GCSE Chemistry Week 5 Exam Preparation Tips

TLDR: you’ve worked hard – trust that it will pay off! In the last leg of the race, take care not to burn out.

Burnout refers to feeling particularly tired and drained and not being able to focus. After working towards these exams for the last couple of years and probably feeling quite stressed about them, it’s important to look after your mind and body and make sure you’re mentally prepared for taking the exams. At this point, there is only so much you can cram into the time you have left, and it's better to have a couple of hours of sleep than it would be to look through one more paper.

Someone I went to school with spent all night preparing for an exam but was so tired by the time they got into the exam hall that they fell asleep on their desk and didn’t answer any of the paper. This is a true story and it happens every year! There is nothing you are going to learn by staying up two extra hours that is going to offset the impact of trying to sit an exam on 4 hours of sleep.

As you may have started exams already and probably by now have a decked-out revision timetable, there’s no suggested plan for the week this time, but I am going to be going through some general advice and questions to ask yourself as you structure the last few days of preparation:

- What mistakes have you consistently made? For me, it was not structuring my answers well enough in 6-mark questions and writing long paragraphs full of waffle. For you, it might be misreading exam questions and not giving the final answer in the form they ask for or forgetting how to convert from dm to cm in calculations. Everyone has a couple of areas that have lost them marks more than once. Clock where these areas are for you and try and come up with different ways of making sure you don’t get tripped up the same way in the real exam. For me and my 6-mark questions, it really helped to write a bullet-pointed plan of what points my answer would consist of before writing it out into a full paragraph. Experiment with some questions to figure out how you can avoid your most common mistakes.

- Don’t sweat the small stuff. Easier said than done, I admit, but try and figure out if something is worth worrying about. There is little point in freaking out about things that we can’t control. At this point in the game, it’s just not productive to start kicking yourself for mistakes you’ve made in the past or wishing you’d done more sooner. Thinking about that is just a waste of time and going to use precious energy and more importantly the precious time you have remaining! Focus up and look ahead – don’t let the past haunting you slow you down – you have bigger fish to fry!

- Do you know what to expect? With so many exams coming up, it can be easy to forget exactly which one is coming up next. Make sure you know what topics are being assessed in each paper if you’re allowed a calculator (you will be), what your data booklet will look like, and how much time you’ll get for the exam. Make sure there is nothing left that could surprise you on the day. (except for how pleasantly easy the test was!!!)

Finally, well done for all the work you’ve done to prepare for these exams. Remember that exams are not trying to trick you, you really are being tested on what you know, and you have put the work in to do well! Make sure you’re sleeping enough, seeing friends, and staying hydrated, and good luck!

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.