Two years ago, I was waiting for “my envelope”. I had just sat my Scottish Gaelic exam a couple of months prior to that (at the age of 35 — and they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks 😆). Now, you might be wondering why I am leading with a story about getting an A if I’m planning to talk about failed exams.

See, I can’t lead with a failed-exam story of my own (I don’t have any from when I was a student — nerd alert! 🤓), but I can lead with how I was approaching this one. Because in a way, this was the first time I had skin in the game, so to speak. This was my first-ever exam I paid to take. (The downsides of being a mature learner — nobody pays for my educational whims anymore.)

But I knew that in case I failed, it wouldn’t mean “I’m a total failure”, or “I can’t learn Gaelic”; it would just give me particular information. And how I’d use it—that would’ve been up to me. (And you bet I’d go for the resit next year 💪)

But there are different ways to act after the envelope arrives and reveals unsatisfactory results — be it a fail or even just not the desired grade. “Unsatisfactory” can mean different things; I’ve worked with plenty of students who simply wanted to get a better grade, even though they actually didn’t fail, and got “the pass”.

You can either panic and start throwing “solutions” at the problem: buying (more) revision guides, booking tutors, signing up for resit courses...

Or you can pause for a moment to evaluate the problem before piling solutions on top of each other and possibly burying your teen under even more pressure.

You may have expected things wouldn’t go well. Or you may have been genuinely surprised by the (low) result. Either way, understanding what caused the result will help your teen on their resit journey.

I should add: if that’s what you decide to do, as there are different ways to deal with a “failed” exam. I wrote about this a little while ago.

What I’d like you to take from this, first and foremost, is that a maths result is information. It is not an identity.

A maths result tells you where a learner is right now. It does not tell you where they can go.

Many learners carry a particular idea which is rather dangerous, as it’s actually affecting their chances of getting better the second time around. The idea is that “if I fail maths, it means I’m not a maths person.” And that sticks better than a sweaty shirt to your back after a day of hiking. And nobody wants sticky shirts or bad ideas about their maths identity.

Let me tell you right now what the exam measures: A performance.

A performance on that day (even how well you slept) and in that format (surprisingly many learners don’t get the extra support they require — I could talk about that a lot, but not today). Some exams are supported by coursework and spread over time, but with maths, it’s often just one day, or 2-3 parts, but they take place very close to each other (less than a month apart). And that makes up the grade. You may wake up unwell, or anxiety and stress about the unknown take over. All of these things play such a huge role, and none of that is a true reflection of the learner’s capabilities.

Let me also tell you what the exam does not measure: the learner’s intelligence, their potential, or future success. And it certainly doesn’t measure their ability to learn.

Too much or too little effort doesn’t necessarily correlate with the results

“Yeah, that all sounds nice and floofy, Veronika,” you may think. “But I know my teen was slacking and not preparing as much as they should.”

If that’s the case, then… Ok, I’m definitely not pretending effort never matters. Of course, preparation matters. Maths does require practice (and understanding, and a lot more). But even if your experience is that “they didn’t work hard enough,” that is often signalling something we shouldn’t ignore. That is still information.

It’s tricky not to get frustrated when it seems like the failure is your own teen’s making. Because it seems they were not working hard enough towards the exams. But this kind of avoidance can mean much more than just “being lazy” (sometimes far from it).

Avoidance can mean anxiety or overwhelm. There may have been previous failures that created fear and led to shutdown (“if I don’t try, I won’t be disappointed”). This could’ve been caused by not knowing where to start, missing foundations… And those (among many) are signs of an unsuitable learning environment.

That’s not a criticism of either the learner or their trusted adult. It’s just something you may have discovered now. And that’s ok, because that means you can now turn the tables more easily than pushing the same “just work harder” routine, which clearly didn’t get your learner to the desired outcome.

But I’d say that more often than a “lazy” learner, there is the “hard worker”. And for some reason, the result didn’t reflect their efforts.

For both sides of the spectrum, as well as the vast range of effort levels between the two extremes, there is something I want you to consider. The unsatisfactory exam result gave you information. And this information is telling you that there’s something imbalanced in your teen’s learning environment. Let me tell you a bit more about that.

There’s this thing I call Three Learning Layers…

…but without going into too much detail about this right here, think about these few scenarios first: 

A student can struggle because they have gaps; perhaps they missed key building blocks. Or at least that’s what it often looks like on the surface. But maybe they didn’t have the right routines and revision strategies. And on top of that, they may have reached the point where maths became: “I’m just bad at this,” rather than: “I haven’t found the way that works for me yet.”

These are all different parts of the learning layers. It’s not something I discovered or made up; it’s what I observed for over twenty years of working with learners and helping them with maths. I talk about this more in depth elsewhere, so let’s, for now, focus on the moment when you find out that “a resit might be needed.”

An exam result is a snapshot of a journey, not a definition of the traveller.

For me, the worst thing about potentially failing an exam as a teen would be the effort required to retake it and the extra time I’d have to spend studying. But I know that for many, the worry is more about the figures — where, at the national level, the resit success rate is quite low on average. And that’s why many learners panic, as they feel like their chances of passing or getting the grade they wanted have effectively shrunk. Because, of course, knowing the pass rates are lower affects how we think about our chances. And that’s a scary trap we don’t want to fall into.

You can think about it another way: Average figures about resit success don’t affect the learner. It’s the other way around; the learners directly affect the figures.

So, now that we've established that it’s not a thing to worry about, look at it from the bright side: Actually, in a way, you have the advantage now of knowing what to expect. And also knowing (at least roughly) what went wrong. So you have something to start from. You’re in a better position than before you took the exam for the first time.

And now you also know that there’s more to it than just “more practice” and “closing gaps” 😉 The way we think about the whole resit shenanigans matters too. Feeling stressed and pressured affects performance. That’s a known thing.

See, my resit students have been on average achieving a much higher success rate than the national resit success rates. So I know that taking a resit doesn’t mean the learner’s chances of succeeding are suddenly lower.

On the other hand, I bet many resit takers get extra tuition or other support. So why is the resit pass rate generally low? It’s not because I’m some sort of miraculous educator. My students didn’t suddenly become different people overnight. We changed the conditions around their learning.

And that’s something you don’t need me for. I’m not a gatekeeper of the secret sauce. I can deliver the change, but I don’t claim to be the only one who can. I’m happy to share what I’ve learnt. And that’s why I’m writing this piece right now.

Replace the panic; it’s not serving you

Now, we’re back to, “Ok, so what shall we do?” As I said earlier, the panic response is, “Find a tutor, buy a course, do everything at once. Ideally. Just in case.”

But I’d like to lead you towards this way of thinking: Before finding more resources, find the missing piece.

These questions might help:

What actually went wrong?

Was it knowledge, confidence or both?

How was our revision approach?

How about the exam techniques?

Was there a lack of suitable support?

What you’re looking for is a mismatch between the learner’s needs and their learning environment. If they’re supported across all three layers, then it all works well. But if something is missing, the three-legged stool looks wonky. It won’t fall (that’s the physics of having three legs), but the important things (knowledge, progress…) will keep sliding off the surface the more imbalanced the three legs, or rather the three learning layers, are.

Once you find the missing piece, you can start working on it and see how learning starts to feel lighter and no longer requires so much effort with little to show for it.

Understand the story first, act later

I’m not saying you shouldn’t get extra help, be it a tutor, a course, a textbook, or any combination. But before you decide what happens next, understand the story behind the result.

If you want to understand the learning environment and how to better support your young learner, read The Story. I promised no gatekeeping, so you can dive in right away and plan your next steps after receiving “the letter” with a better mindset — not while panicking.

Here’s to the results you desire! ☀️