Welcome to My Exam Plan 2.
Review My Exam Plan 1 – Revision technique before reading on. You can find exam dates for all your subjects, revision checklists and our top tips on the best ways to revise.
The number 1 tip for revision is practising exam questions. In this blog, we look at how to use practice questions effectively.
Examiners report the same broad problems, year after year:
How can you make sure you don’t experience the same problems? By practising exam-style questions! First, practise single questions topic by topic using My GCSE Science and then practise using whole papers (past papers and specimen papers).
This is the best way of learning properly and also the best way of preparing to do the exams. You’ll get to know what the exam paper looks like, see what sort of questions you’re likely to get and learn how to answer those questions.
With that in mind, we have listed the three main things to remember when using practice questions to prepare for exams:
It’s a great idea to use exam-style questions while you learn and revise. Then, once you’ve covered a topic, you instantly get a chance to see how it might be tested in an exam. This gives you an idea of how well you’ve understood the topic and helps you build the skills you need. You could be the brightest student ever, but if you’ve not seen many exam questions, you’re at a serious disadvantage.
That means use practice questions to decide which areas need more revision. If you got low marks on a question on enzymes, then – guess what – the enzymes topic needs to go to the top of your revision list. If you consistently do well with questions on covalent bonding, then this topic needs less time. By using exam-style questions like this, you’ll revise much more effectively because you will know where you need to spend your time. If you’re not methodical, you’ll waste time over-revising topics that you already know well and miss other topics that need more work.
There’s no point trying whole exam papers if you haven’t covered all the material. Make sure you’ve been through everything at least once, either in your lessons in school or with My GCSE Science. After you’ve covered all the material, and done the exam-style questions on My GCSE Science, you can start doing whole exam papers. When you practise using whole papers, it’s is best to do them as a timed activity in “exam conditions” (in a quiet space, on your own, in one go). This helps you get a feel for how long you will have in the actual exam itself and how to plan your time. In real exams, you may get time reminders, but don’t count on it. The longer and trickier questions (those where you have to apply knowledge) can easily drain your time.
OK, that’s it for now! Remember, My GCSE Science covers the entire specification precisely and in the right level of detail to get the top grades at GCSE.
Our Progress Tracker makes your revision time-efficient by helping you to focus your work on the videos and exam-style questions covering the topics that you don’t know so well.
Finally, remember to print out our 30 Minute Revision Strategy, which summarises our revision advice in one handy A4 sheet.
My GCSE Science
