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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?

Parents

  • 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

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  • 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

Children
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