The anxiety of not knowing what my future will look like on Friday is dominating my every thought. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that I might have to redraft the life I’ve come up with over the last 17 years in an instant. I’m gripped with a weird sadistic excitement in possibly seeing the grade boundaries released by the exam boards in advance, trying to master the impossible alchemy of predicting my score based on out-of-context data with no relevance to my actual grade.
We might never be free from the anxiety presented by results, but this year is different. With the introduction of new courses in both AS and A levels, we know even less about the tests and grade boundaries that our futures will be decided by. Exam boards and schools, by understanding the process we have to go through better, can ease the stress and help us achieve.
Past paper problems
First is the issue of past papers, which are an essential revision tool for any maths or science student wanting to get a decent grade. Knowing and understanding the types of questions we’ll be facing in May helps us to prepare for them more effectively. It also helps teachers communicate what we need to know in a more efficient way.
This year, for most A-level exams, OCR, AQA, and Edexcel provided a maximum of three past papers. That means we have to delve into old specifications that cover areas missed in the new course and miss out some that were on this year’s tests. Most of my revision time was spent trawling through endless folders thick with digital dust for questions not seen in an exam hall for nearly 20 years.
That is not effective revision. The questions that I did find were either not relevant, on something I’d not studied, or unhelpful for the kind of practice I needed to do. Any extra resources the exam boards endorse are either behind a wall only accessible to teachers or in costly textbooks.
When asked, AQA, OCR and Edexcel responded citing specimen papers and other resources they had made available - and how highly responsive they were when it came to the scale of government exam reform.
Exam boards could easily improve on their current output. They could spend some time in the long off-season curating a much larger library of freely available exam papers for students to practice from. It’s definitely worth it, given the marked effect that easily accessible resources have on teaching and learning.
Understanding the process of revision is key. If you give us more of an opportunity to practice the types of questions you’re going to ask us, it reduces the pressure we feel profoundly and helps us get better grades.
Cohort in confusion
Another problem facing this year’s cohort is the confusion following the government’s frenzied reconstruction of the A-level system under Michael Gove. Despite most of our AS exams not counting towards our final grades next year - apart from maths, which for some mystifying reason still matters - many of us are sitting them anyway, only for the slate to be wiped clean in September, a month after we’ve been spat off the results conveyer belt.
This means we will find ourselves trudging through the ridiculous exercise of fishing for past papers twice: inevitably reusing questions from the year before rather than finding new areas for improvement.
It seems obvious to someone who has been through the system recently, but currently, an empathic understanding of these processes doesn’t appear forthcoming from exam boards or the government.
The political motivations of Westminster, the caring messages of teachers and the press releases of the exam boards will never be able to fully reduce the stress and anxiety that accompany results day. However, by working in students’ best interests and by listening to our criticism, they could help get us through it with a little less anxiety.
Will Allsopp is a sixth-former at King Edward VI school in Suffolk studying science
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