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GCSE question support

NAS75029

My son is in year 11 at a mainstream school.  He does well in class but cannot translate this on to the page - he always puts too little down on the page to answer the question but he is convinced that he has answered it all correctly.  His teachers have been telling him to answer the questions the way they tell him and not the way he does but he will not listen to them because he knows best.  He is very literal and does not seem to understand the need to expand and explain.  It feels exam technique related but this is not covered by any exam accessible issues - they seem to be based around giving him more time which is not helpful when he constantly finishes early!  Does anyone know if there are any tutors that can help him with this?

  • Yes this is an unfortunate problem that often turns up in autistic people, I know that I and some of my autistic friends struggled with it. I ended up working through it by having it explained that the exam wasn't marking whether you got the question right, but whether you ticked the boxes in the marksscheme. Although it seems (and often is ) stupid, that is what you are graded on. Once I got my head around this, which took a while but I got there, I started studying markschemes. Self marking by them, rewriting questions with the markscheme as a guide. For subjects that always have the same markscheme (history and English) I memorized it. I don't know what your school does in terms of access to markschemes, I know my teachers had varying opinions, but if you could talk to them about giving him the markschemes so he can practice with them and explaining the more obtuse ones (English, in particular, was bewildering) then he may find that helps. 

    The change of mindset from getting the question correct to ticking boxes was the key that turned it around for me. 

    Hope that helped

  • The teachers need to be, respectfully, informed that they are part of the problem. If they give fuller specifics about what they require in the answer to a question and put more detail into the question, they will get the sort of answer they want. It may be worth pointing out to your son that humouring people is useful, and that while his answers might be narrowly correct, they are not what will gain him full marks. I'm afraid that the world is full of unwritten rules that neurotypicals just accept and take for granted, that autistics find illogical and baffling. If your son can be brought to realise that there are illogical things that just have to be accepted it will help. It might be useful for his teachers to make template answers to certain types of question, where they translate the unwritten requirements into rules that your son can follow. 

  • NAS75029,

    By the sounds of it the school teachers don't know how to communicate with your son, they're going to have to acknowledge exam papers are not designed in the way your son processes and interprets language.

    Do explain it to him it's going to require being specific and detailed. If an employer asked an autistic adult "tell me about yourself." the autistic adult wouldn't know what to say. They would find it easier to understand if the employer was more specific like asking "what are you good at?" as it's more specific.

    If it just says "explain your answer" that can be too brief. Autistic people don't think in a generalized manner, they think specifically attending details which is why they can interpret specific language. 

    Try explaining to him with specifically and directly in steps what it means by expand his answer. It sounds like he has the details, but hasn't put the details together to make the general explanation.