The Exam!

So pretty soon you will be sitting in the exam hall (probably the gym). The exam papers will be opened in front of you and they will be placed on your desk.

What are you thinking about? Not the Treaty of Versailles, I hope. I’m afraid it’s too late. But it’s not too late to be thinking about the exam itself and your exam technique.

My two pieces – ‘Know your abc’s’ and ‘Sources Sorcery’ – have been useful, I hope. So, I hope, will this piece about exam technique.

First, let’s think about choosing your questions. Don’t base your choice simply on the topic – look at the questions! You might have been banking on a League of Nations question, and there’s one there, but you can see that the questions for your back-up, the Vietnam War, offer you a much better chance to shine. So go and shine!

And do focus more on Questions b+c: that’s were most marks are. Think! Would you be happy with 14-16 marks for this set of questions? Well that’s what’s on offer from Questions b+c.

Now, let’s think about time. For the essay paper, you are going to be answering three sets of questions in two hours. Plan to finish your first question in thirty-five minutes, your second question in thirty-five minutes, leaving you 50 minutes for your Depth Study question and, hopefully, a quick read through your answers. Write the times you aim to finish your first two questions on your exam paper. That way you won’t forget in the frenzy that’s about to come!

For the source paper, timing is not so easy. There are six questions, five of them carry much the same marks, with the last question carrying a few more. My best advice is to divide your time by six and allocate twenty minutes for each question. This allows plenty of thinking time which is particularly important on the source paper. But having divided your time equally, try to finish inside your twenty minutes so that you are building a little extra time for the last question and for a quick read through your answers at the end of the exam.

Now let’s think about the questions. We teachers hate to see unmarked exam papers when we check them after the exam. You know the nature of each question, or at least I hope you do: knowledge for Question a, explanation for Question b, and two views with your conclusion for Question c. But is there a word (or words) that you should focus on? Words like: “hope to achieve”, “disagree”, “a fair settlement”, “achieve”, “a mistake”, “agreed”, “significant”, “Soviet expansion”, “no victor”. These were all taken from the Core questions from a Specimen Paper that teacher’s receive. This means that of twelve questions I looked at (you won’t have so many), I felt there were key words that should be underlined or circled in nine of them. So, do just that: circle any key word(s) that will help you to focus and deliver what the exam asks of you!

The same thing applies even more so for the source paper because here, I would urge you to also identify the instruction, so that means every question would have words circled or underlined. Of the six source questions on the same Specimen Paper I referred to above, these are the words I would have circled: “Why … 1960”, “How far … agree”, “What is the message”, “lying”, “Are you surprised”, “How far … convincing evidence” … that the missiles were to “protect Cuba”.

I wish you the best of luck. Not that you will need it.