Exam season 2024
We share the latest updates from our student community on how students are feeling post-exam and talk on site.
Exam season updates
WEEK 1
13th - 17th May
The first week of A-levels (13th-19th May) saw a 19% rise in pageviews on The Student Room compared to 2023 with more than 4.6 million pageviews in the first week of exams (week 2 of GCSEs for Year 11 students).
Study Help pages were thriving with a similar pageview growth y-o-y, and more than 20,000 posts were made across the week as Year 11 and 13 students discussed revision tips, exam predictions and debriefed post-exam.
BUSINESS (Paper 1)
Business kick started exam season, we saw that students have struggled more than their 2023 counterparts with 28% of our users telling us that they struggled in their first business paper compared to just 24% in the previous year.
The difficulty seemed to centralise around the Multiple Choice Questions and possible ambiguous wording and phrasing.
9 marker wasn't it? Hated the MCQ's why do they word them so horribly? What are we thinking about Paper 2? How's everyone preparing for it?
tbf it wasn't a bad paper but i'm not even gonna lie, that mcq was mean but apart from that pretty chill vibes
ECONOMICS (Paper 1)
We see a similar pattern emerge after our first Economics paper with just 68% of our users suggesting the paper went well compared to 76% back in 2023.
A common theme and complaint around the 2024 paper was around exam timings
I wrote mostly about barriers to entry and exit: big firms spend lots on marketing campaigns (with celebrities for example) and they also may take part in limit pricing (by offering big discounts) meaning they operate below supernormal profits (in the short run - EVAL) and disincentivises new firms to enter. I could've written more for it but ran out of time
Anyone know why this year timing was such an issue istg ive never had time issue but 20 more minutes and i would've cooked 😓
GEOGRAPHY (Paper 1)
We see our first positive exam compared to 2023 with a huge swing of 71% of our students believing they did Quite Well or Great in their exam this year compared to just 63% who thought similarly in 2023.
Interestingly the sentiment within the thread does not correlate exactly with the huge swing we’ve seen in our poll results with students speculating around low grade boundaries due to the difficulty in the exam.
Guys, overall do you think that the majority of people found it quite difficult based on what everyone is saying? and does that mean grade boundaries are likely to be lowered if that is the case?
PSYCHOLOGY (Paper 1)
A similar pattern to Geography with a large swing in attitude post exam. 80% of our users have said their exams have at least gone quite well, compared to just 72% last year.
What a beautiful paper?! I messed up my choice of stat test and couldn't think of a third Eval point for the Psychopathology essay but other than that it was incredible