Making the most of mock exams

It’s that time of year – the pumpkins are discarded, fireworks are exploding seemingly every night and Mariah Carey is just around the corner – but many Year 11 and Year 13 students are too busy thinking about their mock exams to feel festive.

While we all have a different approach to revision, it can be a stressful time of year for students, teachers and parents. Just like Christmas, exams (whether real or mocks) seem to come around quicker every year and it can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Here’s my top 5 tips for making the most of an unpleasant but – in my opinion – necessary part of preparing for GCSEs or A Levels – in chemistry or any other subject.

Remember that small marks add up

Big, scary things stick in our memory. Small, boring things don’t. This has two effects when it comes to revising for chemistry exams:

We obsess about the really hard questions. Every year, every past exam paper has some question that has students screaming to the internet about how ridiculously hard it is. While this makes for great drama on websites like Student Room, remember that these questions are not the norm and are not worth that many marks. Instead, what is most likely to make your grade is making sure you don’t miss marks on the straightforward questions that are repeated every year. Which leads to the second problem:

Because we tend to forget ‘boring’ stuff, you can only really learn these things by repetition. Your chemistry teacher doesn’t know the colour change for oxidation of alcohols because it’s an interesting colour change – they know it because they’ve taught it every year. Retrieval practice should be part of your exam prep all the way through, on top of past paper questions (want some advice on how to revise without past papers – check out this post).

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Don’t leave blanks

If you run out of time in your mock exam, it’s an important lesson and not something you should ignore. The most likely problem is that you’re not spending enough time practising under proper timed exam conditions, but if you are genuinely struggling it’s a good idea to work out if there is an underlying issue that requires extra time – your teachers and school should be able to help you enquire about this.

But if you’ve got time at the end and you’re leaving large spaces in your exam paper, you need to consider why. Is it really that you have NO idea what to put, or maybe that there’s a mental block holding you back? It’s really typical with a challenging subject like chemistry that students lose confidence and start to question everything, to the point where you leave even simple questions blank.

Try to get used to skimming through the question for clues – is there a formula or important detail that you missed the first time you read it? Are there some numbers that you can use – even if you can’t get to the end of a big calculation, you should be able to work some of it out. Leaving blanks gives you and your teacher nothing to work with at all.

Learn from mistakes

This part is actually about learning from PAST mistakes – I’ll be writing another post soon about what to do when you get your mock results back. As a teacher, I know how frustrating it is when there’s a mock question that’s basically the same as something we did for homework or in a topic test, and students do just as bad – or WORSE – than they did the first time round.

Use past tests and assessments, even questions you did in class, to see where you might have gone wrong before. You should also try to answer the questions you’ve already answered, to check if you can still do it as well as you could before.

Be realistic

There are two parts to being realistic. The first is to try to do revision under realistic conditions. Do retrieval practice without notes, and answer past paper questions under timed exam conditions. Write your answers out fully as you would in an exam, and don’t skip them because you ‘think’ you know the answer. Use a proper calculator and A Level periodic table so you’re used to the way they are laid out.

The second part of being realistic about mocks is realising that they are not, in fact, all that realistic. For the real exam, you’ll have had more time to prepare. You’ll be more motivated. This is not an excuse to decide that mocks aren’t useful – they are good practice and help let you and your teachers know what to work on most. At the same time, it’s not the end of the world if things don’t go your way.

Know what you’re preparing for

I almost didn’t write this, as it should be obvious… And yet it isn’t! I deal with students every single year who ask for help preparing for mocks or other chemistry exams – but they can’t tell me what will be on the exam! What topics will be covered, how long will the exam be? Will it be multiple choice, extended response or a mixture? Will it be based on an actual A Level paper or mixed questions? These are essential pieces of information and your school or college should be able to supply the answers with plent of time for you to prepare. If you’re not sure, ask – and don’t settle for vague responses like ‘everything we’ve done so far’!

CK Chemistry Mock Exam Service

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