02/05/2025
Supporting Neurodivergent Pupils Through Exam Season – Insights from Number 4
A while ago, I shared a post about how neurodivergent pupils can find assessment questions—especially in maths—particularly tricky. Not because they can’t do the maths, but because the questions themselves often don’t make logical sense or reflect real life. This disconnect can create unnecessary barriers for pupils who naturally seek consistency, truth, and sense in the world around them.
Take Number 3, for example. He’s always found it difficult to work through questions that include information that feels wrong. I remember a particular moment when he just couldn’t get past a question that claimed a melon cost £20. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to work out the problem, but he couldn’t proceed because that one detail felt so absurd and unrealistic. For him, that lack of logic was a block—not a gap in knowledge, but a clash with his sense of how things should be. It made him frustrated, stuck, and disconnected from the task.
Fast forward to this year, and Number 3 has been preparing for his GCSE maths. He’s worked through countless past papers and has noticed something that might help others sitting exams soon—especially those who are also neurodivergent.
He said, “The questions are actually really similar—they just swap out the names or change the numbers, but it’s really the same question over and over.” That recognition gave him a boost in confidence and helped reduce some of the mental noise that comes with trying to decipher unfamiliar wording.
He also had a powerful message about multiple choice questions: don’t get thrown off by the patterns. There was a moment he paused and doubted himself because his answers went a, d, d, d—and he thought, that can’t be right, they wouldn’t do that. But actually, yes, they can and do. Once he allowed himself to trust his maths knowledge rather than question the pattern, he moved forward with more certainty. But this didn’t come naturally—he had to actively ignore the urge to seek external logic in the question design.
And perhaps the most grounded piece of wisdom he shared was this: sometimes, you have to ignore the strange context of a question. If a question says tax on bananas has risen by 40%, you just have to go with it. Don’t get stuck in the “but that doesn’t make sense” loop—because in exams, the maths is what matters, not whether the scenario is realistic.
So, to all the neurodivergent students heading into exams: your brain is brilliant. If the question doesn’t make sense, it’s not you—it’s the question. Trust your knowledge. Tune out the noise. And remember, the logic might be missing from the scenario, but it is there in the maths.
You’ve got this.
Photo: Number 3 sitting on a balance beam quickly eating his lunch I’d finished cooking while waiting for a lock to fill.
