Four Revision Rules to Share With Your Students by @RichardJARogers

Rule #2: Complete lots of past-papers under timed conditions

Some exam boards release their past-papers for free, and some don’t.

For my IGCSE Chemistry students I’ve been quite lucky: Edexcel publish all of their past-papers and mark schemes online for free, and my students have had lots of practice in navigating through their past-paper site.

For the IB Diploma, the papers have to be purchased. I’m lucky because my school has purchased lots of IBDP past-papers and mark schemes.

Now I’ve got to be intelligent enough to share all of those papers with my students.

Use your school’s VLE to upload past-papers (I’m currently using Google Classroom and it’s great for this)
Print out a past-paper booklet for each of your students to take home over the Easter holidays. You don’t have to mark this – provide the mark schemes so that the students can do self or peer-assessment.
Provide topic-specific exam papers (with past-paper questions that are focused on individual topics). Save My Exams is a great website that provides lots of these ‘topic tests’ for IGCSE, GCSE, ‘A’ – Level and ‘O’ – Level subjects.

At this stage, our students should be completing past-papers under timed conditions too. It’s so easy to run out of time in the real exam. Our students must understand the importance of completing past-papers at home under the same time-constraints as the real exams.

Introduction

Rule #1: The syllabus is your ultimate guide

Rule #2: Complete lots of past-papers under timed conditions

Rule #3: Use more than one textbook for each subject

Rule #4: Use the internet