Poor EPQ results every year

Hi,

This might seem like a weird question but I wanted to know if others have seen the same. EPQ results at my school seem to be relatively poor every year and downright hard to understand with select students achieving A or A* and most achieving C’s and a few B’s. I dont believe this correlates to my school’s statistics as we are a grammar school that generally achieves higher than this in other qualifications such as the Finance course and other A and AS levels.

I myself got A* (47/50) and I am absolutely not complaining but many of my friends and people I know seemed to have gotten low Bs and some Cs, despite being people who are typically ‘smart’ - A students. I am also slightly baffled as even though I know I put a lot of effort into my project, I cant comprehend that it amounted to an A* as I was definitely lazy a lot of the times. I only wrote 4500 ish words despite the max being 5000 ish and literally gave up on the last section of my project log - the part that contributes the most to the AO3 marks. Also, reading back my essay is so cringey, my citations and references are NOT consistently in the same style (ngl, idek what style i used looking back) and the general wording of it seems so poor. To be fair, it may just be me being overly critical of it but either way I feel quite confused stilk about the overall results of EPQ in my school.

Reply 1

mungbean258

Original post

by Songbird19

Because the EPQ is an additional extra, many people do not put the same amount of time or effort into it as they do their A levels. It also requires a lot of initiative and is much more self driven than school work which is more heavily directed by staff and possibly parents. Therefore some people let it slip until it is too late to get the marks they could have, others miss the fact that it’s not actually primarily about the final piece but that keeping a strong log etc is worth so many points. Some students will not consider the EPQ as equally important to their A levels so do not put in much effort. If the quality of their research and evaluating of the sources is not strong then that impacts score too. EPQ is very prescriptive for how to earn points so it’s not that your work has to feel the best quality to you - it just needs to have ticked the boxes for points. Your assessor needs to see that you have shown that element once somewhere in any one part of your project to give you a point for it so it’s not about having the most poetic and beautiful flowing essay ever. It’s got to make sense though obviously!
Your school is capable of achieving high EPQ grades but it’s the students that decide if they are going to work at that consistently high level and commit.