Do you have any advice for our current Year 11 exam students?
The first thing that I want to mention is don’t procrastinate. Try to meet all the deadlines to disperse the pressure. Otherwise when the exams come, the stress can be quite unbearable.
Coursework (English, Art, DT…) makes up a significant amount of the final mark and it is what we have control of. Work on mending it as early as possible and get it out of the way before all the revision comes in.
Don’t be limited to notes and textbooks. There are many extra resources that we can get access to, such as znotes, youtube videos, past papers and etc.
Make notes or flash cards to combine the selected important sections from the above resources. Make them as concise as possible.
How did you prepare for your exams?
I had been revising since the Christmas holiday preparing for my mocks and, although I kept revising, when it’s exam time, I still struggled because there were so many subjects to review , and this is why I genuinely suggest that we shouldn’t procrastinate and really make proper revision notes for every subject for easy reference.
For Mathematics and Science, besides revising for the theory, I practiced a lot of past papers to get used to the style of questions and to find out where my weak points were and what mistakes I tend to make.
For subjects like English and History, I read through the novels that we studied and the textbooks many times and I made notes as I went. I also looked at past essay questions and I wrote brief plans or annotation for them so I would get used to structuring the essays.