GCSE Chemistry Week 2 Exam Preparation Tips

TLDR: We can’t miss out the most important step: marking the papers you did last week and making a plan for the rest of revision.

Mostly likely, GCSEs are the first proper exam season you’ve gone through. If you’re feeling nervous and unprepared, don’t panic! For lots of people, making a revision timetable is a really great way of putting your mind at ease and making sure you plan enough time to prepare for all your exams.

To make a useful revision timetable, it’s so important to know which topics and types of questions are your weak spots. This is where the papers from last week come in – by marking these and thinking back to what you struggled with while you sat them, you can make sure your revision plan is going to target the areas that you need help with the most, meaning you’ll be able to pick up the most marks!

Exactly how to mark your papers and make a revision plan are things you may need help with if you’ve never done them before. Keep reading for some tips and resources.

Tips on marking papers:

Two things to say before we talk about how to mark a paper:

1. there is absolutely no point doing a paper if you don’t mark it.

2. you will learn better if you mark your own work.

This may sound really obvious, but if you don’t mark your work, you won’t know where you went wrong and you won’t know where to revise. Worst case: you’ll make the same mistakes again and again and lose really achievable marks.

It can be really easy to get a teacher to mark your work but marking it yourself will familiarise you with what examiners look for and how you’re expected to answer questions. As you mark more of your own work, you’ll also start to see that the same questions come up again and again, just asked in slightly different ways.

- Be harsh, but not too harsh. Mark schemes are always split up into individual marks. Make sure you follow the mark scheme closely. Don’t give yourself credit if the mark scheme says not to, even if you think the mark scheme is being unfair. Sometimes, you only get the mark if you remembered to include a specific keyword, which is annoying, but important to learn so you can get that mark next time.

- What details are in the mark scheme? Lots of GCSE students (myself included) get frustrated at how much the exams can turn into big, long memory tests. While this is true for lots of chemistry topics, it also means questions get repeated. Recognise what questions came up that you’ve seen versions of before, and recognise which keywords are always in the mark scheme that you get credit for using.

- Talk your thinking through. One of the best ways to learn is to teach other people, or even things (bear with me). Some research has shown that even explaining a topic to an inanimate object like a houseplant or bored sibling improves your understanding and retention of knowledge. Try talking through your thought process as you work through the papers, both for questions you got right and ones you got wrong.

- Read through the examiner’s reports. These reports talk about common mistakes students have made. Check to see if you made the same mistakes – if yes, do you understand why you did and how to avoid it in the future?

- Are you really stuck? Sometimes the mark scheme doesn’t explain why the mark is what it is. If this is the case, spend 15 minutes going through your notes, textbooks, or looking on google for an answer. If you still can’t find out, ask for help! Your parents, siblings, classmates or teacher will be able to help.

Tips on making a revision plan:

- Make sure you have the resources you need: your exam timetable and lots of your past work will both be essential in making sure the revision plan you make actually works for you.

- Give yourself wiggle room: it is impossible to plan exactly where you will be in terms of exam preparation in 2 or 3 weeks’ time. If you make a super detailed plan (down to the hour) for that far in the future, you are almost never going to stick with it. It will help you to build in some flexibility into your plan. For example, instead of scheduling all past paper questions on organic chemistry for Tuesday in 3 weeks, schedule 2 hours of revision on “the topic I’m struggling with the most”. This revision plan is going to work best if you come back to it every few days and adapt it, so if in 3 weeks’ time you get to that task and you feel like organic chemistry is fine and you want to look at calculations instead, you can.

- Build in time off: a big part of good exam preparation is looking after your mental and physical health. Part of that is managing your expectations. This comes down to giving yourself the wiggle room I talked about above, and also making sure you are realistic with how much you can do each day. Research has shown that if you’re doing really brain-intense work, like revision, you can only really focus well for about 4 hours a day (so don’t schedule in a 12 hour revision session).

Suggested plan:

Monday: Mark the papers from last week. Note down which topics you lost the most marks on and struggled with the most. Start to revise these topics.

Tuesday: Go back through end of topic tests, mock papers, and school reports to see if there are any other topics you’re struggled with that you want to do some focussed revision of. Find your full exam timetable for the upcoming season.

Wednesday: Put together a plan for revision. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but keep in mind the tips above and just see what works for you. Writing out a calendar or doing it in a spreadsheet are ways I’ve planned out my revision in the past – see here for a template you can download to get you started.

Thursday: Next week we’ll be doing some more past papers, so spend some time today ironing out more topics you lost marks in last week.

Friday: Same as yesterday!

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.