Sharing Good Practice
THE TRUTHS AND MYTHS OF EXAM PRACTICE BY: JAMIE KIRKALDY
part of a formative, developmental exercise that does more than simply replicate previous outcomes?
A phased approach to exam technique
One of the many mantras I used with my students was, ‘exams are not a test of what you know, they are a test of what you can prove that you know’. It’s a crucial difference. The examiner doesn’t know you or what knowledge you possess. They only see what the you put down on paper. Viewed in this way, exam technique is worth easily as much as subject knowledge and must be approached as a skill in its own right – one that needs to be built up slowly, to pave the way for future success.
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h, nostalgia…it isn’t what it used to be.
It’s an old joke – one of my dad’s favourites, and I now use it on my own kids – but it lays bare an educational truism: when in doubt, we look back to what we know best; back to the certainty of times gone past. In teaching, this generally means past papers – especially amidst the stress and challenge of a global pandemic, when we are looking for ways to engage students remotely. For what better way to hone a student’s exam technique, or prepare them for the rigours of exam assessment, than to give them a practice run, using a genuine paper? All the certainties are there: the content will reflect the course, there will be a variety of question types, the layout of the paper will be identical to the one they will ultimately sit. You even get a mark
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Term 1 Sep - Dec 2020
scheme. Perfect preparation, right? Well, yes and no. While past papers and mock exams are an integral part of exam preparation, they are just that: a part of your approach, not the be-all and end-all. Making students endlessly sit past papers and expecting them to get better is like sitting a teenager in a car and making them repeat the driving test until they pass: without specific, targeted teaching and effective feedback, students won’t gain the skills they need to improve. Indeed, the process of repeatedly sitting past papers could actually engrain bad habits, impeding their development and destroying their confidence. So how can you use past papers effectively? How can you make them
Class Time
Consider the two factors that make exams difficult in the first place: time and access to information. As a teacher, you can control these variables to build your students’ skills and confidence. To begin with, students should be given practice questions (rather than entire papers), and asked to complete them without time restriction, and with full access to their notes. This gives them the opportunity to practise implementing the skills required without the pressure of time or having to remember the subject matter. As their skills and confidence grow, you can – one at a time – remove their notes and introduce time restraints. Once they have mastered what they need to do, you can move to assessing them in true exam conditions, and then build up towards setting full exam papers. The key is setting up students to be successful rather than asking too much too soon.
Data analysis: what are the results telling you?
When students sit a practice paper, you need to make sure that you extract from their performance all the
