Maths and RS GCSE today

[eveningqueen456]

Anybody have any idea what the maths and RS GCSE's were like today? I have figured out they must have been hard as my son has come home really stressed out and is refusing to speak about them. Apparently he left a 15 marker question out !!!!

The only questions where you MUST show your working out on the page are the ones that explicitly state "you must show your working". Every other question has method marks and an answer mark, BUT, if you get the correct answer that implies you've used a correct method and just not written it down. That's perfectly ok and allowed.

@leonaab How many questions like the one you give can you find on the higher paper?

The majority of them.

@leonaab I just picked up a random paper 1 higher from my desk, it was 2022 AQA.
There are 53/80 marks that you can get without writing any working down. You would be daft to try it, but if your answers are correct you would score all of those marks.

Which would appear to be about a Grade 7.

@noblegiraffe you seem to know what you’re talking about 😊 so my DS did not even attempt the last 3 questions on the higher edex non calculator. If he did ok on the rest of the questions could he still get a decent mark? & if he does well on the next maths papers can that bump his mark up? Sorry for all the questions- I’m clueless!

Q19 onwards were, as the ever correct noble giraffe states, very tough. There was a particularly gnarly one about similar triangles, and another about area and volume, both of which required students to come up with two variables. The one about lines and circles was different enough to throw the students who had done kids off past papers and were hoping for a 7 or 8 through sheer hard work. The indices question wasn’t a brain teaser as such, but was about as awkward as you could possibly make it. I think the top end is going to be very compressed and hard to differentiate. Up until that point, the questions were all very honest.

For my mind, that’s going to make getting the 6/7 grades a matter of which makes least silly mistakes on the first two thirds of the paper.

Done loads of, not done kids off!

@Nellodee you've described my DS. He had done so many past papers and so much revision but just really struggled with the paper. We'll have to see how the other two pan out.

Same as my DS, and but he's not despairing yet.

Obviously it depends on what you mean by a decent mark, but the last three questions were worth a total of 14 marks. Last year if you dropped around 30 marks on each paper you'd get a 7. If you dropped around 20 you'd get an 8.

The marks for all three papers are totalled, so it's also possible to do badly on one paper and make up for it with a much better performance on others.

Basically, it's still all to play for. 🤞

@MsAwesomeDragon Interesting points. I took a look at a paper and calculated the marks based on what I said about the following:

• The making some questions labelled as having mandatory working out.
• Other questions being designed so that their answers are about working out.

I identified that 45 (most strict) or 47 (least strict) out of 80 of the marks required working out as the answer. These aren't questions labelled as needing the working out, but they can't be answered without producing an answer that's working out as the concept being assessed.

This means that only only up to 35 of 80 marks would be achieved by providing calculations that demonstrate no evidence of working out. If this score was repeated across each of the 3 papers, then the score would only be 105 marks in total. According to the 2019 grade boundaries, this would be grade 5 or a C in the old grade scheme.

I chose the 2019 paper because this reflects normal expectations for the exam. They may have changed the questions to be less strict in assessing working out since the pandemic - but equally, they would be expected to provide questions that are as thorough as the 2019 paper now that we are past the pandemic.

Can you provide an example of a question that you have decided needs working out shown to get the marks where it doesn't specify that you need to show working out?

"Other questions being designed so that their answers are about working out"
I'd be interested to see what sort of questions you've put in this category. I'd agree with anything that says "show that" or "prove" or which states a method you need to use.
I ask this because I've just looked at 2019 higher AQA paper 1 and I found at least 45 marks that do NOT require working to be written down (they will obviously require some method to get to the answer but it doesn't have to be written down). Which is different to what you've come up with.

@MsAwesomeDragon Other questions are those where the answer needs to be provided as a diagram or where the working out is broken down into multiple steps over several stages in the question. There are also answers that require a one step working out, which is practically working out as the answer.

From what I see, the exam questions look like they are designed to assess the ability to work the answers out more than just providing an answer. Not many are labelled as showing the working out as a requirement, but the questions are mostly designed in a way to produce evidence of breaking a maths problem into individual steps. It seems they also distinguish the intermediate and harder questions by providing less guidance on showing the working out - i.e. prove that x is y instead of answer this with steps a, b and c.

Ah, I see. Your understanding of "requiring working out" is different to my understanding of that same phrase.
I wouldn't count questions broken down into parts as requiring working out, I'd say that is requiring multiple answers within the same question. Nobody would just not bother answering part a because it's "working out". And a diagram wouldn't be in my definition of requiring working out. The diagram is the answer (or part of the answer), it's not working out that has to be written down.
That would be why we're disagreeing, because we're talking about different definitions.

No one thinks that 'answering a previous question' counts as 'showing your working out', MsAD. It's clear what @leonaab meant in her earlier posts and she is just changing the goal posts to pretend she meant something different because she was proved wrong.

She previously said "That's not true at all. If you take a look at the marking schemes, they show exactly what the marks are awarded for in the working out. At GCSE level, they aren't interested too much in whether you get the right answer;"

"Full marks for correct answers will mainly be about addressing the possibility of being able to work out the answer in a way that's not mentioned in the marking scheme. These questions still require the working out to get to the final answer."

"Take note of how the marks are awarded as M1 or B1 and the final answers are awarded as A1."

She clearly thought a final correct answer with no working was only awarded the A1 mark.

Suggesting that at GCSE they aren't interested in whether you get the right answer is pretty funny.

@leonaab which exam bird do you mark for?

A - accuracy marks not answer marks.
Below is the definition from Edexcel (I teach Edexcel so only one I can compare)

So Q18 would get 4 marks if answer is correct no working necessary.

Q20 gets zero marks if answer but no methods shown.

There are only 14 marks on this paper which state this and 2 are for constructions.

@noblegiraffe You are right; I should have looked at the specifics about working out not being required for some questions. But this doesn't change much in what I said.

While the exam boards are being generous with some questions by awarding full marks just for the final calculation, the majority of questions are designed to assess ability to break a problem into individual steps.

If the exam boards were so interested in the final answers, they wouldn't design the exam with the emphasis on being able to score the majority of marks from the working out.