A-Level Maths Week 5 Exam Preparation Tips

So, your A-Level maths exam is just around the corner. Huh, that came quick. Well, I hope you’re not stressing out. And if you are, don’t worry. I mean, it’s natural to worry, but don’t let it overcome you. You’ve gotten this far, you’re at the final hurdle and you can do this. You’ve done lots of preparation and I think you’re ready to go off, fly and ace this exam. But before that, here are some pre-exam, exam day and troubleshooting tips.

Pre-Exam

· Have a good routine

By this I mean have a good routine of what you’re doing up until the day. Make sure you’re still seeing friends, doing things you love, getting some exercise in, eating as healthy as you can, and getting a good amount of sleep. I know it’s very tempting to reduce the hours of sleep you are getting in order to learn more content, but you’re actually in a catch 22 there. The less sleep you get the less time you’re giving your brain to consolidate the information you learned that day. This means it may take you longer to memorise whatever it was you learnt in the first place, or you may end up falling asleep in an uncomfortable position or, even worse, falling asleep and missing the exam (my friend did this for one of his first medical school exams – I don’t recommend).

· Go over formulas

The beautiful thing about the Maths A-Level exam is you get a formula booklet; however, this is only useful if you know how to use it. Before the exam, make sure you have had a look at it from cover to cover; make sure know what is in there and what formulas and equations you are supposed to know off by heart. You’d hate to get into the exam and realise you know what to do but have forgotten the formula or conversely to leave the exam upset because you didn’t know the formula and then find out the formula was in the booklet the whole time.

· Prepare for the day

This kind of links to having a good night’s sleep and routine, but specifically on the night before the exam itself. Make sure you get all your clothes ready, that you’ve packed your bag, pre-made lunch for the next day if you need it and decided what you want to have for breakfast. Then take the evening to look over last-minute things (not for too long) and resting either by doing some mindfulness, meditations, reading, listening to music, walking – anything that helps you to relax and reduce your stress. And of course, make sure you get plenty of sleep – aim for at least 8 hours.

Exam day

· Manage your stress

There may be a lot riding on these exams such as university offers, apprenticeship offers etc. I know you know this, and I’m not trying to stress you out more but just get you to acknowledge that you may be feeling a little more stressed out than you’d like to. So, on exam day you want to make sure you manage your stress well so that it doesn’t end up impacting your exam performance. You can do this by using whatever stress management techniques you already have, and if you’re reading this and currently don’t have any, try to find some things that work for you – such as counting your breathing, listening to music, doing some mindfulness, whatever helps. Another way to manage your stress is to avoid stressful people. Those are the people asking impossible to know questions that won’t be in the exam, or pretending that they’ve not revised even though you know they’ve been sweating it (slang for studying hard) for the past few months. You don’t need this negativity in your life, avoid these people.

· Mind over matter

I debated putting this point in, but it is a key point. You have made it this far in your education, not by luck and not by chance but by how much hard work you have put in over the years. To be savage – are you really going to let yourself get in the way of yourself? To explain, I mean are you going to let the stress and anxiety of wanting to do well stop you from doing well? As someone who once experienced a lot of stress and anxiety when it came to exams, I know it’s not simply the case of just changing how you feel but what I have learnt is that you can to choose to focus on positive thoughts, even if they do not line up with how you feel. So, you may feel like you know nothing, but when you’re preparing, when you’re walking into the exam, when you’re sitting down, tell yourself you do know something. It may feel like you’re lying to yourself, but your feelings were lying to you anyway. It’s negative you vs positive you, who’s going to win?

· Talk to yourself

Linked to the point above, talk to yourself! Maybe not out loud as people may think there’s something wrong, and if you’re in the exam room you’ll be kicked out – but speak to yourself in your head. Combat those negative feelings and thoughts by telling yourself positive ones, and apart from that, talk yourself through your exam! On the day I finally passed my driving test (hint, it wasn’t on the first try) I spoke to myself throughout the whole route. Whenever something happened, I thought was wrong, would fail me or that I didn’t expect, I told myself ‘Seyi, it’s okay, just keep going’, and maybe that’s what you need to tell yourself as you sit this exam ‘*insert your name*, it’s okay, just keep going. This way no matter what you see, how you feel or what comes up, your mindset is to just keep going – give it a go, you’ve got nothing to lose.

What if I get stuck?

A lot of stress and anxiety tends to come from people fearing that they’ll walk into the exam and forget everything or not know the answers, so as much as I’m encouraging you to be positive and have a good mindset, it’s also good to explore the worst-case scenario and see what we can do to avoid that.

· Move on

The first tip is probably one you’ve heard before – if you don’t know it, take a deep breath, don’t let it distract you and move on. In GCSE’s I would say it’s fine (not ideal but fine) if you completely leave it but that wouldn’t be my advice for A-level’s. We want to make sure we get something down even if it is random numbers, but I’ll come onto this at another point. As for now, if you don’t know it, make a note of the question number, and move on to return to it later.

· See if other parts of the paper will help you

This is a tip that helps me a lot through exams. Once you’ve passed the question, I don’t want you to forget about it but move it to the back of your mind. Sometimes another question in the paper may have some numbers or equations that help you with the question you got stuck on or trigger something in your memory that helps you remember what to do. At this point, go straight back to that question and write down whatever you remember and if you get stuck again, don’t hesitate, just go back to finishing the paper but at least you’ll have something down or hopefully even answered the question! So essentially when you move past a question, don’t forget it but don’t fixate on it – keep it at the back of your mind and maybe something you see later will help you out.

· Make sure you write something down

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, you don’t want to leave the question completely empty – make sure you have at least written something down or come back and write something down at the end. The reason I say this is because if you really have no idea what is going on, you also have no idea what you can get marks for, so just write down any key bits of information, any equations you think you could potentially use, plug some numbers in places and hope for the best – this may seem like terrible advice, but it genuinely works. You may not know what you are doing but you could also may subconsciously know it, but fear is holding you back from realising that – write down what you can and then just move on, the examiner can choose what they give you marks for.

· My story

To illustrate my point about writing something down, I thought I’d share my story with you. I will never forget doing my mechanics paper. I walked in, sat down, opened the paper and I kid you not, I had no idea what was going on, and with each page I turned, I found myself in the same situation. I think there were one or two questions I could get, but the majority of the paper felt alien to me. So, what did I do? I just went through and wrote down equations I thought could be relevant, with the numbers they’d given me and tried my best to figure something out. I cannot remember how many actual answers I got in that exam, but I can tell you now there were a LOT of workings out. To make it worse, when I walked out everyone around me said it was easy! Fast forward to results day and I’d actually done quite well! Now, don’t get me wrong, I did much better in my other modules and they helped pull my overall grade up but I did a lot better than I expected and felt I had done whilst in the exam. My number 1 tip with your maths exam (and exams in general) is don’t give up. You can do this; you’ve got nothing to lose from giving your all in that exam.

And that’s it! I’ve given you all the tips I have, I hope they’ve been useful! Remember what I just said – you can so do this! You didn’t come this far to just come this far. Look after yourself and smash these exams. And then, go on and smash life – the sky is your limit (unless you become an astronaut, then the galaxy is xxx).

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 Seyi. Seyi will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Seyi will answer them in these sessions.