Hey you! How’s it going? Me? Yeah all good … busy as usual, but busy is good.
Anyway, I’ve finally made it to the finish line of dissecting the Foundation papers from Pearson … so paper 3 is another calculator paper, and let me tell you, the examiners did not hold back on calling out the bad habits that are costing students easy marks.
The Good News!
When a question was purely numerical or a straightforward algebraic process, our students completely nailed it:
- Directed Numbers & Basic Proportion questions were absolute marks in the bank for the majority.
- Algebra Basics with solving basic linear equations and expanding a single bracket were strong areas.
- Bar Charts were drawn beautifully by most, though a few forgot to label the zero on the axis. I am an absolute ogre when marking these and never give full marks unless both axis are labelled, the scale is linear and includes a zero!
- Stem and Leaf Diagrams were not a typical “draw a stem and leaf diagram” but find the mistake style … Historically written explanations on what was wrong with a given diagram tend to be a disaster area but they actually showed some improvement this series!
What Caught Them Out!
Once again, students are actively throwing marks away because they aren’t reading the question or they are letting their calculators do the thinking without writing anything down.
- “Write it as a Fraction” Means NO DECIMALS!. … a frustrating number wrote a decimal instead of a fraction on the first question and got a big fat zero. Later in the paper, many successfully simplified a fraction but them also wrote a decimal on the answer line, completely spoiling it and losing the accuracy mark. RTFQ (Read the Flipping Question!)
- Mathematical Notation Crimes: This is a massive one for departments and teachers everywhere. Examiners explicitly stated that calculating say 45% of £4.00 (numbers changed to protect the innocent question!) by writing 45% x 4.20 is not classed as a mathematical method and so if the arithmetic is wrong and that’s all they wrote, they get nothing. We must teach them to write 0.45 × 4.20 or 45/100 × 4.20 … also, please tell students to stop doing “build up” (finding 10% first) on a calculator paper, it’s a waste of time and invites errors!
- Time is Not Decimal … the classic blunder returned with students treating 1 hour as 100 minutes … which reminds me that I once had a parent complain that open evening was closing early as it said 9 pm on the website … I had to explain that 19:00 was 7 pm and not 9 pm.
- Confusing Rules. Students were asked for even multiples of a number and many of them listed a bunch of multiples but didn’t circle the even ones and in another question, they had to find a pair of prime number that “summed to” a number but flipping tons of them “multiplied to” a number. I suspect this is because we refer to lots of maths questions as “sums” regardless of the operations involved … vocab is so important!
The Back-End Killers
Reading about the final third of the paper was a tough read, particularly on the crossover questions.
- Vector Vocabulary … Students do not know how to describe translations. They are using casual words like “move” (zero marks). When writing column vectors, they are drawing fraction lines between the numbers or writing “so many left and something down” instead of using actual vector notation.
- The Square Root Trap … in the multi-step calculator question, students typed the square root over the entire expression instead of just the first term and because they showed zero intermediate working, they got zero marks.
- Reverse Percentages … the classic trap claimed hundreds of victims when given a value after a reduction, they simply found that % of the given amount and added it on. Absolute carnage.
- Pythagoras in Context … a beautiful 5-mark question combining a triangle and a circle … and it tanked. Students needed Pythagoras to find the diameter, but most couldn’t link the steps together. It was the worst performing question on the paper.
After reading this I did go and check our ResultsPlus analysis for the back end of the paper and breathed a sigh of relief as all our questions were green (and some considerably better) when compared against the Pearson averages but to be honest that’s not a surprise given that our year 11 Foundation students focus on the crossover content!
Some other things worth noting …
The examiners made some suggestions in this report where students could tighten up their exam technique:
- Show the Screen: If they type it into the calculator, it must be written on the paper. No naked, incorrect answers! I tell my students that the examiner cannot mark their calculator screen!
- Reverse Check: Teach students to check their reverse percentage answers by reducing their final answer by 20% to see if they get back to the start.
- Formal Vector Rules: Hammer home column vector notation i.e. no fraction lines and definitely no text descriptions.
So, I’ve read all the sh!t so you didn’t have to! I hope it was useful and I’ll be back with more soon as the plan is that I’ll digest all the stuff that will come our way with the upcoming reforms and post the key points … it really helps me process the contents having to formalise my thinking.
Mel
Cheers Mel, much appreciated! 🫶