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Do past papers work for you at university?

I find that there are hardly any past papers for my degree and that it seems quite pointless as they can ask a wide range of questions that are broad, you simply can't practice them like at A-level and hope they come up in the exam. What should I do, should I just try to understand the material as much as I can, is that enough? I feel I need some sort of practice, so I'm thinking re-do all the tutorial questions I've got this term and then that should be enough. What do you think?

a whole hour!

I have the same problem - there's often only 1 or 2 papers (if there are any further back they often have changed the content of the exams slightly) and there are no answers to them. NO ANSWERS! It is useful in so far as giving you an idea what to revise/how to revise, if its something like the finer points of french grammatics or linguistic translation, it's only really by making a note of where you've specifically gone wrong that you can improve greatly really, otherwise you could be rereading the same excellent grammar book but making the same mistakes everytime unknowingly.

But then, for things like English, it doesn't matter so much. At uni it's much more about being able to articulate yourself than regurgitating pointless facts.

Reply 3

jabed786

Original post by turbo64

a whole hour!

I think thats all you can do is go over the tutorial questions/work. Look at what things the lecturers focus on and just learn as much as you can.

One of my exams has no past papers available and its really annoying because its 100% exam, no coursework to ease the pressure. So I'm just looking over the tutorial work but whats annoying about that as well is that they dont even explain the answers to the work in the tutorials so I dont even understand most of the stuff because the lectures dont explain well either :frown:

Reply 4

HayThereMardyBum

Uni wants you to learn how to think, not how to remember.

Reply 5

Liv1204

Most of my modules don't give us any past papers, and I've never found them particularly useful even for the few modules that do. I do like them to show the format of exam questions though, like what style of questions will be given. But as long as they tell us a bit about the exam it's not really needed, I think just doing the readings and learning/understanding the facts is enough for me.

Reply 6

mollymustard

I find that often for my course either the course convenor or the module content has changed leaving the practice paper slightly irrelevant. Still good to have some grounding to go on though!

Reply 7

RadioElectric

When I was at Keele, we got shown an exam question and example answers from students who got high, medium and low marks on it. Even though it was only done for one question in one module, it was very helpful to all of the exams I did after then.

Reply 8

bluewhale

The exact policy will vary between Universities, but it is likely that for some modules, there is not a big cache of past exam papers available, especially if it has only been running for a couple of years or the format of the exam has changed significantly. At my University, there is open access to exam papers in the library, but they are also available from the module convener. There are no mark schemes. In some of my modules, we have been given sample essays from previous years and a number of also used seen exam papers, which are received about two weeks in advance. Sometimes sample papers are included in the module booklets, which at least give you some idea of the type of questions to expect. In any case, you should be made aware of the format of the exam (such as the number of questions you are required to answer and the associated time allowance) well in advance.

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