My son came back from his Biology A Level on Monday all dejected. He and most of his peers had found it very hard. He said it had been 90% on Ecology, which was only a small part of the syllabus and they’d all revised genomes and the environment unnecessarily. He told me they’d had to discuss “why hedgehogs should not be killed” (or something like that, can’t quite remember). He said that a lot of other students were furious and were going to write to the examining board and complain about it.
Well. Today I see that it has made the papers. This sort of thing is where I think Facebook comes into it’s own – giving our children a voice to air their collective grievances. Almost 5K students have now jointed the group complaining about the paper. In addition having been advised in a revision guide not to learn lots of examples about “learnt animal behaviour” one of the questions, worth 11 marks was on just that.
It really is very sad to hear what they are all saying. Some feel their chances of a good grade has now been dashed – the paper amounts for half the marks of their final year – it seems so unfair to have restricted the questions so that they couldn’t show off all their knowledge.
One boys comment on Facebook page says it all .. “Goodbye Medicine”.
Tragic.
Muddling Along
June 16, 2011That doesn’t sound entirely fair to skew the exam that way – has the school contacted the examining board to raise a complaint?
Family Affairs
June 16, 2011Not sure but probably Lx
Working Mum
June 16, 2011I’m aghast at all the errors this year, but given the number of exams that take place with modular GCSEs for years 10 and 11, AS levels at year 12 and A2 at year 13 it’s hardly surprising. What happened to teaching a course and then examining it, at the end?!
Didn’t someone say “you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it”?
Family Affairs
June 17, 2011I agree. Ridiculous. Lx
Jon Storey
June 18, 2011Lauren must have been doing the same paper! Thoroughly brassed off but fortunately she had revised the ecology bits too but certainly it didn’t seem to be a remotely fair paper…..These kids work too hard to be teated unfairly.
Family Affairs
June 18, 2011Exactly x
concerned
June 18, 2011I totally agree, my daughter has spent months revising the syllabus & she was understandably upset when she came back from the exam. We were very grateful that someone sent her a newspaper clipping from The Times newspaper.I will be calling the school on Monday & have already written to OCR to complain.Thank goodness for face book as we thought we were the only ones.
Jon Storey
June 21, 2011Lauren did a Physics exam today, there was an error in the paper…..!!
Family Affairs
June 22, 2011GOD. It’s all so rubbish. Apparently one of the music papers had some of the answers on the back. GCSE Maths yesterday was a repeat of a March paper, one of the A level Maths paper had an impossible to answer question – TOO MANY MISTAKES – what is going on? Lx