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Achieve Exam Success

How to Achieve Exam Success

  • Get focussed
  • Be organised
  • Stay relaxed
  • Keep connected
  • Create a revision file
  • Improve your exam technique
  • Purchase a best-selling Study Skills handbook!

Regardless of how much revision you complete over the weeks and months ahead, the day that you receive your exam results will inevitably be one of the most significant moments in your life. Here are some hints and tips on how to improve your study skills and make the most of your revision.

1. Get focussed

To ensure that, from the start and throughout the run-up to the exams, you overcome your fears and focus on exam success:

  • Write down the grades that you aim to achieve in each of the subjects that you are taking.
  • Set aside a couple of minutes every morning to relax and imagine how you will feel on the day that your exams are released if you are awarded an excellent set of grades.
  • Regularly remind yourself that exam success will provide you with a valuable stepping stone to other longer-term goals.

2. Be organised

Many students fail exams not because they lack the ability to achieve exam success but simply because they completely underestimate the amount of time that they need to revise. To avoid making this mistake:

  • Start revising early in your exam-year and set aside plenty of time each day for revision (e.g. start revising 3-6 months before your first exam and revise, on average, for 1-2 hours per day).
  • Make changes to your daily routine to release additional time for revision (e.g. spend less time watching television on weekdays and get-up an hour earlier at weekends).
  • Create a revision timetable.
  • Become more assertive (e.g. get into the habit of saying things like I'm revising this morning, how about meeting after lunch?).

3. Stay relaxed

The process of preparing for and taking your exams will inevitably, at times, make you feel anxious. To reduce exam stress:

  • Focus not only on achieving a particular set of grades but also on achieving shorter-term goals (e.g. revising a particular topic when you get home from school today).
  • Get plenty of exercise (e.g. take the dog for a walk every morning or play five-a-side football in the park with friends).
  • Set aside time for rest and relaxation (e.g. get plenty of sleep and take-off one weekday evening a week to socialise).

4. Keep connected

Remember that some of the most effective forms of learning (e.g. asking or answering questions during lessons and trying to explain topics to friends) require you to interact with other people. To make best use of opportunities for interaction during the run-up to your exams:

  • Answer questions that your teachers ask during lessons.
  • Actively participate in class discussions.
  • At the end of lessons, ask your teachers questions about topics that you are finding difficult to understand.
  • Organise to revise outside of school with a few friends (e.g. at a local café on Saturday mornings).

5. Create a revision file

Some students try to revise by copying-out verbatim (word for word) their class notes or sections of their textbooks. Unfortunately, you can copy out a whole book and still know little or nothing of what you have read or written. Instead, experiment with different ways of taking revision notes:

  • Use highlighters to underline and highlight important information in texts that you read.
  • Rather than writing in sentences, try to take summary notes by using key words and symbols.
  • Use different visual frameworks (e.g. lists, shapes and maps) to help structure and organise your notes on topics.
  • Create a single page summary of each of the topics that you are revising and store these in a revision file (e.g. if there are thirty topics in your History syllabus then there should be thirty pieces of paper in the History section of your revision file).

6. Improve your exam technique

To maximise your performance in the exam room:

  • Take a few minutes to read through instructions at the front of the exam paper.
  • Pay close attention to the command words (e.g. what, when, where, why, how, choose, list, describe, compare, explain) in each of the questions that you are asked.
  • To avoid making mistakes, mentally rehearse answers before you write them down - or write a few notes on rough paper.
  • Answer all of the questions even if some of your answers are short (you won't be marked down for having a go).
  • Set aside time to check through your answers (bear in mind that you can be marked up and down according to your grammar, spelling and punctuation).

Purchase a best-selling Study Skills handbook!

For further information on how to improve your study skills and make the most of your revision purchase a copy of our best-selling student handbook GCSE Success Essentials: Study Skills - over 200,000 copies of this book have now been sold since publication!