Exam results

While we were in the waiting room Becky texted me Tim's GCSE results - he'd done well enough to stay on at Sixth Form and had got 7 As which is pretty good. Tim was away on scout camp and she'd got his results on-line. She came round after we got home with her ipad. Exam results these days are complicated. There's a column of letters at the top and a whole load of figures at the bottom and if you're a parent you have a tendency to look at it and say; "What does it all mean?"

We eventually got it sussed and she decided there wasn't much point in trying to get any of his papers re-marked as he wasn't close enough to any of the grade-boundaries (we didn't have words like that in my day) to get an A* (we didn't have A* in my day either). 

Actually I think I've just about got to grips with the school exam system now, now we're nearly at the end of it all.

Perhaps I should just mention J's exam results. As expected he did really well in Maths, Further Maths and Physics (in fact he did very, very well in some of his Maths modules). However Chemistry was a bit of a shock - two grades lower than he expected. Strangely a lot of other people in his year also got unexpected Chemistry results. One girl was given zero marks which seems very odd and understandably she was in floods of tears. 

As J was only two marks below the next grade we decided to apply for a re-mark. This cost us £45 for each of the two papers to be marked and £10 for each paper to be returned -  a total of £110! But then it is our child's future possibly at stake. Paper 1 came back with exactly the same mark and we waited a few more days for Paper 2. Finally the email popped up - 7 marks higher which took him up to the next grade - phew. And we receive £45 back which means the exam board has made £67 out of marking his exam wrong. Something just doesn't seem right about this. We haven't got the actual papers back yet so can't work out what happened.

Anyway J has done well enough to apply to the unis he likes - yay - well done J.

Oh and he passed his piano exam as well.