GCSE Geography Week 3 Exam Preparation Tips

Nailing natural processes

As we all know there’s both a human and physical side to geography. Some of us may love human and hate physical, or you may be more of a rivers and volcanoes person. Either way you have to learn about both of them, and one of the big things involved in physical geography is natural processes. Often there will be multiple for one topic such as different types of plate boundaries or landforms created by erosion along processes. Understandably, it gets very hard to remember all of them (after a while one rock looks pretty much the same as another rock).

As mentioned in past weeks, exams are essentially tests for how much you can remember and not actually a test of your knowledge. Now because of this most students will naturally treat exams as memory tests and don’t actually understand the content they are looking at. However, by understanding the information you will find it much easier to recall the knowledge in the exam. This is particularly applicable in the revising process.

Step 1) Understanding

Understanding why each part of a process happens will help you to be able to formulate answers that are better worded and set out. If you only memorise the content you are at risk of forgetting part of a process and messing up your whole answer.

The best way to do this is by taking time to go through your textbook or class work about the process you are looking at.

Let’s take the example of the formation of a wave cut platform. The first step is that the foot of the cliff gets eroded. Ask yourself, why is this? Because of abrasion - rocks from the ocean being thrown at the foot of the cliff by waves - as well as hydraulic action from these destructive waves further eroding the cliff.

Here we can see we have said the first step and then we’ve described why. If you include this explanation in your answer it will definitely put your answer in the higher marks category.

Then you are going to want to continue doing this for the next few steps.

Step 2) Bullet points and key words

Now although I said that memorising isn’t the only step in revising it is still needed. After you have understood the process in depth you are going to need to remember it. Obviously there’s a lot to memorise so a really effective method to help is using bullet points and key words.

What you want to do is use a broad sentence as your bullet point. So using the example above the bullet sentence would be:

- Cliff foot gets eroded

Then add some trigger words after it to help remind you of the longer explanation added to the point. It is good to use key terminology that will likely be in the mark scheme. For example:

> abrasion, rocks thrown, hydraulic action

And again do this for the rest of the steps of the process.

Step 3) Diagrams

Most of the processes you look at will have a diagram attached to them whether it’s formation of a meander or formation of a stack.

An easy, EASY way of getting marks in exam questions that ask you about a process is to draw a diagram with your written answer.

So the third step here is to learn the diagram.

A few important things to remember when drawing diagrams:

- Don’t make them too complicated otherwise it becomes hard to read. You want to make it very obvious and clear that you know what you are talking about. Only have necessary labels.

- Write and draw CLEARLY. You want the examiner to be able to easily see where to award the marks.

- Draw them in pencil in case you make a mistake.

Step 4) Memorising

We have now worked out the writing part of this method that will help making the memorising easier. Now we move on to (you guessed it!) memorising.

There are two methods that I advise you use: active recall & teaching.

Active recall is basically where you write out as much of the process as you can remember from memory without referring to your notes. Once you have done this, compare your answer with the one in your notes and in a different colour write in what you have missed. Repeat this over and over until you have nothing that you’re missing.

Teaching is teaching (I said what I said). Get a friend or a parent or a sibling (really anyone will do, the dog’s always a good backup) and explain the process going through each step saying all the details. This will naturally make you think through each detail, explaining each step thoroughly and making your audience properly understand.

Perfect!

Now you’ve got all the tips and tricks to help you master processes, as long as you apply these practices in your exam revision, you will find applying them in your actual tests easy!!

See you in next week’s blog for more tips and tricks!

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