Exam Success - DOING YOUR BEST

The scene is a hot summer’s day in the August after your GCSE examinations. The day you get your results. You’re opening your results slip and a huge grin spreads across your face because the results are very good. You have worked hard for your exams and prepared as well as you possibly could. Your results reflect that hard work. You’ve done it!

To guarantee that you turn this picture into one of the happiest days of your life, you need to optimise your time before and during your exams.

Before you start:

• You need a quiet place to revise, with good lighting.
• You need all your resources (pens, colours, paper, notes, book) close at hand.
• Remove things that present distractions!
• You must plan your revision — break down each subject into manageable chunks.
• Plan to take breaks and exercise — a healthy body is a healthy mind!

We have talked about different ways of revising and many of you attended the twilight sessions about revision and exam technique.

Here are some reminders:

1. Highlight key points.
   Why not try underlining or colour coding particular pieces of information? A series of different colour highlighter pens migft be useful here. This is a very useful first step to breaking down long pieces of writing into more usable short lists or diagrams.
   
   

2. Make a Mind Map
   Some of you will be more familiar with this than others. A mind map is really a spider diagram using colour so that each leg of the spider is a different colour. Research shows that colour can help us remember things so why not try making a mind map of a topic in one subject area, using different colours for each part of the topic, and putting down the key words that will help you remember? It really is worth trying this — if your brain works this way, mind mapping is a perfect way of remembering huge amounts of information. It may not work for you but you do need to practise a little before you can make that decision. Try using PICTURES as well as words and making each map funny or memorable in some other way so that it will stick in your mind. Don’t forget, these are your revision materials — they can be as outrageous as you like.
   
   

3. The Shrinking Mind Map
   THE AIM OF THE GAME IN REVISION IS TO REDUCE A LOT OF MATERIAL INTO A SMALL SPACE. IF YOU HAVE PRODUCED A MIND MAP, THE IDEA OF A SHRINKING MIND MAP IS TO CREATE THE SAME CHART WITH FEWER BRANCHES. You HAVE THE SAME NUMBER OF MAJOR ‘LEGS’ AND USE THE SAME COLOURS BUT YOU DO NOT WRITE ALL THE DETAIL DOWN. You MIGHT SHRINK THE MAP ONCE, TWICE, OR EVEN THREE TIMES SO THAT YOUR FINAL SHRUNKEN MAP MIGHT ONLY HAVE TEN OR TWELVE WORDS ON IT BUT EACH WORD WILL TRIGGER YOUR MEMORY OF ALL THE OTHER THINGS THAT WERE ON THE ORIGINAL LEG.
   
   

4. Cassette Tapes.
   Take some of the lists or the notes that you have made and record them on to a cassette. VARIETY is the key. You might want to get different friends or members of your family to read different things on to the tape so a different voice will jog different memories. Other people will choose background music to match a particular subject or topic so that, in an exam, thinking of a particular piece of music will bring back the information you require.

The great advantage of the cassette is that you use it during "dead time" You would be unlikely to take your revision file out! to the park when you walk the dog but there is no reason why you can't take your walkman with you.  Don't forget what we have already said about controlling time.  If you put together all the little pieces of "dead time" in a day you could easily find yourself between 30 and 60 minutes 'tape time' every day. Just think how much difference that could make to GCSE success!

5. Song, Rhymes, Mnemonics and Acronyms
   The title of this suggestion may sound more difficult than GCSE's themselves to you! The songs and rhymes part is fairly obvious. Making up catch phrases or rhymes can help you with crucial bits of information, e.g. to help you sort out which is the x and which is the y axis on a graph you could remember "x below y because y goes up high". It may make you cringe but you won’t forget it!

Mnemonics and Acronyms can do a great deal more for you. A mnemonic is a word or abbreviation than helps you remember. An acronym is a word made up using the first letters of a series of other words or the first word of a series of sentences. For example to remember the advantages of credit cards for a business studies question.

C onvenient to carry
O utlets for use everywhere
P ay later
S ecurity
E xtras e.g. insurance

These live points, when arranged in this particular order, produce the word COPSE. This would be easy to remember in an exam.

6. Flash Cards
   Research shows us that when our brain is storing information our eyes are often angled upwards or to the right or to the left (depending on how your brain is set up). Flash cards can be a big help in remembering important information. Why not try making some brightly coloured lists or even just writing down key words that you want to remember and putting them up in your room at home.

Try different colours for different subjects or different areas of the room. If you can persuade your family to go along with this, another way in which people use this technique is by using a number of different rooms in the house for different topics. If the dining room becomes Science and the kitchen becomes Maths then moving from room to room can, quite literally open up different "files" in your head.

7. Lists. Charts and Notes
   It may lie that all the ‘fancy" ways of revising we have talked about above don’t work for you. The traditional way of revision is to make lists of information and it may well be that your brain likes this better than any other way. it is certainly the way that most people will tell you to revise but you have been warned — your brain and their brain are different, find your own way. If you are going to make lists, try and find ways of making them interesting and keeping them short. The temptation is always to write down too much and it may be that you use the same technique as we discussed for mind mapping by producing "shrinking" lists which become ever shorter as you become more confident that certain areas of information are already in your head.
   
   
8. Study Buddy
   Sharing Learning - one of the most effective ways to learn is to teach someone else. This is why your teachers are so amazingly knowledgeable! Once you feel that you someone else what you know. Be careful with this because mastermind style "question and answering does not necessarily guarantee that you will be able to remember lists of information in an exam. You are probably better off being tested on the charts and lists that you are trying to remember for the exams than by having somebody look through your folder of work and asking you questions here and there. A good plan would be to build in a ‘testing time’ of a few minutes each day to see how well your revision is going.
   
9. Practising Previous Exam questions
   Your teachers will give you examples of old questions and it is really important to see if you can answers these questions from previous years. This is not just a matter of testing your knowledge, it is more important than that. All exams are written in a coded language because, to be honest, there are often not many different questions that you can be asked about particular subjects. What does happen is that the same questions are asked in different ways or wrapped up in what can be confusing language. A massive key to success in examinations is understanding the question that you are being asked. This may sound obvious but so many people miss out on what they want every year because, although they were well prepared, they have misunderstood the question that is being asked and have written down information for which they cannot be given marks.

Over 60% of all errors in exams are caused by not reading the question properly.

10. Show You Know
    We have already talked about a number of ways in which you might show other people what you know but the important thing is that you convince yourself! There is no point reading information and then saying to yourself "yes I know that" and moving on. You must demonstrate to yourself that you do know the information. How do you do this? It is up to you. Recite things out loud, write down lists, stop yourself from eating that next biscuit until you can recall everything that you need to - whatever it takes.

You know something if you can recall it when ever you want - you cannot be sure that you know it just because you can recall it 30 seconds after you looked at it on a piece of paper in your hand. Test yourself by trying to recall important pieces of information when you are a long way from the ‘crutch’ of your revision aids. LEARN AND RE-LEARN - go back over lists several times to be sure that you know.

Above all, make it FUN! There is no rule to say that revision has to be stressful, miserable or boring. It is a job that you have to do to get from where you are now to that picture you painted in your head of results day. Whether it is a fun experience or a miserable experience is up to you - so why not enjoy it?

Help from other places:

• I particularly recommend www.bbc.co.uk/revision  (the Bitesize website). Don’t forget to video the Bitesize programmes!
• Also The Guardian has a site called www.learn.co.uk.

On Exam day

• Do have breakfast. Saying " I don’t eat breakfast" is like saying "I don’t put batteries in a torch."
• Don’t get stuck into files — use brief revision aids instead, if you want to do last minute revision.
• Set the alarm clock
• Organise equipment the night before
• Get to the exam in plenty of time

Keep a positive frame of mind. If you watch athletes at the start of a race, they are telling themselves that they are going to succeed. Believe that you can too!

And finally......... GOOD LUCK!!!!!!