Tag / exams

by Jessica Edwards

GCSEs

With my exams starting in just over a week, and my Spanish Speaking exam on Wednesday, my blog has been the least of my worries.

Every time I would sit down to write, I would instead revise, or watch Netflix, but never actually write. And I’m not upset about it. My exams are my priority right now, because I know I will never be able to make a good, sustainable living from this blog, it’ll only ever be a hobby. My GCSEs help sculpt my future, and I need them more than a regular post schedule on my small blog.

I finish my final exam on the 14th of June. From then all I will be completely free to do whatever I wish. I’m going to try to travel, read a lot more, and maybe get a job (I’ll have to sort out my CV first though, it’s a mess). I’ll be able to brainstorm ideas more easily, be happier, and consequently more creative. I’ll try my best to keep to a regular schedule, but my school work will always come first, so it may not happen.

I’ll also have more of social media presence, posting more on both Instagram and Twitter.

Just hold onto until June. The best is yet to come.

by Jessica Edwards

My GCSE Mock Results

Before I tell you my results, there is a few things I want to mention. First thing; I’m sorry that I didn’t post last week. I mentioned it a bit on Twitter, but basically, with it being the first week back at school, I was stressed and exhausted, and I went on holiday with my dad that weekend, so I didn’t have time to write. I do feel upset about it, but I know I can get back to posting now.

Also, I’ve been really sick all week, but I managed to drag myself into school every day, no matter how difficult it was and how miserable I felt.

Finally, before I give you my results, I want to tell you about my new partner. I have partnered with The Exam Coach to offer you The 7 Day Exam Plan. This is seven days of lessons filled with tips and tricks to help you ace your exams and reach your GCSE goals. I tried the product out myself and I absolutely adored it. I would definitely recommend buying this product, and definitely sooner rather than later. The sooner you implement the advice given in the podcasts the better. It will definitely save you a lot of time, resources and heartbreak, especially as exam season draws ever nearer. Here’s the link: The 7 Day Exam Plan

On to the only reason you’re really here, the results. DISCLAIMER: You may think my results are absolutely amazing, you may think they’re a bit rubbish, and that is absolutely fine. Success is individual, and everyone sees it differently. Just because I may be upset with a grade that you think is way above what you can get, doesn’t mean that I think you’re stupid or anything like that, I might have just wanted higher in that subject.

English. You either love it or you hate it. I’m definitely on the latter. The lessons bore me so much, and I just can’t really get my head around it. I felt both literature papers and the language paper 2 all went quite well. And I would’ve been happy with anything above a five. In literature I got a 6-, which is a B, and I was really happy with it. I knew I’d done better on paper one, because I can’t do An Inspector Calls or poetry to save my life. In language, we only did paper 2, because we’d been studying it in class, and the extracts were on like surfboards or something. I got a G7, which is my goal for August, which I’m so happy with. I’m not going to aim for an eight, just a higher mark, because I was only 3 marks into that grade. Overall, I’m proud of my two English grades.

Next is maths, my favourite and most important subject. We did our three papers in November, and we got the results in January. I got a 7, which I know is an amazing grade at this stage, but I was so upset with it. All I wanted was an 8 in maths, just to prove that becoming a maths teacher, and being a good one at that, is actually a plausible thing. After lots of talking to my teacher, I finally got over myself, and she convinced me that she’s certain I’ll easily be able to get an 8, or even a 9, which would be absolutely amazing.

After maths on the list is science. I take triple science, so have three grades, all 6s. When I say I hate science, I mean I hate science. Namely biology and physics. The topics in biology are boring and almost all useless for everyday life. For example, the structure of  a leaf… I don’t need to know about stomata and phloem and xylem. And the physics topics are just confusing and difficult. I kind of like chemistry, it’s more interesting and I love my teacher more. I was really happy with my 6s, because I didn’t think the exams had gone well at all. On the second physics paper, you needed 70% to get a 7, and I got 70%, which I was so proud of! It may have only just been a 7, but it was still a 7.

This is definitely the most controversial of them all. DT: Graphic Products. After the exam, my teacher sat us all down and told us that we’d all failed it, and there was only person who “did well enough to get a decent grade with coursework”. He said who it was, and it wasn’t me. That’s why I got a 5 in my exam, a 6 in my unfinished coursework, and a grade 6 overall. I didn’t fail the exam, and I got a decent combined grade. To say I (a) don’t care about the course, (b) have an incompetent teacher who didn’t teach us any of the theory that was on the exam and, (c) didn’t do any revision for it, I did flipping amazing! I’m not bothered about getting anything above a 6 in August, and I only want a 6 so it blends in with the rest of my results more than if I got a 3, for example. I am, however, upset about my coursework grade. I’ve been told since the beginning that my coursework is perfect, but I only got 71/100. The mark does seem better than the grade, because it is. I was TWO MARKS off a grade 7! There are two classes, one of them has a decent teacher who actually marks their coursework and gives them time to improve on it… then there’s my class. Three weeks or so before the coursework needed to be marked for the exams, the other class were given feedback sheets on sections three and four, so they had time to improve and tweak the pages before marking. My class did not get that feedback. I could’ve easily got a 7 in the coursework with that feedback, and it hurts that I didn’t. I could rant about him for hours, but I won’t.

Next is history. It was one of my favourite subjects before I realised how content heavy it is, and how much work it is. I do still enjoy learning it, but applying it to exam questions and having to revise it isn’t my jam. We had two of the three exams: Medicine Through Time, 1250 – Present, and Weimar and Nazi Germany. I thought both papers went okay, but I did better on the Germany paper. I was right. I got 7s on both papers, but they were low 7s, so my overall grade was a 6. I’m also really happy with my 6, because I struggle to remember all of the content in History, because there is just so much of it. I’m not bothered about getting anything higher than a 6 in August because I’m not going to really ever need something higher than a 6.

Last but not least is Spanish. I like Spanish, I’ve been doing it since I was in Year 2 (in an after school club), and I’d like to think I’ve always been quite good at it. I wanted an 8, but I got a 7. I’m not really upset about it because it’s still a really good grade, especially in another language. It means that by August I should be able to get my 8, which I’d be really happy with. Having a second language GCSE can be so useful when going to job interviews, or just generally if your travelling in a country that speaks it.

And that’s all of them. Overall, I’m really happy with them and I know that with proper revision I can get even better. I wish I’d heard about The 7 Day Exam Plan earlier, before I did my mocks, so I could have done better, but I have all of the information now, which is what counts. I really do recommend buying it and trying it out, it’ll work wonders for your exams. Here’s the link again: The 7 Day Exam Plan

by Jessica Edwards

Mock Exams

Monday, I started my mock GCSE exams. We’d already done the three Maths papers and the one English Language paper that we were doing, so I have all of my other exams now.

I’ve been quite stressed over them, mostly because I’ve had hardly any time to revise, it definitely didn’t help that my Graphics teacher wanted six pieces of homework due in over the last weekend, which I did not have enough time to do, as I was playing football in the morning and watching football in the afternoon on Saturday.

First this week, I had English Literature Paper 1. The texts that we are doing are Macbeth and Jekyll and Hyde. I was a lot more confident before the exam, and as soon as I read the Macbeth question it just plummeted, I was so shocked. And I think that the Jekyll and Hyde question was good.

I didn’t have any exams on Tuesday, but Wednesday I had my Spanish Listening and Reading, which I weren’t too confident going in to, and I don’t feel like I performed too great in them either. When I got to the translation at the end, I genuinely felt like I was going to cry, in the exam hall. I’d had a banging headache for over an hour and I felt like I’d done so bad, and there was still this rock hard translation to do. I pulled myself semi-together, had a vague guess at the words and phrases in the translation and called it a day with about 20-25 minutes left.

That was my last exam of the week. Hopefully, I’ll be getting my maths grade on Monday, and I’ll be tweeting about it, so be sure to follow me if you’re interested in that. My next exams are on Tuesday and they’re Physics Paper 1 and History Paper 1, and I’m dreading both of them. I’ve been prioritising Physics over History, and I’m not really sure why, because I think History is by far the more interesting of the two. There’s just a part of me that wants to do well in all of my sciences, maybe because they’re difficult, and I want to feel that achievement, or just because I feel like it. I’m really not sure.