A-Level and IGCSE Results

By: Tara Ting

Have you written your exams? Well, I have. And out of curiosity, I wanted to know how everyone else’s went. Was it absolutely horrible or was it just me?

As we turn back the hands of time to May of 2022, we witness the hardships and struggles of students to escape the atrocities handed down by the school, also known as the A level and IGCSE examinations. These test scores determine whether you are fit to go to the best schools that will prepare you for the upcoming future, so you can imagine how much pressure and amount of all-nighters these students had to experience.

Students have waited 3 months to get their results, so the question is, “Are they satisfied with them?” Well, the answer depends on who you ask the question to. For the students that I have personally spoken to, the majority deems their scores terrible, with only 37% claiming that they are proud of their results. One student said that they want to explode and die after seeing their results, some have even started perceiving themselves as failures, with a couple of students saying that they could’ve done better had the school not changed the exams to offline in such a short time.

While I was interviewing them, students would give similar answers like, “my results were not bussin bussin” or “cringe”.

Jonathan, a student in JC1 Truth, had this to say, “ My results were not bad, but at what cost?”

Darren said, “ I’m a failure ahaha.”

However, not every single student seems to think of their results as an abomination of hell. A student said, “My scores are good because I worked hard. To see them reach that point is actually quite nice. On the other hand, now that I have good scores, I’m thinking about whether I should stay in BBS.” Some have stated that they are proud of their scores, and in turn, proud of their hard work.

To explore outside the minds of students, I have also gone to teachers, to tell us their perceptions of these scores. Are they really so-called 'abominations' that should be burned and chained to the depths of hell itself, or are they just alright and an overreaction from students? Here are their responses. Their names have been kept anonymous as a personal request from them.

“This year's A Level results was good as always, but we noticed for science subjects, some students who are capable to produce A* ended up having only A. There might be a few reasons for this but since Cambridge has their own standards to mark the papers, we accept the decision with some heavy heart. Apart from the high achievers not getting A*, other students performed as expected. Overall on average, we have 5-6 students getting A* in science subjects this time. The number is lower compared to what we used to get in the past.”

“Compared to the results from last year, this year’s A Level results are actually quite worse. But, I expected it since Cambridge was the one marking it this time. Since the start of HBL, I have noticed that students could not do as well as they could’ve done if it were done offline. We did not have enough time or resources to teach our students. Some of them could not understand the basic concepts, with the majority of them not being able to focus in class.”

“I am actually not surprised that my students received bad results. HBL had given them less time to prepare and less resources. There were a few surprises, in which students who could do good, were able to get less than what I expected. For those who had gotten average marks during tests, they performed really well.”

Overall, like the majority of students, the teachers seem to have grasped a similar idea, that students could have done better, had they been given enough resources and time to study. Despite the results, the majority of A Level students have gone to be accepted into their university of choice, and IGCSE students claim that they will try their very best to do better on the A Levels.

Sources:

IGCSE and A Level teachers

Anonymous Students from JC and Sec 4

Jonathan William Samad

Darren Putra Dahana