manageable number I think!

ah OK @Stoufer that explains it. I think when GCSEs came in there was such a lot of excitement at this new idea of an exam everyone could do, they just threw out everything that had been done (caveat - I was no longer in education at this stage and neither a teacher nor a parent yet). Hence the all-coursework GCSEs as compared to my all-exam O levels 7 years earlier. I really don't think a return to coursework is the answer; I do wonder tho about a modular approach for some subjects where you can sit half the exam in year 10 to get it done. Eng lit and history and sciences would work here.

This was normal when I did GCSEs, and I'm middle aged.

It’s completely normal - they’re in fact more spaced out now than they were in the 90s and 00s. She’ll be fine. It’s intense for a week or two then she gets a nice break afterwards!

I sat GCSE in 90s - sat 9 as did DH in another part of UK so must be normal number. 2 GSCE Lang and LIT were 100% coursework - another I sat early so had 7 subject one of which has just one exam and huge piece of coursework - most other has two exams.

DC are sitting more GCSE overall and seem to have more exams per subject.

I can easily believe the exam period is longer as thus individual subjects may appear more spread out at same time many like mine seem to be sitting more exams so it feels very cramped few weeks with no days in-between that I remember happening.

Yes it feels crazy this year (I’m an invigilator). Loads of clashes, so lots of kids in isolation. We started 9th May, last scheduled exam is 21st June, but that could change.

It's not a week or two though, is it? This marathon runs over about a month!! With half term in the middle but not part of that four weeks. DS started last Friday, has a full on week this week (7 exams and that's not as bad as some of his friends who have 3 on one day), a full on week next week, half term respite (to revise the Paper 2s!) and then two more weeks of exams. Luckily by the last week it's tailed off and the load is lighter.

I am so worried about burnout and mental exhaustion. There HAS to be a better and fairer way of doing this.

I sat GCSEs in 1989 and English Lit and Lang were 100% coursework. 50% for some other subjects. Clearly that wouldn't work now because of AI and less sophisticated ways of cheating, but they have to be able to work something out to bring back an element of continuous assessment, surely.

Yes, normal unfortunately. It's going to be intense, make sure she takes lle of breaks and gets enough sleep and make her healthy snacks to keep her energy up!

I suspect it was a "standardised" score rather than their actual mark though. I got standardised (I.e scaled) scores on the transcripts of all my exams back in the day, although I think my teachers did know my raw marks? (Or maybe could work it out because they could find out the scaling factors).

Unfortunately, continuous assessment does not work. I’m actually glad we’ve gone back to 100% exam (I can only speak for English). There do need to be some quite substantial changes in the actual exams though.

I got v good marks in exams BUT I'm rubbish at memorization. In my day you could take the highlighted and annotated (!) text into lit, formula sheet for science, history had a focus on sources.

So much then was about being able to do the skills of the subject which as irl we'd have Google now makes even. More sense to me than having to know a ton of content for 10 different subjects.

There's no way I'd do as well now.

I could'nt agree more , my 15 year old is doing them at the moment she's quite calm about it but i can see she's tired .
So much pressure at such a young age.

My DD seems to have an awful lot before half term. Exams every single day. One day she had 3 exams.

Are your DC revising when they come home after an exam? DD is starting to flag already so I'm not sure how much revision is going to be done over the next week or so.

then finally a week day off on June 5th for the first time since may 10th!

They do get half term though, @Loiolo yes!?