A-Level Chemistry Week 4 Exam Preparation Tips

TLDR: switch up your revision. Variety is the spice of life, or in this case, the spice of revision.

At this point, you may be feeling like you have exhausted all possible and available past papers, YouTube videos, textbooks, revision resources, memes, and just about everything else. To make sure that going through all these resources hasn’t been a waste of time, let’s go back and revisit some. As with all revision techniques, this will look different depending on what your weaknesses are and what revision you’ve done so far. A good idea is to go back over questions and papers that went particularly badly (everyone has a few of those) and redo them given all the progress you’ve made since doing them the first time. The abundance of past papers done to revise is necessary and a tried and tested revision technique that can’t be replaced, but variety and novelty are important so below are some other revision techniques and activities you can sprinkle throughout your past-paper work to keep things interesting, and some more general advice.

- Write your own exam questions. If you’ve gone through all the exam papers you can handle for now, why not turn things on their head and come up with your own? Try writing an exam-style question and a mark scheme for it. This can be a useful exercise to get you to think about what exactly questions are assessing.

- Write a perfect “wrong” answer. When doing a past paper, obviously you are trying to think of the right answers only for almost two hours. There is only really ever one right answer, but lots of wrong ones. By noting down what wrong answers would be, you’re thinking about common mistakes you could make and this may help you avoid these mistakes in the real exam. Just remember on the day to not employ this revision technique!

- Write down your entire thought process. The entire thing. In great detail. This works particularly well for questions you aren’t sure about. Writing down your whole thought process forces you to organise your thoughts, and gives your brain the space to make links between concepts that you might not have made otherwise. I find this to be helpful and I’m often surprised by how many extra marks I can get by spending a few more minutes working a question through in this way.

- Ask yourself why. To get the top grades, your understanding of the content has to be pretty iron-clad. Making sure you understand why something is the case, or how different stages of working link together strengthens your understanding of the content.

- Work with an accountability partner. Find a friend who has exams coming up too, maybe someone who is also studying for chemistry exams, and make plans with them, both for work and otherwise. Let them know your plan for the day and set a call to check back in in the afternoon or work together and make sure the other is not getting distracted. To give yourselves an incentive to get good quality revision done, plan something fun and relaxing for the evening that you can look forward to (like looking at memes)

- Don’t set yourself up for failure. One of the fastest ways of making yourself burn out is pushing too hard too quickly. For me, this always happens when I put tasks on my to-do list that are just not achievable in the time I have available. Be careful with the way you plan your revision and how much you can realistically and healthily achieve in one day. For example, setting a task such as ‘do all 2019 past papers by 5pm’ for a Monday will probably not happen (and if it does, you probably won’t be working at your best). A much more manageable way of getting this work done is to set yourself the task of doing one paper every other day. Research has shown that people can only really be productive for about 4 hours a day, less if the work you’re doing is really brain intensive (like revising). Maybe time to rethink that 12-hour revision session?

However, you prefer to revise, be kind to yourself, remember to take breaks, and do little bits often, not huge sessions once a week. You’ve got this!

Have any questions about how to prepare for your A-Level exams? Having problems with any hard to understand content or tricky past exam questions? Then ask Martha. Martha will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Martha will answer them in these sessions.