A-Level English Literature Week 4 Exam Preparation Tips

Our English exam is approaching and it’s time to kick into high gear. Last week I foreshadowed (ohh fancy English Literature term you should include in your notes if you haven’t already) the topic for this week: practice papers under exam conditions. I know all this talk about practice papers is getting repetitive, but it is SO, SO, important if you want to smash these exams!

Hopefully, you are feeling relatively comfortable doing open book and open time practice papers. It is now time to gauge how well you know the content by heart, and how well you do under a time restraint. Most people can write high-quality essays with unlimited time - it takes practice to do so in a restricted amount of time. If you read last week’s blog post, you should already have a vague structure you can follow. This formulaic approach will greatly simplify the daunting prospect of transitioning into writing essays under exam conditions. Nonetheless, the first few tries might leave you feeling discouraged. It is very difficult to produce first-rate essays in a short amount of time, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t do as well as you would like to in the beginning. We have time to develop our skills, and the best way to do so is to practice.

Write as many practice essays as possible and make sure you understand your areas of weakness. There is no point in doing practice papers if you are not learning from your mistakes. Due to the nature of English Literature, marking past papers will not provide you with an exact grade. However, you can compare your answers against the marking scheme. It is crucial to be honest with yourself – do your answers fulfil the criteria? Where might your answers be lacking, and how can you improve? It is always a good idea to veer on the harsh side because your examiner will most likely not be lenient. Ask your teacher to have a look at it or let a parent/sibling/friend give feedback. Then fill out your Bulletproof Booklet:

You can download these from the Elevate Education website or make a template by hand. Just make sure to include each column - they are all important!

Under Exam, you guessed it, you write down the exact paper you have done. For example, English Literature 2020 - Paper 2A Texts in shared contexts: WW1 and its aftermath.

Under Question, you fill out the exact phrasing of the question you have attempted to answer. This is important because many times we are so eager to show the examiner everything we know that we end up including irrelevant information, causing examiners to feel as if we have not answered the question. You want to make sure everything you include is relevant to the question - this will save you time and make for a more effective argument. A good thing is to ask yourself after each sentence: ‘Does this help answer the question?’. Don’t be like Victor Hugo.

Under Topic, write down the broad topic covered. This could be ‘Unseen Prose’. By filling out the topic you will get a sense of which area you are struggling with the most. Perhaps ‘Comparing prose texts’ keeps coming up as an area where you are losing a large chunk of marks, whereas you are doing well in the ‘Unseen Prose’ topic. Your weakest topics should be the ones you spend the most time on.

Why was it wrong? you need to write out specifically what was lacking in your answer. Don’t just write ‘it wasn’t good enough.’ Instead, try to identify the specific problem. For example, maybe you provided quotes but didn’t explain them or connect them to the question you were answering. Maybe you were simply regurgitating facts without showing understanding. Or maybe, your sentences were way too long and difficult to read.

Finally, under Correct answer, you re-do the section of the exam that you struggled with. Don’t waste time re-doing the whole paper - why rewrite the introduction if the introduction was great? Instead, focus on fixing your mistakes. If the problem was a lack of content knowledge, plan to do some memorisation work. If one paragraph was not pertinent to the red thread, rewrite the section and make it more relevant, clear, and concise.

And now we repeat the process: do paper → mark it → identify mistakes → fix mistakes → re-do sections → do new paper.

This process will greatly improve your essay-writing skills and ensure that you can walk into that exam room feeling confident and well-prepared.

Have any questions about how to prepare for your A-Level exams? Having problems with any hard to understand content or tricky past exam questions? Then ask Klara. Klara will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Klara will answer them in these sessions.