Ninja wrote:57/80=A*
It's a looooooooong story. My year is the last year to have proper English Controlled Assessments. Each of these controlled assessments have a maximum number of marks, but not all are equal, for instance the one of Macbeth is far larger than the descriptive writing.
Now, those marks you get in the CAs go into an equation, and when they pop out, you find out how many marks you need to get in the paper to achieve an A* grade. I need roughly 56 because I blitzed those CAs, so while 57/80 may be an a* grade on the paper, you have to factor in CAs
And the thing is, this isn't like a maths test where you can get up to 90/95 or even 100%, this paper is difficult because of its nature and the time management. You have six questions, the first three questions are worth 8 marks, then next two worth 16, and question 6 worth 24 marks. We are urged to do question 5&6 first as they are worth the most marks, then move on to the others. 5&6 are relatively simple descriptive/persuasive/explanative writing tasks, but 1-4 is analysis of texts.
Said texts are the tipping point, our teacher pulled some strings and got us a new past paper, as we had used all the available ones, it was from Northern Ireland and was bloody tough. The three sources (1-Q1, 2-Q2, 3-Q3 and 4-Q3 and 1 or 2) were sparse, with the closest thing to literary techniques in them being a semantic field- when the writer talks a lot about one subject and starts using terminology from it. Because said texts were so difficult, we all faltered once we got to Q4 onwards and the grade boundaries were low. I did fine and got about 51, which was an A if I remember, it could have been an A* (favouring in my controlled assessments). My buddy is great at English, but struggled with the texts. He missed out one question completely but still got an A, simply because he did good in his CAs and blitzed Q6-4