11 Plus Exams Forum

It's now only days til my DD final A2 exams...,its been a roller coaster but she is know calm and foccused thankfully.

I think, in fact, she just wants to get intot he exam room now and ' download' all the info.

She is slightly anxious about not meeting her offer, but only in a fairly low key way - mind you by August 15th it'll be a different story.

How are your DC? And you? How have you found this journey? And do you, as I do, feel quite nostalgic now our DC have finished school?!

Some Y13s had exams before half-term so many students have already begun 'the final lap'.

Next year there will not be January modules to ease the load ...

At least the bad weather means they have fewer excuses not to revise ...

Yes Guest 55, the January modules make a huge difference.....my younger son will have this new system to contend with....nightmare. Presumably there will be a shift in grade boundaries too as they'll all find holding that much knowledge harder?

A2 girl is endlessly procrastinating, little revision.
GCSE girl is head in books, lots of revision.
Uni 1 girl starts finals today. No idea...
Uni 2 girl halfway through Y2 exams and says she is leaving to become a farmer

Good luck everyone.

DD is already stressing about this. She is in the middle of ASs atm and feels very worried that if she messes any up she will have to wait a whole year to retake them. I have explained that things were like this when we were young, but of course they are so used to having modules and possible re-sits now that it feels like an entitlement - a safety net.

I was out with friends on Monday whose oldest child is at uni and has had a major shock with 3 hour exams, covering a whole year's work, as the longest he had sat before were 90 minutes and they covered a couple of modules.

What I think is unfortunate is that AS levels won't be scrapped instead of just being tinkered with. It would be so lovely for young people to have a bit of a breather between one lot of high-stakes exams and the next, even higher-stakes exams, in order to do something other than study themselves into a frenzy.

Just saw yours Belinda:
All 3 of mine are studying!
But their mother who has a 20 000 word dissertation to write is eating pistachios, texting a friend, watching it rain on her washing and posting on some daft forum.

Amber wrote:DD is already stressing about this. She is in the middle of ASs atm and feels very worried that if she messes any up she will have to wait a whole year to retake them. I have explained that things were like this when we were young, but of course they are so used to having modules and possible re-sits now that it feels like an entitlement - a safety net.

They'll all be in the same boat.
The wise thing to do would be to give very careful consideration which ones, if any, will be resat in the following May (most AS's are in May) without jeopardising A2's in the June (most A2's are in June). And they'll have almost a year to decide, plan and revise.

Amber wrote:But their mother who has a 20 000 word dissertation to write is eating pistachios, texting a friend, watching it rain on her washing and posting on some daft forum.

At least your 3 are revising!

Didn't the Gove-ment announce that he (they) were doing away with ASs for the current yr9 cohort, or was that another pie in the sky policy?

moved wrote:Didn't the Gove-ment announce that he (they) were doing away with ASs for the current yr9 cohort, or was that another pie in the sky policy?

I wish they had done awY with them already. Another year of exams for my daughter, who is really fed up.

One of the options mooted was not to do away with the AS level, but make it a standalone qualification which did not contribute to the A level. That would mean deciding at the beginning of sixth form, instead of at the end of year 12, which of your 4 subjects you were going to drop, because potentially, any study you did for AS would not be of value for your A level, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, you'd have to study the A level curriculum alongside the AS curriculum. Though I did read somewhere that it might be possible to teach some A level and AS subjects in parallel. It sounds like a complete dog's dinner, and the worst of all possible worlds. Or are we going to go back to the study of just 3 A levels for the whole of the sixth form? AS levels were supposed to add breadth to the very narrow sixth form curriculum. Whilst I dislike the constant pressure of exams, I'm relieved that my DS is year 10 and not year 9.

My DS is in year 9 - in fact all 3 of mine seem to be in years where change is due! I thought they had given up on the idea of dropping ASs because the universities like them? Or was that just discussed as an argument against them? I'm keeping everything crossed that DD won't have to do any AS retakes next year as the thought of her doing the work she has done for the exams this year, plus A2 revision does not appeal.