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.
I didn’t want to start off this blog post in a negative light but I had to warn you about this small issue that will prevent you from achieving your target grade…
Nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes, including myself. It’s part of human nature. In an exam, it’s easy to make mistakes. The atmosphere is tense and you’re under pressure.
Maths is a unique subject because, unlike most other subjects, there is only one correct answer. As part of your solution, you carry out some working but this all leads to a single answer. Now, if you make a mistake early on in your working, it will follow through and your final answer will be incorrect. This is why it’s so easy to make silly mistakes and lose marks in your GCSE maths exam.
Convince yourself now that you will make silly mistakes in your maths exam because it will happen. I’ve marked many student’s practice papers in the past (as a result of 1-to-1 tutoring) and the number of marks lost due to silly mistakes can be as high as 10% of the overall score. This means you could lose up to 10 marks (usually the papers are out of 100) just through silly mistakes.
Here comes the important bit. Let’s suppose you are striving for a ‘B’ grade in your GCSE maths exam. If you aim to scrape a B grade, you’ll miss out due to the silly mistakes you’re bound to make. This happens in most cases. That’s why you should aim for a score that is, at least, 10% greater than the grade boundary. If you need to score 50 marks to get a ‘B’, you should aim for a score of at least 60. This extra 10 marks act as a safety margin in case you happen to make those silly mistakes in the real thing. Even better, you should aim for the next grade up – A. Not only does it guarantee the ‘B’ grade but it also raises your aspirations.
There you have it. That’s how you can almost guarantee your target grade in GCSE maths. It’s a simple rule of thumb yet it’s very powerful. In my GCSE Maths Revision System, I advise my students to, not only aim for just 60 or 70 marks in their exam, but to strive for 100% and no less. This is because I believe students are much more intelligent than they think. It’s just external influences that make them think otherwise. However, scoring 100% is a different ball game altogether and to achieve that, you’ll need to follow all of my guidelines in my GCSE Maths Revision System.