Hey you! How’s it going? Good? I hope.
Anyway, I’ve read more sh!t so you don’t have to … this time it’s the examiners report for AQAs GCSE Maths Foundation Paper 1 and honestly, it’s a right mixed bag.
The Good News!
Let’s start with the good stuff because God knows we need some positivity in our lives:
- The overall data shows that the demand was completely on par with last summer … the mean marks and standard deviations are almost identical. So, no excuses about the paper being “unfair”.
- The kids absolutely smashed the bread-and-butter topics: the four rules of number, square roots, ordering basic numbers, time calculations, basic pay, and pulling data out of a two-way table. Brilliant. High fives all round.
What Caught Them Out!
But flipping ‘eck, the stuff they struggled with makes me want to weep into my coffee. They completely lost the plot on relative frequency probability reasons, writing fractions as decimals, and drawing graphs from equations.
And don’t get me started on algebra … when adding expressions, we had students deciding (it’s not the same question I’ve changed it slightly!) something along the lines of 3𝑥 +2𝑦 =5𝑥𝑦 … No, just… no!
In addition to this, students dropped marks because they left a coefficient of 1 instead of just writing the letter … I’m not sure how I feel about this!?!?! I know the question asked for the simplified form and students were only penalised on the first occasion of writing 1𝑥 instead of 𝑥 within the question, but mathematically 1𝑥 is correct … well … it’s definitely not wrong! Maybe this is just an AQA thing but definitely worth being aware of if you teach this specification.
Some other things worth noting …
Worth giving these a special mention, because they are relatively easy things to address in the classroom :
- Basic Arithmetic Slips: Comments were made about students making basic numerical mistakes, lots of which are primary school number facts.
- The Decimal Remainder Myth: Remainders when dividing wasn’t dealt with well and so students arrived at the wrong answer resulting in them rounding down instead of rounding up in the context of the question.
- Graph Plotting: Stop joining smooth curves with straight, rigid bloody lines!.
Basically, It’s the same old misconceptions costing them easy marks. What I really like about reading the examiners reports is that when it comes around to me using the papers for mocks I breathe a huge sign of relief to find that my students make the same mistakes that others do too!
Paper 2 up next. Have a great Friday y’all.
Mel
