GCSE Maths Week 1 Exam Preparation Tips

A few weeks till exams?

A few weeks till exams…

My names Seyi and for some of you reading, your exams are just a few weeks away. So now what?

Okay, maybe not so much, or not at all – but maybe this is how you are feeling, so before I even say what this is. Or why I’m writing:

Yes, exams are soon, and yes, you want to do well, and yes, they’re important (!) but despite how you might be feeling – they are not the end of life as we know it! So chill.

"Seyi, I don’t know how to chill. My exams are so soon, I’ve done lots of/a bit of/absolutely no (insert whatever suits you best here) revision and I am FREAKING OUT".

Well don’t! Because over the next few weeks, starting today, I’m going to take you through what you need to be doing and when you need to be doing it, to ensure that we absolute ACE this Maths GCSE.

Despite what everyone may have already told you, it’s not too late to make a difference. Whether you’ve done a tonne of revision, or you can’t even find your maths book (do please look for it though), we’ll get through this together.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to get ready for your Maths GCSE and hopefully it’ll look something like this:

This week we’re going to look at getting ourselves in the best place for this exam, meaning it’s time to get prepared.

Those of you reading will be at different levels of preparation, some of you will have read your maths textbook inside out and others of you will just know there’s an exam coming up, but preparation is key, and here are some quick steps to help you all make sure you’re in the best place to progress. Check off what you’ve done already and jump in wherever you’re missing something.

1. Find your specification!

Your specification is your rule book for this exam – it has everything you need to know in it from formulas to how much math exactly to math etc etc. To find it, go on your exam board website (if you’re not sure what exam board you are doing, ask your teacher!), select GCSEs, Mathematics and the right specification for you and bam – it’s there! (I also just google ‘exam board maths GCSE specification – e.g. Edexcel Maths GCSE Specification and it comes up – just make sure you have the right one, and not an old version!)

2. Choose your resources

There are such a wide range of resources to help with Maths GCSEs, from things you may use in school (textbooks, classwork, MyMaths etc), to other websites, YouTube videos and blogs (like this one) that will be able to help you! Ensure you have resources that help teach you content you have yet to fully understand but also that have lots of questions and past papers for you to use (Hint: For past papers, a good place to start is the exam board website).

3. Identify what you need to do

This bit won’t be entirely fun and it’s easy to get overwhelmed but take it one step at a time! Have a look through the specification and your classwork and see what topics you understand and what you still need to review. What I’ve found helpful to do in the past is to tick things off as I go through the specification – in green if I fully understand it, orange if I need to spend some time on it and red if I wonder when on this beautiful earth I was ever taught such a thing (i.e. I find it hard), as then you end up with a visual and easy-to-understand representation of what you need to work on.

4. Assign time to work

It’s really great planning all this work, but you actually need to do it. The final step of your preparation is finding some time in your week that you can dedicate to doing maths work. Maybe 1hr on a Tuesday and 3hrs on the weekends works for you, or maybe you’re someone who wants to do a 1hr a day – have a look at how much you need to go through and try to slot in some revision time. (If you start revising from this week then you should have/spend a week or so to go over everything you’re still trying to get your head around, again, depending on how much you need to go over.)

5. Have a hot chocolate

Or a tea, or Lucozade or glass of water – whatever floats your boat. Congratulations, you’ve got a plan! If you want to be super on it, you can start getting some work done and filling in those gaps of knowledge, but if you’re totally spent by this and can’t do any work or have no idea how to use the resources you chose to learn everything you need to know, then don’t worry – I’ll be back next week to talk about how we can best learn everything. But at least now, we’re ready to roll.

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 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.