[Corruptedmorals]

Originally Posted by cson

Aside from the whole marking issue two things come to mind

1) its all condensed into about 1 week, considering the LC is spread out over the guts of 3 weeks

Nah, my mocks were over 2 weeks. My LC is exactly 6 days..finish on the 13th. So doesn't apply to everyone...

[GretchenWieners]

Pres were easier for me, got 410 in them, got 390 in the real thing. It depends really.

[Peyton Manning]

Originally Posted by md99

Do you mean that the results are used to distrubute grades etc...

No. The mocks are generally harder because they put in difficult questions on purpose to see how the students can handle them. They then look at the overall results and establish whethern they should stick to the same difficulty level questions, or easier (depending on the results).

Making the questions hard on purpose nearly guarantees that no one will get 100% so they can see what level you are at as opposed to making them too easy, where they cant know how good you are.

[md99]

Originally Posted by GretchenWieners

Pres were easier for me, got 410 in them, got 390 in the real thing. It depends really.

Did you relax too much or not increase your study between the pres and the real thing? Out of interest.. I fear similar things to happen myself!

[Peyton Manning]

I got 350 on the pres, 475 on the real thing. The wierd thing is, I didnt increase my study load or anything. Id even go as far as to say that I did slightly less study so this is why I think the pre's are genuinely harder than the LC.

[penguin88]

I think people generally get more points in the real thing because they had more time to study. Even if you still study at the same pace for the mocks and the LC proper, odds are you'll do a good 3 months study by June whereas for the mocks you'll only have done 1-2.

Also, another misleading factor is that often the mock papers have questions, or parts of a question, on them which aren't actually on the course, hence why the questions might seem to be "difficult".

[Naikon]

It doesent help that in geography and physics for example have questions which havent been covered yet in School, so by mock exam time you have about 30 or 40 percent not covered.

[JC 2K3]

Originally Posted by Naikon

It doesent help that in geography and physics for example have questions which havent been covered yet in School, so by mock exam time you have about 30 or 40 percent not covered.

Depends on your school tbh. In Physics I've personally only not covered about 6% of the course in school. And it's not that hard to learn a chapter or two on your own.

30-40% is a massive amount to have not covered. Especially in somehting like Physics, which is a relatively short course... Or is that an exaggerated percentage?

[Naikon]

Well more like 20
Our physics class is a bit "behind" in terms of finishing the course.
God help the people in the Ordinary Class.
Seriously though I will have to cover a good bit on Nuclear/Modern physics and the options, and a few bits here and there.

[cocoa]

In regards to maths, the general trend (in the actual LC, not mocks) is for them to get harder, because otherwise they would be forced to issue the same questions over again (with different numbers, obviously...) so I was quite happy when my teacher said that he's mixing in some questions of his own to make the mock that bit harder.

Overall, I don't think mocks are any more difficult, but it would be quite common to raise about 50 points or so by the LC, simply through having studied more, lets face it, the LC is based a hell of a lot more on what you can learn off by heart than on on how actually talented/able you are. So it's logical to assume that you've learned a few extra pieces of information between the mock and the LC

[GretchenWieners]

Originally Posted by md99

Did you relax too much or not increase your study between the pres and the real thing? Out of interest.. I fear similar things to happen myself!

It was a mixture, I stopped caring after a while really but also I just got lucky with questions in the pres and the way English is marked. One of my friends went from 465-550 in the short space of time. Depends how committed you are.