Knowing the Exam

• Before you start to revise, you need to know quite a lot about the exam that you are revising for. This is because:
• If you don't know what it covers, you can't choose the right subject to revise.
• If you aren't aware of a continuous assessment element, you may pass the exam papers but fail on your course work.
• If you don't know what sort of questions you have to answer or from which section, you will waste valuable time in the exam room working it out.
• If you don't know how the exam paper is structured, you may waste time on unimportant questions when you should be doing others which carry more marks.
• If you are to be tested, you need above all to know exactly what your examiner will be tested you on. An exam doesn't just test whether your are clever because intelligence takes so many different forms that one exam could never test. Rather, your examiner will be trying to see whether or not you have a certain set of skills.

The easiest way to find out about the exam is to ask your teacher. It is your teacher's job to know what you have to do. The other way is to have a look at your old exam papers to find out what the test will look like or to ask people who took the exam last year. The can be great help, perhaps sometimes being a but more on your wavelength that your teachers. Ask if anything was different from they'd expected.