This week saw the senior school involved in the first week of their prelim exams.\u00a0 For pupils in S5 and S6 this should now be familiar ground but for our S4s it is the first time they have really faced this intensity of challenge.\u00a0 I really felt for them because they are facing a new type of challenge as a result of changes made to the National 5 qualifications.\u00a0 This new challenge has seen unit assessments being removed and the length of the exam being extended.\u00a0 Several of their exams are now 2 hours and 30 minutes long (without a break).\u00a0 Indeed some youngsters with additional support\u00a0arrangements (eg extra time) could find themselves sitting in an exam hall for almost 3 hours!\u00a0\u00a0I know it\u00a0is a long time since I last sat an exam but it would have been at university and I am pretty sure it was not as long as 3 hours long.\u00a0 So I have nothing but admiration for the youngsters who are sitting their\u00a0prelims, particularly those who are facing the new N5 qualifications.<\/p>\n
I also have\u00a0a mixture of appreciation and sympathy for the staff who had to produce new exams and are now starting to mark the pupil answers.\u00a0\u00a0Marking was one of those\u00a0parts of the job which I never really liked but I knew that to make a success of marking there were\u00a0no short cuts, you\u00a0needed\u00a0to concentrate on the task (the marking scheme and the pupil answers in this case) and be willing to put in the hours.<\/p>\n
I also want to highlight the extra miles many of the staff and pupils have gone to in respect of extra preparation.\u00a0 I have seen a steady flow of\u00a0seniors arriving to the school when they do not have exams to attend revision sessions organised by their teachers.\u00a0 I am also aware of many teachers putting additional resources onto Google Classroom and responding to individual pupil enquiries\u00a0on-line.\u00a0\u00a0I am pretty confident that those who are willing to go the extra mile and put in the hours will see a difference in their eventual results.\u00a0\u00a0Back in August when reviewing the results of the main exams the staff could see a 2-3\u00a0grade difference between those who regularly attended extra revision sessions\u00a0and\/or were active in Google Classroom etc and those who did not.<\/p>\n
There is a parallel between what I have said above about marking exams and the advice I would give to those who are preparing to sit their exams –\u00a0there are\u00a0no short cuts, you\u00a0need\u00a0to concentrate on the task\u00a0and be willing to put in the hours.\u00a0 I have been really heartened to see so many pupils come in to do extra revision last week.\u00a0 If they keep doing this through to their main exams in May it will make a\u00a0big difference.<\/p>\n
Before closing this blog I want to mention two other brief but important things:<\/p>\n
This week saw the senior school involved in the first week of their prelim exams.\u00a0 For pupils in S5 and S6 this should now be familiar ground but for our S4s it is the first time they have really faced this intensity of challenge.\u00a0 I really felt for them because they are facing a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parents","category-uncategorised","category-weekly-blog","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.harlawacademy.org\/option1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}