Tips from examiners

Functional Skills examiners report encouraging news that candidates tend to respond appropriately and enthusiastically to the questions asked. However, there are four main areas that examiners feel centres should address.

• Enter candidates at the right level

• However, there are some consistent issues raised in student responses. The most concerning is the number of students entered for the level 2 exam when this is clearly not an appropriate level for the individual. A significant proportion of students seem to be entered at Level 2 when it is clear that Level 1 would be far more appropriate.
  Our questions for centres would be:

  • Have these students already achieved Level 1?
  • Or were they only entered for the Level 2?
  • A quick checklist of their skills would reveal that these candidates would be unlikely to succeed at Level 2.

• Teach candidates basic exam technique

• Often very straightforward mistakes are made in the candidate's reading of the questions. Instead of reading a question carefully and making sure they answer the question exactly many (often quite able candidates) lose significant marks.

  Centres should also train candidates to look at the relative weighting of each question in the papers. Some candidates devote too much time to questions worth lower points and don’t leave enough time left to do justice to the remaining questions that were worth far higher marks.

• Presentation

• This is really obvious, but if examiners can’t read it, we can’t mark it. Emphasising this to candidates will help mitigate against the small but steady number of nearly unreadable scripts received.

• Checking

• The majority of candidates do not appear to check their work for either accuracy or sense. There is rarely any indication of this and in almost all instances papers would benefit from editing and checking for accuracy and sense.

Specific to Functional English

In Reading tasks candidates should take care to use information from the documents rather than from their own experience when answering questions.

Candidates should be encouraged to use their own words rather than copying verbatim from source documents. Centres could help achieve this by giving candidates opportunities to practice the skill of selection, rather than quoting extensively from the source documents.

Candidates should plan their time so that they have sufficient time at the end of the assessment for proof-reading and corrections, paying particular attention to spelling, grammar and in particular punctuation. Candidates will lose significant marks if capital letters and full stops are used inaccurately at Levels 1 and 2.

Specific to Functional Maths

Recommendations centre on training candidates to underline, and extract, key information given in tasks as well as giving them sufficient practise in answering open questions and communicating their solutions to others. Candidates should also be made aware of the importance of showing all their working and how they have come to an answer so that all possible credit can be given.

Being functional in maths is about more than the ability to simply use mathematical skills. Candidates are assessed on three interrelated process skills: Representing, Analysing and Interpreting. Only Analysing requires candidates to process and use maths. It is therefore essential that candidates show reasons, justifications and explanations for their answers.