Improving my way of thinking

Hello, so I am a gcse student currently doing my exams and a problem I am facing is that my way of thinking during the exams is not good enough as often on many questions in exams I know the answer to but I could never figure out what it is asking me to say. Also every time I do a past paper and after that I check the mark scheme I find out that I have failed to gain about 10 marks just because I had not been able to apply the knowledge I already knew to the question. I am kindly asking if anyone has tips or a technique which can help me improve that so that I could not lose these marks.

I find it very useful to take a highlighter into the exam, or if you're not allowed to then use your black pen, to box the command word in the exam question and then any information that follows that might be useful. Here is a general list of command words, http://www.aqa.org.uk/student-support/for-students/revision/understanding-the-question you may not have any exams with AQA, but this is a good source for general keywords that most exam boards will use. It's really important to understand these so you know what the question is asking; seems a bit basic and condescending but it really helped me. If they want you to explain then you need to say what it is and why it happens, for example.Emphasising other important information in the question will help with applying your knowledge. For example, if you see the question referring to a topic you have studied, then you can be sure that they want you to apply what you already know to that question. Read carefully; you can easily lose marks in a maths exam if you don't round to the correct number of decimal places or you don't a number in its exact form. Keep practising past questions, and mark your work for each topic. You will eventually see that each question is roughly the same and they want you to use the same keywords, and if you keep missing marks for a certain thing you will become aware of this and in future you can add it to your answers. Please make sure not to see losing marks as a failure, you can learn from this and it is useful. If you want some help with specific questions then just ask, good luck with your exams

Тhank you very much this is very helpful , I hope I improve in my future exams, but sometimes it can be very demotivating if I had studied the thing but I still get it wrong in the end because I just didnt think of it in the exam. For example today I had a physics exam and the second question was what is the name for a reflected sound wave to which the answer was echoes which I knew and I had studied but I still didnt think of it in the exam so I got it wrong .

Aw, no, that really sucks I am sorry to hear that! It sounds like you may be rushing a little? Everybody does it in exams since there is a limited amount of time available, but it may be worth slowing down a little Additionally, if you don't think you know the answer straight away, you could look through the paper to find one you are fairly certain you can answer and return to questions at the end. Often I find that I can answer questions that I know how to answer in half the time they suggest and then I have time left over to go back to trickier questions! You don't even have to do the exam in question order, so you could try going from the back of the paper forwards to read the trickier questions, answer the ones you know, and then start from the front again. This just means you can have some time to recall the information you know

Wow this is a really good idea, I think I might try it, but do you think it is worth trying for a first time on a real exam?

I think it is worth trying it out first, now it is the half term you could practice some papers for your next exam? Make use of the half term to try this technique to see if it works for you!

Yeah, Im planning to do that, thank you very much for the technique