Aidan Batey, Head of Maths, New College Durham
‘GCSE Maths Resit Class 4K are sitting their assessment.
(Question 25) Round this number to the nearest hundred.
The type of thing they’ve done time and time again.
They only did this a few weeks ago.
We had a great lesson!
It’s only for 1 mark.
Why would they leave it blank?
Why didn’t they just have a go?
Did they simply run out of time?
It was a long assessment – maybe too long?
“25 questions is a lot you know Sir!”
But we needed to know if they’d made progress.
Perhaps they weren’t sure of the answer?
They were excellent when we did rounding in lesson!
“I’ll come back to it later once I’ve done the ones I’m good at!”
Bet they forgot to do so when they realised that the early finishers could leave.
Why didn’t they just have a go?
Maybe their attention span had disintegrated?
Their eyes flitting too hastily over questions, leaving this one unnoticed and untried.
“Oh yeah, I didn’t even see that one!”
What if they do that on their real exam?
Heavens forbid that they just couldn’t be bothered.
Yet another question on yet another maths test.
“Sir I’ve failed GCSE Maths like five times – this is a waste of time…”
But don’t they see they are getting closer and closer each attempt?
Why didn’t they just have a go?
I hope it wasn’t because they were afraid to get it wrong.
We had such a brilliant lesson on this topic!
“But I couldn’t remember if you round up or down when it is a 5 on the end…
I didn’t want to get it wrong – you’ll think I’m stupid!”
Their resilience is so low – what can we do?
And if I hear one more student tell me…
That you only need to go…
Up to the staples in the middle…
And that’s how you’ll get a grade 4…
“I’ve done enough by Question 25 surely, Sir?”
Why didn’t they just have a go?
All clouds though…
Less marking I suppose.’
Given the way that the GCSE maths curriculum is formally assessed, I suppose it is unsurprising that for many maths teachers the usual way of assessing student progress is to use exam-style questions. This might be on their initial or diagnostic assessments, or on mock-exams, or perhaps on shorter formative assessment used in class. It makes clear sense in terms of teacher workload and if the questions sourced have mark schemes available, then we can be even more assured about their quality.
But this can only shine a light on part of the picture of how an individual is progressing in their maths studies and in my opinion, this is even more pronounced when that person is resitting GCSE maths at college.
For those students there is one clear thread that connects them: they didn’t get a grade 4 (or higher) in the last exam series. How the sense of not-achieving manifests will be different for every student. Some might perceive it as outright failure while others may see it as a step in the right direction. However, there are so many other factors and reasons and variables as to why and how a resit student performs in maths that we must be incredibly careful not to make assumptions and inferences solely from the marking and review of assessments.
Getting a question wrong or leaving a question blank tells us something (but not absolutely everything) about levels of understanding and retention. How to find out the rest, well that’s the challenging part – but it can be done!
I would recommend doing everything possible to build learning environments in classrooms that encourage openness between students and teacher. Getting to a point where assumptions don’t need to be made because students are prepared to be asked “Why” and respond with honesty, this is key to genuinely assessing students above and beyond their test scores.
If we get it right, well, maybe next time they might just have a go.
GCSE Resits Hub Project 