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It’s the final few days and weeks before your exams. It’s a difficult time where the anxiety and stress can become unbearable, how do you manage?

This article will go through the last few aspects you’d need to focus on to make it through the finish line and ensure you can do the best you can.

Be aware of how you’re feeling

No one can work consistently at high effort all the time, yet many students feel they would need to and are obliged to work extremely hard. Effort comes in ebbs and flows and there are times that you’ll be more effective learning and other times that you won’t be. 

For me, mornings are where I excel and post lunch afternoons I am struggling to concentrate. As you do make the process of revising try and be aware of when you’re working effectively and focus on those areas as it’ll give the most effort.

Conversely, many students I have would also feel run down and overly stressed. Feeling some level of stress and anxiety is one method of our bodies informing us to aim to work towards a goal and it can help us to focus on revision. However, it can become overwhelming where it bubbles into all factors of life. Understanding where you’re on this scale and the intensity is crucial in being able to take action to address it. If the intensity of your anxiety is stopping you from revising and interacting with others, it would be advisable to seek professional help and enquire into access arrangements at your school. If it’s high you can try to take a break by either doing some breathing exercises or some physical exercise to reduce the anxiety intensity.

Have the specification out!

The specification is a big list of what the exam and award is – its format, the units and the content of what they expect you to know in a nice readable document.

Go through the specification and work through aspects you do know, what you’re unsure of and make sure you feel confident in each area. Revise the areas you’re unsure of first and foremost before moving onto less confident then the most confident. It’s a good guide to check your understanding of the course.

Use past paper materials

Past paper materials are vital resource to work through in the lead up to exams. Practice them in exam conditions to make sure you understand the timings. Look through the mark scheme to check how the examiner will look through your work. M stands for method marks and are awarded for showing the key element the question is asking for. A for accuracy, where the answer must be in the form stated in the mark scheme, they depend on the M mark so if your working is wrong and you coincidentally reached the correct answer you would not receive that mark! B marks are independent marks from the M and A marks and may be awarded even if the marking is incorrect, the answer must be as stated in the mark scheme.

Make a list of the questions you found more difficult and this will become your basis for targeted revision, you can relate this to the specification to see what topics are usually covered.

Alternative specifications will put the questions in different formats and the topics will be bundled slightly differently. Using alternative specifications will help in developing the breadth of maths skills with tackling the problems in a variety of applications.

Asking for help

Exam season can be isolating, although it does not need to be. If you are stuck reach out to family, friends, school teachers, tutors. Different people in your life would be willing to help you. When asking for help, to make it easier for someone to help it’s best to have a particular question in mind, how you approached it and what you thought of and a specific problem what is causing it. For example, lets say I’ve made an error in factorising a quadratic. I thought I’ve followed the method however, I’ve not gotten the right answer. I’ve checked my signs and working and there’s not an error I can see. With just this information we check any assumptions made when parsing the question and the impact on the answer.

Those are our top tips for the last few days. Is there an aspect you’d like to add, let us know by commenting. Is there a topic you’d like to see next too?