How to prepare for the toughest exams yet
Murray Morrison, the founder of Tassomai, discusses the challenges students will face this year, why exams will be harder than ever before and what parents can do to get their children ready for their GCSEs…
GCSE exams are always a challenging time for students and parents but this year is set to be even more difficult than previous years. Expected exam results are returning to pre-pandemic levels as grade boundaries become tougher for the 2023 summer exams than they have been for the last 3 years, so it is time to engage all the revision resources at your disposal.
While this should be a cause for concern – students this year could get the same score on an exam as an older sibling might have done recently, but end up with a lower grade due to stricter grade boundaries – there is also a tremendous opportunity for students to get better grades than their peers and beat all expectations with some smart revision and good exam preparation.
Where to start?
This is the best time to get a head start on your child’s revision and planning for the exam period. You still have lots of time! Make the most of having access to help from their teachers but use their time wisely. There’s no point in your child asking their teacher to help them revise, it’s much better if they go in with a game plan and ask for help on specific topics they know they are struggling with.
This is where parents come in! Sitting down with your child and identifying where their strengths and weaknesses are is the first step towards building a revision plan.
Take a look at your child’s Tassomai Tree
When a student answers questions on Tassomai, their responses are fed back into the Tree. This powerful tool can be used to see how individual students have understood particular topics. All parents (private subscribers and parents of school users) have access to this information on their own child via the parent dashboard.
This is a really easy way to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses! Use the Tree to find the areas that need work and then work out how they can improve or which teacher would be best to ask for advice. Having specific goals and a checklist of topics that need more work at this time of year is the best way to prepare for the months ahead.
Tackling problem areas
Past papers and specification documents from the relevant exam boards are a great resource, and if your child’s using Tassomai there are tools within the program to help. Once you have a checklist of topics that your child needs to improve on, then you can work on proper revision techniques.
There are lots of different methods for effective revision and it’s all about finding the ones that work best for your child. Tassomai is built around the importance of self-quizzing, interleaved practice and spaced revision, all of which help students to build concrete, long-lasting knowledge of their subjects.
Make a space for revision
If you have a room or a corner of a room that can be made comfortable, free from distractions, and dedicated solely to revision for the next couple of months, the consistency really helps. Obviously not everyone has this space at home – but often schools will let students stay behind a bit later to study, or you might be able to find space in the local library with fewer distractions.
Huge amounts of revision time are spent ‘getting set up’ and ‘settling down’ several times per day. Get the work-space set up and make it special. Think about superstitious athletes – they train in the same space, same kit, same order every day. That’s not really superstition, it’s efficiency. By having a routine, they remove the need to make decisions and can get straight to work.
What to do when?
February Half Term
The February half-term and those long evenings of the rest of term can be spent on identifying the areas that need most work, this way you’ll have time to get those areas sorted and the revision period can be all about practising to perfection rather than learning from scratch.
The sooner your child knows which areas they need to work, the better. That intervening time between identifying areas and starting work on them is valuable – the more aware they are, the more likely they are to pick up on relevant things said in class that relate to the problem and the more likely they are to ask smart questions and pay attention, and so on... so when it comes time to do the work in the coming months, they'll find it much easier.
Spring Term
Between now and the end of the Spring term, it’s all about strategy – the better you can prepare, the more effective your child’s revision will be.
Doing structured, low-stakes retrieval practice every day will blow off the cobwebs and make their knowledge retrieval really quick and reliable. All of this will make way for the Easter holidays to be about exam practice and technique.
Easter Holidays
When it comes to revision, the Easter holidays is all about volume – the more you can do, the better.
Here is where students have time to do some deeper dives. Get your child to start working through exam questions and whole papers. There’s no point in doing this if they haven't done the groundwork on the retrieval practice and put the time in to re-learning their problem topics, but they can start to build in exam practice through the break so that by the end, they’ll be fully confident in their technique, their time management and they will know how to get the marks according to the mark scheme.