As pupils across the UK anxiously await their GCSE results, Daniel Hordon looks back at when he sat his GCSEs seven years ago and tries resitting his maths exam. 

Seven years ago, I sat down at a wobbly little table equipped with my calculator, protractor, and pair of compasses ready for a mental workout.

I am, of course, talking about sitting my GCSE Maths exams.

Amid the sea of students also bracing themselves for the next 90 minutes, at tables which were littered on the underside with 10 years’ worth of ex-students used chewing gum (lovely), I could see the finishing line on my five years at high school nearing ever closer.

I should state from the outset that I always loved maths at school, was a self-proclaimed nerd, and got a nine at GCSE – an A* to most people but I was part of the first cohort to do the numbered qualifications in Maths and English.

Read more: Can you answer these 10 past exam GCSE questions?

I was always a numbers man so if you’d told me back then that my job now would involve churning out hundreds of words a day I’d probably have laughed in your face (along with some of the very complimentary commenters who I’m sure will descend on the comment section below heaping my writing with praise).

I say I loved maths, or at least I did until I attempted to take it at A-Level when it became the most challenging and mind-boggling thing in existence. That said, I managed to get a C mainly down to some incredible teachers putting more hours than they were paid to put into my education doing just that (big up Mr Sargerson).

Four years on from finishing those A-Levels my use of maths has waned somewhat despite the odd bit of number crunching for a story every now and then. My knowledge of standard deviations and calculating momentum has faded away with my hopes of being the first male Rachel Riley - although let’s be honest I’ve got the legs - to now only knowing that the words have something to do with maths.

So, in an act of camaraderie with those students awaiting their exam results, I thought I’d have a go at a GCSE Maths paper. Had my knowledge gone totally out the window? Or is solving a quadratic equation just like riding a bike?

I logged onto the AQA exam board website and downloaded the GCSE Maths (Higher) Paper 2 from November 2021. Just loading up the website took me back to the days of doing endless practice tests in the run-up to the real thing. Having printed it off (sorry trees) and setting my stopwatch for 90 minutes I was ready to go. I’m not sure anyone else will be stupid enough to want to download this paper for ‘fun’ but if you do, I should warn you of ‘spoilers’ below.

Turning the page to the first questions transported me back to the exam hall.

In the beginning, it felt like it was going well. Three not-too-bad questions to start drew me in and all of a sudden, my mathematical juices felt like they were flowing through my brain once more.

Having not done this kind of maths for some time I was surprised how much of the technique came flooding back to me. Somehow, I could remember what supplementary and complementary angles were and how to solve a quadratic equation - I was honestly quite shocked. I was even more staggered to remember the cosine rule to find an unknown angle in a triangle. Maybe those days of revision really did drill this stuff into my brain.

But a few questions in the wheels began to slowly come off. Working out the diameter of a circle and whether numbers were proportional to each other resulted in a whopping ‘nul points’.

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Partway through sitting my paper I did begin to wonder once again why this is the kind of maths we learn at school. Since sitting my last maths exam I’ve never once needed to know if two numbers are directly proportional or even use the phrase ‘directly proportional’. I have however needed to call the tax man and work out whether I’ve paid too much national insurance.

With 10 minutes left, I was nearly finished, but with a few questions, I knew I had right-royally butchered. I’ve never been good at checking over my own workings and always had tunnel vision for seeing what I thought I’d written instead of what was actually down on the page.

As my clock beeped to signal my 90 minutes was up the time had actually gone a lot quicker than I expected. But how had I done?

I flicked open my laptop, found the answers online and raided my mam’s old teacher's assistant pencil case for a red pen.

Going back through the paper I got off to a good start scooping full marks on the first four pages, but from there it went downhill slightly. A point dropped here and a point dropped there before a couple of questions where I failed to get a single mark. Racking up my total I managed to score 54 marks of the 80 available and to be honest I was pretty chuffed.

Having not used that part of my brain in some time I’d seemingly managed to dust off the cobwebs and avoid a total disaster. A quick check of the grades and I would have managed a grade eight, one off the top level.

I was totally dumbfounded it had gone so well. Maybe I’ll put it down to this being a 2021 exam paper from during the pandemic, so maybe the questions were easier or grade boundaries reduced slightly.

Either way, I’d shocked myself.

With my act of camaraderie complete it’s worth saying a big good luck to everyone collecting their GSCE results in the coming days. No matter what grade you come out with, you’re still young and not doing an exam for a story on the internet.