March 2021

November 2020 Papers now Live

We are delighted to announce that we have now added another set of GCSE papers (November 2020) to all of our member accounts increasing the overall test quantity to 60. As many of you will be using these papers to help determine teacher assessed grades, we will only release these once you have contacted us. Even though the tests are locked by default, we understand the sensitive nature of these assessments and do not want students to gain early access without your full permission. 

Improvements to Feedback and Annotation tool. 

We have ironed out a few bugs in the way student and teacher data was saving so you can be sure that all annotations will be kept on each question. We have also decided to separate teacher feedback from student annotations so that neither user can delete or change the other user’s notes. 

This feature has been a huge hit during the lockdown period, and our members are realising that our online mocks can in fact be delivered very accurately and efficiently when teachers supplement our auto marking with human judgement. 

New Login Screen 

We hope you like our new login screen. It is much easier on the eye and if you are bored, the squares will light up if you hover over them. If that wasn’t exciting enough, we have written a more comprehensive introduction animation which we would encourage all teachers and students to click through. This contains some general advice around navigating the website, important shortcut keys and tutorials on how to use the various drawing and construction tools. You will also find a link to our latest news which will bring you back to this newsletter (and previous editions). Finally, we will be developing our social media presence over the coming months so please follow us if you enjoy our service. 

Improved Filters 

You will now notice that you can isolate crossover content from either tier to help teachers and students focus on this important section of questions. We envisage that this will be extremely useful next year when making decisions about tiers of entry. As a reminder, students will only need to complete these questions once at either tier and work will be automatically transferred to the other tier. 

The other major filter improvement relates to the addition of difficulty levels. We have categorised every question from the live series test papers into deciles using Results Plus performance data. This means that you can now isolate the easiest questions (0-10%) up to the hardest (90-100%). This could help if you are planning to take a criteria based approach to grading.