What am I doing wrong😭😭

You need to look at the areas which you are weak on and work on them, how is it that you are revising? past papers are perhaps best but its important that your knowledge is sound on all the topics so that you can answer questions appropriately

Im currently making mind maps and then condensing into revision cards but I find it hard to remember the content in depth to elaborate my answer in the exam. I do try and do past paper questions and practice writing essays ect. as often as I can but I struggle to find an effective way of using them, eg looking at an examiners report

Past paper are a good indication of what you know and what you need to work on use them to figure out your areas of weakness and work on them, by looking over the content and so on. If you are struggling speak to a teacher ask them how you can improve. Maybe try a different technique of learning you could try teaching someone else or just explain it to yourself like you were the teacher i find this helps. With psychology ur best off doing past papers as questions are tended to be repeated and recycled so they will be similar to what you may get in the exam

Thank you so much, I will try this and let you know how it goes

nooo mindmaps

you have to test yourself on content. you need to not look at the content and force yourself to actively recall it from your memory. in the simplest form this is flashcards, but also extends to past papers, blurting* etc. past papers are vital exspecially for biology because you need to understand how to answer the questions as well as recall the information

*You read over your notes/textbook and then write down the headings of those notes, cover up the notes and write down what you can remember of the topic. Then check if you have remembered everything and write in a different colour what you missed out/got wrong.

All the way through elementary school, high school, and undergraduate college, i used to study like crazy for an exam. When i took it, i found that most of the stuff i had studied was NOT on the exam - so basically i had wasted my study time. In addition, there were about 12 kids in my class, that never seemed to study, but got straight A's, or nearly straight A's. I couldn't figure this out!! When i ended up in graduate school years later - the same effect occurred. I figured out that, if i didn't 'clean up my act' - i wasn't going to make it out with a degree! Thinking about it after a couple of drinks - i realised that what i had to do, was to figure out what the instructor thought was important - because that was what he was going to put on the exam.

Each time he discussed a particular topic, i kept track of how long he addressed that topic, and how much work he did whilst he was addressed it. As an example: Just talking about something is easy. I assigned a 'work factor' - as a metric of how much work he had done - of 1 to 3 for just talking about something. Drawing on the board is harder. I assigned a 4 to a 6 for board drawing. Say he talked about a topic for 5 minutes - a 'medium' complexity talk (something that he had spent some time organising, but not a lot). I would take the 5 minutes, and multiply it by 2 - for a medium complexity talk. This gives a total of 10. Then, later, he spent 9 minutes drawing a diagram on the board relating to the same topic. I would give him a 5 - for a 'medium complexity' drawing. Multiplying by the 9 minutes gives 45. Adding the 45 to the initial 10, gives 55. I would continue this for every time he mentioned that topic during the grading period. I would do this for every topic he went over in class during the grading period. Then, i would 'rank' all the topics, from the highest total to the lowest. Then, i figured how many questions could be asked on the exam. Figuring an hour for the exam, and that it typically would take 8 to 12 minutes to do each problem - there could be 4 to 8 questions on the exam. I would take the 10 highest ranking topics, and make sure i could answer any question that could be asked on each of them - questions that had shown up on homework problems, during class discussions, or anything else.

The first time i did this, i had 100% of the exam questions on my 'sample' exam. It took me 12 minutes to do the 1 hr exam. I checked my work 3 times. The first time i checked my exam - i found 2 small errors. Correcting them, i checked it 3 more times. Finding no other errors, i turned it in. 100%.

My 2 'study buddies' were amazed. I had showed them my 'sample exam' about a week before the actual one, and they didn't like any of my questions: "Oh, he wouldn't ask that - he asked it on the mid-term".... (me): "Yeah, but nobody could DO it on the mid-term & he ended up yelling at us. Don't you remember that???" After the exam, they asked me: "How did you DO that"?? Easy!!

Try that - it may work in the Uk too. Best of luck!!

that sounds amazing! well done for figuring it out and taking the time to share it

unfortunately it wont work in the UK for GCSEs/A levels as all the exams are set by an external company and the teachers have no idea what will be set. there are some things that could be considered more likely to be set than others, but that is risky business to start trying to guess what will come up :/

but that is really good advice for here: trying to cover every kind of question you can think of abour a topic. the ranking could be done by keeping track of what you struggled to understand the most and assigning priority that way instead for uk style exams!

Well, what needs to be done is to figure out what criteria the external company uses to select questions. Then you should be able to do the same trick with those exams. They must have some means of 'filtering' the course material to do this. Otherwise, none of the students could answer any of the exam questions - if the companies picked questions that had not been covered in the lectures.

honestly no idea how they pick them. i love the idea, but there is so much material in the course and there is a previous exam question out there about literally every specification point. they might as well pick them out of a hat. at this point in my life i must have sat nigh on 100 different past papers from each of the 3 major exam boards and never noticed a pattern :/

Ok, i've been thinking about this over night. There MUST be a course syllabus somewhere, that outlines what is to be taught in the lectures. Otherwise, the schools would be teaching Greek, and the tests were designed to test for competency in aeronautical design. I think that this situation is like what you have when you are taking a course from a large uni that is taught by 5 or 6 instructors. Each instructor teaches 3 or 4 sections. The dept head [who may be one of the instructors too], and the instructors get together and decide on a 'Departmental Final'. They agree on the questions, and the exam is given to all students taking the course. In this case - they would have to co-ordinate across all unis teaching the course - so that lectures and tests would cover the required material.

If you could get a hold of class notes from 5 or 6 unis teaching a particular course, and 'correlate' the notes, to 'filter out' all the topics, i think you should have a 'handle' on it. Make a list of all the topics covered in each set of notes. Then, alphabatise each list of topics - so that you can easily compare them. Line each of them up - so that you can compare the topics covered in each course. I would expect that the list of topics covered at each uni would 'correlate' with those at the other unis.

Each topic that appears in each of the sets of notes, should correspond to one of the exam questions. Formulate a question that asks absolutely everything that you could ask about that topic. Then, practice so that you can answer everything asked in that question.

It would probably help if you could get someone to help who already had their degree in the appropriate subject - because they could probably see relationships between the topics that would not be apparent to an undergraduate student. What would also help, would be a copy of the sylllabus for the course, from one of the unis in question. Try the trash dumpsters. Best of Luck!!!

PRSOM thanks for the help, defo gonna try what you suggested