GCSE Maths Week 3 Exam Preparation Tips

If you only read one post out of this 5-part blog series, I want it to be this one. If you only read one article in the next few days, I hope it’s this one. If you remember just one message out of everything I have written about recently, let it be this:

DO PAST PAPERS, PAST PAPERS ARE YOUR FRIENDS. YOU MAY NOT LOVE THEM, THEY MAY NOT LOVE YOU BUT THEY WILL BE ONE OF YOUR BIGGEST WEAPONS WHEN IT COMES TO WINNING THE WAR OF GCSES.

I’m hoping that right now you are making good headway with your maths revision – you’ve got a plan of when (and maybe exactly what) you’re studying, you have found some good resources to use and you have at least 1% of faith in yourself, that this is still possible – you aren’t doomed in your Maths GCSE. Great. And if not, I promise it’s still not too late! Check out the last 2 posts, get yourself sorted and then join us back on this post from the paragraph below – keep going!

Right, so now we’re all on the same page. In the last post I told you there were 2 parts to learning: understanding and past papers. We covered understanding last time, so this post will focus on past papers.

If you didn’t quite get it from my unnecessarily dramatic opening, past papers are incredibly important when it comes to doing well in your exams. Research has shown that the more past papers you do, the better your marks will be. Doing more past papers = better marks, what a simple formula! If only they could all be like that... However, I must stress, there is a right and wrong way to do past papers. Just doing the questions and never checking them or looking at your mistakes will give you practise and exposure to the type of questions you will see, as well as potentially help you with your time management but no more than that. When you do past papers the correct way, not only will you know the type of questions that come up, and how to manage your time but also how to answer different types of questions, how to handle exam stress and you’ll learn more content from looking over your mistakes. Someone call

Bruno Mars, because exam papers are a *treasure* when it comes to GCSE preparation, especially when it comes to mathematics. So, let’s go over how to do them and how to do them well.

1. Actually open the past paper

To start doing past papers, you need to actually open the paper. This may seem like a silly point, but I often hear people telling me they don’t even attempt past papers because they are so worried about how much they don’t know or feel like it won’t be useful (which is oh so wrong because they are OH SO USEFUL). If the thought of doing past papers stress you out, then take this first strep as stress management. Print out the paper and just have a look through it to get yourself used to it. Doing this alone will start getting your mindset ready to succeed, and once you’re there (or even if you’re not if you’re running out of time) then you can move to point 2. (Top tip within a tip: aim to have your past paper printed out. This will help you get used to the layout – you can print it at home, school or your local library. However, if you can’t manage to get it printed out, no stress, it’s not a reason to not do the paper!)

2. Don’t time yourself & use your book/resources to help

“Don’t time yourself?! Use my book/resources whilst I do the paper? Seyi, you’re crazy!” That may be the case, but there is a method to my madness. Sometimes a lot of the stress or fear around past papers is because people feel like they won’t be able to complete the paper in the the amount of time allocated or get stressed about the fact they cannot answer all the questions. So, to take that fear way – don’t time yourself and use your books and resources! Not only does this help limit some of the stress and fear, but actually doing the paper this way helps you to learn and memorise more information as you’re processing the information in the exam context and helping your brain know how to approach different questions and work out certain problems, whilst becoming aware of areas you need to read up on and actually reading up on it there and then in order to answer the question. Another benefit of the reduction in stress is that you can focus on the question properly and not how much time you have to do it – it’s a highly productive set up.

3. Put your book away

Once you’ve got comfortable doing the paper and feel like you have more knowledge, it’s time to put your books, notes and resources away. Attempt the paper without them, it will be hard, it is an exam after all, but it will help you more accurately assess what you do and don’t know; give it a go and see what happens.

4. Time yourself

Once you’ve got used to doing the paper without any resources, you want to start timing yourself. NOW CHILL. I know this can be a massive anxiety inducing step for a lot of people but let’s take it in stages. Firstly, instead of only giving yourself 1hr 45 or however long the paper says, start a stopwatch and then complete the paper. This way you can see how long it takes you to do the paper naturally and how much you need to adjust to meet the time constraints set by the exam board. To decrease the time you are spending on the paper, try to go a little faster on question, e.g. move on before you start doubting yourself or practise mental maths to help calculations go faster. To help you know how long to spend on each question you can divide the total amount of time you have by the total amount of marks the paper is (Minutes/Marks) and that will help you know how long you should spend on average per mark. For example, if your maths paper is a total of 100 marks and it Is 1hr 40minutes long (= 100 minutes) to work out the number of minutes to spend per mark you do 100 / 100 so 1 minute per mark. So, if you had a 2-mark question in this paper you’d aim to spend no longer than 2 minutes on it, and if it was 8 marks, you’d aim to spend no more than 8 minutes on that question etc. If you had 2 hours for the paper (120 minutes) then you would have 120/100 = 1.2 minutes per mark. In cases like this I recommend spending 1 minute per mark still and using the extra time at the end to go back to any questions you found hard/skipped and to review the paper.

5. Mark the paper – BE HONEST/BE HARSH

Then you want to mark the paper. The reason I say be honest and harsh is because it’s better for you to be too hard on yourself and push yourself to have the precise answer than to be too lenient with yourself and miss marks in your actual exams because your examiner is stricter than you. Of course, I don’t want you not giving yourself the mask if you deserve it, but if you’re a bit unsure as to whether you would have got the mark or not, then choose to not give it to yourself so that you learn from your mistake. It can be frustrating seeing low scores/not seeing the score you want initially but stick with it, keep going, don’t give up and you’ll start to see some progress. What’s most important is that you learn from these mistakes – see point 6.

6. Analyse

Once you’ve marked the paper comes something even more important than doing the paper itself, analysing how you’ve done. This isn’t always a pretty or enjoyable process, but it is a highly necessary one. It helps you to know where you’ve gone wrong, why you’ve gone wrong and how to rectify the wrong. I find using a table like the one below quite useful, you can make it on word, excel or by hand (though that may take a while).

I make a note of the question number, the total marks the question is worth and how many marks I lost in the question. Then I write what I think to be the main reason I lost those marks – was it a silly reason (e.g. I wrote the wrong number or read the question wrong) or do I need to go over and learn this topic as I didn’t really know what was going on? Or do I just need to revise it as I understand a bit but am missing some detail? Whatever it is I write it in that section. Then in the information section I write down action points I need to take – such as ‘go over simultaneous equations’, ‘look up resources on trigonometry’ etc. It’s also useful to write the actual answer or layout of what the answers should be. This means that when it comes to the day or so before the exam and you’re not sure what to revise or to focus on, you can look at this document which shows you all the places you’ve gone wrong. You can then identify and review weaker areas, what mistakes not to make again and topics you could benefit from doing an extra few practise questions on.

7. Go again

Great, one paper done – onto the next one! Take a break after each one or do one a day but do push yourself to do as many past papers properly (doing at least steps 4-6) as you can. The more papers you do the higher your mark will be – so keep going! Where to find them? The exam board website, old past paper sites, using old specification papers (but only do the questions relevant to your current specification), questions from textbooks – do them all! This way you won’t run out of practise materials, even if it’s a new specification.

I think past papers are great. They can be long, tedious and at times, very disheartening, but are an amazing way to prepare for your GCSEs. I would even go as far as saying that at this point, if all you did from now till your exams were past papers, in the way described above (i.e. at least steps 4-7), that would be enough.

And for those of you who get major exam stress, I really do empathise with you. It’s easy for me to say ‘just don’t be anxious’ or ‘just breathe’ (which you should do, oxygen is good for you xoxo), but it’s not always that easy to do. What I will say though, is that even if it feels like no one else believes in you with this, I truly do. Take each question by itself and give it your best shot. If you can’t do it, that’s fine, move on and come back to it later. Then later once you’ve finished the paper, go back, look at the answer, review the topic and most importantly *don’t beat yourself up about it*. Everything you are doing is helping you, so keep going – you’ve got this! I’ll see you in the next post.

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