December exam

It’s a bit early for you to be thinking about the second stage of preparation – you’re still7 weeks away!

How much can you write in 1 minute 18 seconds? Do you know?

Find out … time yourself. Or, better still, get someone to time you as you copy out script from a source document (book, magazine, leaflet, revision kit …)

You’ll probably not get past the end of the third line

And that’s the MAXIMUM length of a sentence / paragraph in a P7 answer

And that sentence contains just ONE markable point

Work on the mantra “one sentence per point, one point per sentence”

And one sentence should therefore be earning you a mark

Get used to planning answers

Note how many marks are available in a question / part question

Divide by 2

And that’s the number of minutes that you should be spending just planning what you would write as an answer if that question faced you in the exam

Try it with a question from the revision kit (and remember that you need to plan for ALL parts of a question)

Now check your plan against the printed solution and identify where your plan differs from the solution.

You may have missed some obvious points
You may have missed the point of the question
You may have picked on a word within the question requirement and focussed your planned answer on that one word
You may have misinterpreted the question
You may have confused the requirement asking for procedures with a similar requirement asking for evidence (or vice versa)

Try another question

And another

And keep going like that until you (should hopefully) find that you are scoring sufficient points in your plan to earn you a pass were you to enjoy the luxury of writing out those planned points in full proper sentences (instead of just the one word notations that are your plan)

Try a few of those and let me know how you get on

OK?

It could well be that you couldn’t think of enough points