The examiners claim that the English exam just assesses skills and barely assesses any knowledge.
As proof of this they compare the marks students scored in 2022 compared to 2019.
The mean mark has only dropped by 1%!
This is a very stupid conclusion. After all, if the examiners are right, they are claiming that your skills in English are dictated by your age. But their own data tells them this is rubbish. Every year thousands of students retake English and maths GCSEs. This is what happens:
“For example, in previous November series for GCSE English language and GCSE maths, about 60% of students get the same grade when they re-sit, about 30% improve their grade and around 10% get a lower grade.” Source: Ofqual
In fact, Ofqual also point out that, in English, 25% of grades awarded by examiners are too high every year. So, that means that we would expect 25% of students to resit and get a higher grade if they sat the English exam the very next day!
So how is it possible that grades only dropped by 1% in 2022?
Of course, there is another way of looking at this. The extra hours your teachers spend teaching you English language count for nothing. I mean, how many hours of teaching did students miss before the 2022 exams? Days, weeks, months?
It strongly suggests that the kinds of activities teachers give students to do for language exams doesn’t actually help them improve at English language!
As further proof of this, AQA gave out advance information for this paper in 2022. Teachers and students knew they were going to get a magazine article.
Well, what would you do? You would think: “AQA think it will be really helpful for me to know that my students are going to get a magazine article. So, I had better teach them how the magazine article is different to other persuasive writing.” Well, that was logical.
Why this lead to students getting lower marks!
So, students got much better at setting their work out in columns, and having headings and subheadings.
The first two were irrelevant, a distraction that didn’t cause students to lose marks. But subheadings did cause students to lose marks, because it meant they jumped from topic to topic, rather than write a coherent argument.
The Mark Scheme Never Changes
Teachers should have realised that the mark scheme is the same, no matter what the genre of writing. So students are marked for the quality of their writing, how persuasive it is, and how well argued.
The genre of the writing: letter, blog, article, speech etc is totally irrelevant to what your writing should look like or sound like.
See what I mean? Students are practising the wrong things.
The Solution
Read lots of persuasive pieces of writing.
Write lots of persuasive pieces and try to make them at least 500 – 700 words long.
Practice questions 2-4 under exam conditions as many times as you need to get the grade you want.
Revise what needs to go in each question and then do the question under exam conditions.
Mark the question and then do another one a week later to see if you improve.
If you want to read 11 top grade exam answers, with examiners commentary, click here.