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.