no justice in Exam results

[MuchBrighterNow]

My ds' got their exam results today

Ds 2 only just passed , he revised really hard and conscientiously.

My other ds1 who is never at school, hasn't written a single note in class and revised less than nothing, ( I had to coerce him into turning up for them ) got top grades. He is now dropping out of school altogether as he feels its such a waste of time...

I am proud of them both but it just doesn't seem fair. Exams can't judge character, or effort or any other qualities and yet so much depends on them.

I can relate to your post muchbrighter.

I was exactly like your DS1- coasted and dropped out with decent grades.

My DSIS- worked butt off and got average grades and stuck in at school.

We are both in our mid twenties now and successful in different ways.
DSIS is a radiographer and I have my own business. We both own our own homes and are fairly successful but we're just not wired the same way.

Your DS1 will get a wake up when he's out of school. It's harder to coast, but don't feel bad about it. Classrooms just aren't meant for some, even the smart kids.

Remember, not everything hinges on exams. Depending on what you want to do there's always options.

Not everything is about exams! :) You can do amazingly well in them and struggle in the "real world", and you can also struggle through them and succeed in real life. They'll both be okay.

Thanks for your positive post cumber.

It's hard not to get caught up in believing that passing exams is the only way through.

We are sold the idea of there being no jobs available for the uneducated and then there's the worry of huge debts and still no jobs for those continue to study.

I don't think it's fair on children to put so much fear in them regarding exams... what they don't mention is that you could do your exams later, in a college, when you have the right mental frame of mind for it etc. or there's work based exams/vocations etc.

Not having a degree doesn't make you uneducated. There's thousands of degrees that shouldn't even exist as they're not worth the paper they are printed on. As we're learning the hard way now- having a degree, even a good one, no longer guarantees you a job.

I agree .. what's the point in getting into enormous amount of debt for a degree and even then have to do an internship for free before you can even hope to get a job.

Ds1 has jacked in his studies and wants to learn trade as he thinks a lot of education is pointless and irrelevant.

You hear a lot of people saying things like "DCs only get one chance at success" and "If they don't do well, they close so many doors"... It just isn't true. I taught in FE on an 'access to HE' course for years, where people who had dropped out of school or hadn't done well at O levels/CSEs/GCSEs returned to learning because they had decided they wanted to go to uni after all... They ranged in age from 21 to about 70... It's never too late to study if you're motivated. And frankly, now that it's so expensive, I can see lots of good reasons for not going to uni straight from school, or not going at all.

Also, incidentally, each level of qualification becomes pretty much irrelevant once you pass to the next level... So no-one ever asks again about GCSEs once you have A levels; no-one asks about A levels once you've got a degree, and so on...

Agree with flow's last paragraph more or less.
The rest, or what you choose to put on the cv, is glanced over.

I think I disagree with your op though.
My guess is ds1 is extremely bright.
There are some pople like you. And they drop out because they are bored.
And often they become entrepreneurs. Jolly good ones.
[some though go the criminal route instead, but from what little you whave writeen, doesnt sound like your ds1 is going down that route].

ds2 will probably be fine, job wise too, eventually.
Character shines threough in a job eventually.
He will be known to be reliable. loyal, hard working, team player etc. All valuable commodities once he is in a job, particularly if he enjoys that job. And if he doesnt, chances are he would get a good reference for the next one, again, important.

The reason we believe that everything lies in exam results is because schools (understandably) have to spend a lot of time preparing those pupils for whom life will be defined by their exam results. Doesn't mean the rest of humanity have suddenly stopped existing.

And what flow says about many more chances is absolutely spot on. I work at a university and I see a lot of students who have come in later in life, gone down the FE route for their A-levels and eventually end up getting very good degrees. One way in which the world has changed is that your life is no longer decided for you at 16: most people will end up changing careers and way of life at some stage.

My dd is very much the academic type and I was sorry indeed when she was ill and more or less dropped out of secondary because it seemed that the doors that were closing were exactly the kind of doors she would want to pass through.

In reality, no doors have closed. The Sixth Form college are still happy to take her on for A-levels (repeating her maths GCSE if she fails it) and she herself has made a change of plan that may mean that A-levels won't be that relevant anyway.

My db got into quite a prestigious university, then dropped out after his first term to get hands-on experience and eventually started up his own firm which has been very successful.

There are MNers who genuinely believe that their dc's lives will be ruined if they don't make Oxbridge and 200k jobs. And then there are the rest of us. We survive too

Good points cory
Also, I realised, eventually, as my kids went through the system, that Head of Years, are literally only interested on that year group.
If they are Head of Year 9, they are interested exclusively in Year 9's. Once they become Year 10's, they are not bothered on the whole.
They have a new set of Year 9's coming in to deal with.

Careerss? Not their problem. That is something that hapens and exists outside of school.

Just yesterday I was chatting to a young graduate of a very lowly ranked university. He was just about to start his first job.

In this recession with thousands of unemployed graduates, how on earth had he managed to land a decent job? "Not my grades" he said "My personality". And I can believe it. He had just presented to a room full of academics and technical staff and had been perfectly at home discussing some extremely technical issues with interested groups later.

Grades ain't everything.

Thanks for all the comments reminding me that school exam results aren't everything. It's true that noone has ever expressed an interest in the grades I got at school and even I can't remember them

I'm sure anyone who's motivated enough to retrain later in life is more likely to know what area they are passionate about and therefore make much better use of the opportunity.

I did my degree in the days when fees were paid in full , I had a full grant and worked as well. I actually left in profit. I certainly don't think what I got out of it would have been worth an investment of 10 or 20 grand, I was too young to really know what intersted me and retrained in a completely different area.

I think I was hoping my Dc would follow the well trodden path from school into higher education... it's been hard letting go of that. Maybe Ds is wiser than I give him credit for in wanting to go a different route !

.

What I am learning is that basically any worries you have about your dc's future are time wasted because you invariably worry about the wrong things: the things that never happen or the things that turned out not to matter or the things that turned into something really positive.

And in the meantime you have wasted the energy that would have been needed for the shit that did happen.

My parents worried about my emigrating, my ability to support myself and most of all about dh not being right for me. If they could have seen into the future they would have worried about my being the carrier of a genetic disorder (inherited from my mother, no less) that came close to ruining all our lives. Dh should not have been part of anybody's worries

FIL worried about his son's choice of career and his ability to support a family. Again, a lot of emotional energy wasted: dh has turned out to be considerably more successful in that line than FIL himself. A little investigation into the medical history of his future DIL's family would have been more to the point.

I worry about dd's physical health, her mental health and her ability to concentrate on her work. Which probably means there is some bastard out there waiting to break her heart.