Last month, Shiplake pupils attended a seminar offered by Elevate Education, in which they received tips and techniques on how best to tackle their imminent examinations.
With exam season fast approaching, our Sixth Form Pupils were invited to attend the Ace Your Exams seminar in which they learned the main causes of problems that arise around at this point in the academic year. James from Elevate Education, a very engaging and enthusiastic character, gave advice to our pupils and outlined the six biggest mistakes in exam preparation. They are:
- Not leaving enough time to prepare
- Doing the wrong work
- Not correcting past mistakes
- No plan
- No goal
- Not enough practice papers.
The pupils were then asked to identify which of these areas required immediate attention. James then asked how many people had one issue to address, to which a lot of pupils raised their hand. Thankfully, very few pupils thought they had to work on all six of these problems!
James then went on to identify that as much as 75% of exam success is based in preparation and the remaining 25% is in the exam room strategy itself. He also identified the seven steps for preparation excellence which are as follow:
- Give yourself adequate time to prepare, using notes and practice papers to revise
- Going through those practice papers and identifying the mistakes and weaker areas
- Get the teachers’ advice
- Learn from the people around you
- Fix the mistakes by redoing sections of the paper if necessary
- Use an exam planner to identify the subjects, goals, the to-dos and perhaps most importantly, the deadlines - this will help to keep you organised
- And finally, use the practice papers!
Finally, after much discussion and debate, James described the three steps to excelling in the exam room. These were to stay calm, to ration your time and to consider all of the possible answers. Further materials from Elevate Education can be found here.
