Stuck on the same grade in maths.. help!

I am currently in Year 10 (15 years old.)

For around 5 terms now, I have been getting a 6B (equivalent to an old B1/B2 grade) in maths, consecutively. After getting the results of another monitoring test today and it being - yet another - 6B, I was rather furious. I will admit, I made several stupid mistakes as I had no time to check my answers at the end of the test; Although I answered all of the questions, there was absolutely no time to spare.

I was wondering if anyone had any tips to help me get off this level as I am going to push for an 8 (A grade equivalent) in my GCSE Maths. This is partly because I am interested in taking maths and possibly further maths at A Level - but that conversation is for another day!

All help is greatly appreciated,
Alex

Good evening!

I got my GCSE results back in August (I'm in Y12 now) taking AS maths, before (hopefully) doing A2 in Year 13.
Like you, I was on a C in Year 9 and was stood on a B from the beginning of Year 10 through to, quite literally, my final mock exam before the real one. So even the mock I did 3 weeks before my actual exam, I thought all hope was gone - pretty much like you. What you need to do, is thoroughly go through mark schemes and understand what they want exactly. Learn the patterns in the exams. Year in year out they ask Circle Theorems, Transformations, two-way tables, surds of some form, simultaneous equations. Ace them. And do not forget to do C, D, E grade stuff too! You may think you know them, but can you times your fractions, get full marks on SPAG questions etc. If you don't get those, you can't get the A at the end!

Just keep on going. Do past papers. Learn the patterns. Learn the mark schemes. Understand concepts - including the basics. There's no point learning how to ace the Cosine rule, if you then can't rearrange it using basic algebra to find an angle rather than a side.

Most of all, don't lose motivation.

It worked for me. I got my A grade in GCSE maths after constantly being bombarded with B's.

Good luck!

It's the most simple advice but it's integral in improving your grade. I assume that you get to see your exams so you see what you do well and don't do well in, no? Well go over them and look for patterns of what you're good at and what you're not. Don't necessarily forget about the stuff that you're good at, but focus on learning the stuff that you don't because that's probably what is preventing you from improving overall. Use resources that you know work for you.

Yes, we are given our tests back and it sounds stupid, but I was going to put it in a draw with the others we have had 👀 Thank you for this because now I realise that I should make sure that I am 100% confident with a subject before moving on and forgetting about it... I will also start to look back on old topics throughout the year which I may have forgotten and need to brush up on. Hopefully, doing so will reduce the workload that I have during exam season when it finally comes around for me and it will be a case of reminding myself of the information needed rather than re-teaching myself.

Thank you so much for your response, it had caused me to understand better where I was going wrong over the past year!

Kind regards,
Alex

No problem. One more thing just popped into my head because it's what I'm going to do in a few weeks. Ask your teacher for a list of things that you are going to learn in that term and during the holidays, learn them so you aren't struggling in class as much and don't have to consolidate it with revision that night or whatever. In doing that, you can go over more different topics at home during the school term while learning other things in school. It will be more productive instead of learning stuff in school and then going home and learning it again. See what I'm saying?