I work with a guy who’s mid twenties and constantly tells me about how he was predicted 2 D’s and 8 Es at gcse. Instead he got 3 As and 7 Bs.
I always thought you were banded on exam papers? Eg maths was three tires of papers and most you could achieve was based on ability? Eg no point Someone who can achieve A* doing the same paper as someone with limited knowledge of the subject?
Uni is obviously different.
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Anyway
Assuming they were the same then as they were for me, yeah they’re capped.
Foundation papers could get a D at highest, it would be surprising if they expected a low result and gave him the higher paper, it would be setting him up to fail.
When I were a lad, they didn’t used to be banded, apart from the Sciences, which had upper and lower papers. I think they have that for most or all of them now.
Who’s Simone?
UK secondary teacher here. It depends on the subject. Some (like maths) have tiers; there used to be three tiers but there’s only two nowadays, with the higher tier catering for grades 4 – 9 and the foundation tier catering for grades 1 to 5. So yes, if you do foundation maths then you’re capped at a grade 5 even if you get every single question right.
Other subjects (most actually) don’t have tiers so the whole range of grades 1 to 9 are available. My subject (Computer Science) and my wife’s subject (English) are like this, as are most.
Just doing a bit of research, it looks like Maths, Sciences and languages (French, German, etc) use tiered papers but everything else has the same paper for all.
I was.
It sucked being banded lower in maths, when I got 97% and didn’t bother using a calculator. Teachers didn’t believe I could do complex equations in my head, despite me proving it time and again…. also I regularly corrected their mistakes.
I’m pretty sure my Maths paper was capped at a C because I wasn’t doing the higher paper, but on the flip side I think the higher paper failed you if you got below a C grade.
This was about 1995 and I definitely wasn’t going to pass the higher tier maths exam.
This really annoyed me a school. I got put in set 3, then consistently got 100% on tests. Should suggest I’m not in the right group, might be better in set 2 or 1. But went through all of secondary school in set 3 and got C, the highest I could possibly get.