Sats: Teachers react to ‘nightmare’ maths paper

The final Sats paper was taken today by Year 6 pupils after yesterday’s paper left children in tears
17th May 2018, 1:17pm

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Sats: Teachers react to ‘nightmare’ maths paper

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/sats-teachers-react-nightmare-maths-paper
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The final test of Sats week has received a mixed reaction from Year 6 teachers.

More than 600,000 10- and 11-year-olds did the 40-minute maths reasoning test today.

And while one teacher’s initial reaction on the Tes forums was that the test was a “nightmare”, others said it was “not too bad”.

“Well, having seen that nightmare of a paper 3 all I can say is I think the threshold will have to be a LOT lower this year,” one commenter said.

“Lower ability struggled - too much wording to wade through to really get to the maths!” agreed another.

But some felt it was fine. “My children seemed an awful lot happier with it than the previous maths papers and that was children from all different abilities,” one teacher said.

And another added: “I felt that today’s paper was much easier than paper 2. I don’t think that there should be such a big difference between the two papers and it would be fairer on the children if they were of equal difficulty.”

The paper follows two maths tests yesterday - a 30-minute arithmetic test and a 40-minute maths reasoning test, which were described then as ”the hardest papers of the week”.

And yesterday, on Twitter, teachers said that some children had cried after finding Wednesday’s maths test too much.

But social media was also helping to create light relief during the week - with teachers puzzling over the whereabouts of Chen, one of the children used to illustrate maths problems.

And soon Chen popped up on Twitter himself - as a spoof account.

And, with that, finally, the tests are over.

The results for all Sats tests will be returned to schools on 10 July.

A respectful message to teachers: We know how important these tests are, but please do not discuss the content as more children will be taking the paper over the next few days.

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