Y11 2025-26 - Trying not to melt and pushing through the final weeks

[Stowickthevast]

I finished the thread so started a new one. Welcome all Y11 parents, support and solidarity for the next big push here!

It must have been IGCSE not GCSE – that is only 2 papers (L and then R&W as one paper) and usually all on the same day. Spanish IGCSE is the same, both papers tomorrow. I assume this is a private school as state schools cannot offer IGSCE. Plenty of private schools choose to offer GCSE tho.

AQA GCSE French writing was last week as R & L are on the same day; Edexcel split them up hence French writing GCSE was today.

OCR combined science -biology was “very nice” and french edexcel writing had “nice topics to write about”. The last double exam day for the DTs and French ticked off the list. Just geography, sciences and maths to go here. This time next week they will be finished. One of my DTs thinks French edexcel grade boundaries will be very high as all the papers have been nice. So hopefully that means the aim of the new french format has been achieved by making it more accessible.

We’ve taken to ranking the exam boards and their papers in our house.
I definitely think this thread could provide some constructive feedback to the exam boards

Thank you so much! Yes she's done lots of old ones, and the one you've linked they used for their mock. I cant believe there isnt more, she knows them all too much to be useful 😅. Dd says thanks 😀

@Caddycat genuinely I would try a couple of Edexcel ones then – new spec and legacy if not already done. It‘s all Spanish after all :)

I agree it’s rubbish that there is so little material. Like in 2016 when we started teaching the then new spec really cold. We barely had a textbook and just one set of sample papers and no idea at all what kind of mark would get a 5 or a 7 or a 9.

Ah that makes sense - yes it is IGCSE. Reading the posts I suddenly thought we’d missed a paper! Thank you

Shocking as there was a question about weight loss medicines on the Aqa paper for single biology.

Wow really! What was the question?

There was a graph that measured body mass after a drug x was given. The loss went up and up until it went down. They had to explain what was happening.

Yes my DS said it was super hard. He’s hoping grade boundaries will be high!

Yep. Super hard, came home in floods of tears.

However, she has managed to find the paper online late this evening and someone has also posted the answers by working them out. DD has calculated that she dropped 6 marks. Out of the entire paper! All that crying earlier and she has actually performed really well.

As I kept telling DD. FM is supposed to be hard. No one ever came out of a FM paper thinking it was a breeze. Even if you get everything right, you will have needed to work extremely hard in the exam to get each and every mark.

This is exactly what DD said, AQA higher was hard and everyone left the hall asking "what the he'll was that"..

My friend's son said it was the easiest paper so fat, so, although she says he us not doing foundation, I wonder, as it was apparently geography heavy, and he did history, as he struggled with geography.

Lots of tears, lots of anxiety here tonight.

DD worked steadily through exam period and before but I don’t think done a single thing for weeks on tomorrow’s Spanish. Tried to encourage but seems to have made the decision it’s the only one she doesn’t care about. Did ok in mocks so might get lucky and scrape through but it’s so disappointing that doing well in a language is not her priority. Many of her school peers also seem to feel this too. Feels like a wasted opportunity,

i told dd2 about triple being geography paper 4 and she agreed. However she loves geography, it’s her favourite so that possibly explains why she didn’t mind it. She did enjoy being told baby cars were kittens.

Does anyone know anything about Edexcel Geog Paper 3 (fieldwork) which is on Thurs? It turns out DD does not and she is getting in quite a tizz about it. I thought this was general almost at the end exhaustion but, on asking her more detail last night, I realised she really doesn’t seem to know anything about fieldwork! I’m confused as the Geog dept at her school is really good. My first thought was that we email her teacher but she reminded me he’s one of the teachers who is accompanying the school trip my son is on! There really doesn’t seem to be much about it online either.
She seems to have two issues, both of which are fairly fundamental. The first is that the teacher lost some of the fieldwork results including hers. My solution to this is that she just gets a classmates results as surely the examiner won’t know if it her exact results. And the second is that she simply doesn’t seem to know how to answer the questions.
I think she’s been aware for a while that this paper was going to be an issue but was counting on doing so well in papers 1&2 that it didn’t matter. And then those papers didn’t go very well for her!
One thing I have realised from these threads is that I should have been much more involved from an earlier stage. She has always had good grades, worked really hard and is very independent so it has been easy to leave her to it but I’m not sure how effective her revision has actually been. Sigh!

My son keeps asking how to answer the fieldwork questions. It wasn’t included in their mock so he’s never had an exam on fieldwork. There should be something in her geography revision guide though - I also found this guy online but not watched it fully yet.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eWmo9MJNajY&ra=m
ps my son edexcel A

Both AQA triple higher papers were so random this year. Almost like there was no point studying! I feel like the papers should contain a broad range of the spec.

@Ursulla42 problem with with ten GCSE and 22 exams by DD couldn’t deal with sheer volume so similarly Spanish is the victim

@Bluebelle8261 I said exactly that yesterday when DD said half the paper 2 topics didn’t feature at all.

@FoxandDuck does she have past papers to look at? Definitely get her friend's results, or even an example off t'internet. The examiner won't care whose results they are and she doesn't need to know them off by heart, just the broad methods and conclusions.

DS said he got the kitten question wrong yesterday. He was also most put out because apparently the question said that brown cats were worthless (obviously for the purposes of the question!). Ironically, we have two brown cats and one white one.

My biggest concern this week is Maths. OCR have given 2 much harder than usual papers. I really hope this weeks is kinder.

DS said that biology paper 2 was his worst so far compared to all the others (iGCSE AQA). Biology very much his least favourite science so he’s glad to get it over with. Further maths on the other hand he was very happy with.

He has an exam free day today which is just as well as zero revision has been done for tomorrow’s DT exam so far. He got a good NEA mark so I think is a bit blasé about the exam. Will have to see what happens tomorrow.

Dd was annoyed with biology yesterday (edexcel iGCSE higher). There are 6 or 7 questions and every year they are taken from the same 8 topics. Biology paper 1 was eons ago & she didn’t have the time to go over everything again so she focussed on the 10 most likely to come up.

Sod’s Law said they decided to change it up this year - it wasn’t a disaster she answered at least one of the 5 mark questions really badly.

Gearing up for chemistry on Friday, then physics on Monday. She’s got an unmissable family thing on Saturday so that will be a day off. She’s so close to the end now it’s really hard to stay motivated.

@mylifeisexams do you know any good videos to watch … I can’t seem to see many. Dd has done hardly any revision.

Further maths - there is a definitely a problem when consistently grade nine students are all saying how bad it was. The problem is when brilliant students are questioning their a-level choices because of this.There's a petition already that you can sign that hopefully will gain traction like the unfair maths Alevel exam that was in the news: https://www.change.org/p/review-the-june-8th-further-maths-exam

DS2 also doing the Edexcel A Geography paper 3 . He was equally lost at the weekend but I have seen him intently studying a CGP revision guide .. he says the YouTube posted above is Economics 😂