Mohammed Syed, a 10-year-old boy from West London, passes his GCSE Maths in one month!
Discover how he did it by watching the short video below…
Get the GCSE Maths In Four Weeks Revision Guide here for Only £12 from Amazon
I recently wrote a report called: Why it’s Easier Than Ever To Achieve Your Target Grade In GCSE Maths…
If you haven’t read it yet, you can download it from here >>
The great news is, it’s got even easier, particularly for Edexcel students.
The gap between paper 1 and paper 2 this year is almost 2 weeks!
Unlike previous years, when there were only 3/4 days between both papers.
Not only that, but you have a week-off in between.
This means you have a greater chance of maximising your score in each paper.
You should stop all revision for paper 2 as from today and focus solely on paper 1 until you’ve taken it on the 26th May 2016.
Then immediately after, focus on paper 2.
I have advised my tuition students to do the same.
Don’t revise any topics that feature in paper 2 until you’ve completed paper 1.
If you’re unsure on what kind of topics will feature in each paper, take a look at the lists below:
GCSE Maths Higher Non Calculator Topics
GCSE Maths Higher Calculator Topics
Focus on your areas of weakness too. These are questions you got wrong consistently in your practice papers.
Use my past papers by topic to target specific areas.
Save one or two practice papers (ideally the 2015 papers) for the penultimate day i.e. the day before the actual exam.
This is what I like to call the ‘the acid test’. Whatever you get in these papers is what you’ll get in the real thing.
If you’ve already gone over them, don’t worry. You can always go over them a second time around.
If you’re a Edexcel student, I highly recommend that you download my ‘GCSE Maths Tricks of the Trade’ guide too.
What I’ve noticed over the last few years (as a result of face to face tuition) is there are a number of key areas that a typical student would drop marks on.
It is difficult to go through all of them in this blog post. That’s why I documented them into a guide.
Going through this guide alone will boost your final result by one whole letter grade >>
I have given you everything you need to achieve your target grade in GCSE Maths this year.
You really don’t have any excuses.
Go out there and smash it! 🙂
If you have any questions about revision, leave a comment below.
Good luck.
Jeevan S.
Up until this point, you would have followed a specific revision schedule. You would have revised each subject accordingly. However, as you enter May, your revision schedule will somewhat change. You will revise subjects in the same order as your exam timetable. The order in which you revise for each subject will depend on the gap between each exam and whether exams arrive in clusters e.g. 3 exams on 3 consecutive days and then a 4 day gap until the next one.
If your exams fall on every other day, then it would make sense to revise each subject a day before the exam. At this stage, you would have a great deal of knowledge about each subject and efficient notes pages (if you don’t have any for maths, you may want to check out my previous post). Now it’s just a case of memorising all of those key notes for each exam. For maths, it would most likely consist of formulas or general pointers such as don’t forget to write the units at the end of each answer, rounding to 3 significant figures etc. etc. It’s just small errors you made consistently throughout your practice papers. All the important stuff is already stored into your long term memory.
If your exams are not evenly spread out and they come in clusters, then it can get a little complicated. What you need to do is focus on each cluster, in turn. For example, suppose you have a science, business and history exam on a particular week. There is a 4 day gap and you have maths, another science exam and geography the following week. A few days before, you would have to focus solely on the first cluster (science, business, history) until it’s over. Immediately after the history exam, you would revise for the second group; maths, science and geography in that order.
You may need to revise two subjects on the same day if the gap between those exams are too small or even worse, fall on the same day! There are certain subjects which do not require as much attention as others due to the nature of the exam. Depending on the exam boards, these subjects could be R.E, P.E (practical), Drama (practical), Art, Technology, Media Studies and I.C.T. Dedicate more time to core subjects such as maths, english and science because these are more important for your long term studies/career.
As you can see, it’s difficult to define the ideal revision schedule as one size doesn’t fit all; students have all kinds of exam timetables. However, what I highly recommended is that you download my guide: How To Maximise Your Grade In Every GCSE Exam. It’s a great resource to use in the weeks leading up to your final GCSE exams. On pages 17-18, you’ll find a very good example of what I’m discussing here. I’ve given a typical exam timetable which has a number of exams in quick succession. I explain how to approach them all so you can maximise your grade in every one. You just need to adapt it to your own personal schedule.
At this late stage in your revision schedule, you should not be revising from any textbooks or revision guides. Instead, past papers should be at the forefront of your revision. Complete as many past papers as possible, especially the most recent ones (June 2012 and onwards) as they will look almost identical to the ones you’re about to take.
Use your revision guides and textbooks as a reference point in case you need to read up on extra material but even so, try to avoid referring to heaps of information. This is because you have a number of exams in quick succession. Mark schemes and cheat sheets/notes pages usually work best. Cheat sheets are only a few pages long that contain the most important concepts/formulas of the syllabus.
When you complete those past papers, what you’ll notice is that you’ll have weaker and stronger areas. You should obviously dedicate more time to your weaknesses. Target these areas by answering a few more exam questions on these topics. This is how you’ll bump up your final grades from D’s and C’s to B’s and A’s.
If you feel you don’t have any good summary notes or cannot find any exam questions by topic, don’t worry. Over the last year or so, I’ve been compiling my own notes and resources for students I teach on a one-to-one basis. It’s taken me a long time to put together but I wanted to make sure you had all the best resources at your disposal. Here they are below. I would advise that you go through all of them and pick the ones that are most useful to you.
GCSE exams are no longer a test of ‘how intelligent’ you are anymore. These days, they’re a test of ‘how much you can remember’. Students who perform the best in their GCSE exams tend to have very good memory retention skills. The exam boards don’t do you any favours. They give you all your exams in one go, some of which fall on consecutive days. This means your memory retention skills have to be strong in order to perform well in all your GCSEs, let alone maths.
The best memory retention techniques are those that store concepts into your long-term memory. Why can you remember lyrics of a particular song for years on end? Simply because it’s stored into your long-term memory. I wouldn’t advise ‘cramming’. Cramming involves attempting to learn heaps of information ‘last minute’ – just days or weeks before an exam. Cramming is only stored in the short-term memory and hence, there is a chance you could forget it come the exam. Although it may work for some, I wouldn’t highly recommend it because as you can see, it’s a riskier approach.
In order to utilise your long-term memory, begin revision early and set-up a routine. The reason why you can recall the password to your Facebook account every time without fail is because you follow a routine of logging into your Facebook account on perhaps a daily basis? This is how you should approach revision. Revise in a systematic way so on this day, you are going to read through this many pages of this textbook and complete this many past papers. Continue this pattern and what you’ll notice is after a while, the key concepts will begin to stick into your long-term memory.
Also, you shouldn’t revise topics in isolation. This means revising algebra one week and then, trigonometry the next. There is a danger that by learning individual topics, you may not be able to recall the key concepts of several topics at any one time. This happened to one of my students I tutored recently. Remember, your GCSE maths exam is on every topic. That’s why past papers are a great revision tool because:
If you would like a set-routine for your GCSE maths revision, I would highly recommend my GCSE Maths revision program. As part of the program, I give you a bonus guide called: How To Maximise Your Result In Every GCSE Exam. In there, you’ll find the most critical areas to focus on in your revision. I also provide a revision schedule, built around your school timetable, so you can achieve top grades in all your exams whilst having enough time to enjoy leisure activities too. To download this guide, visit www.passgcsemaths.com.