A level revision questions

Jagraf

My daughter is in the first year of her A levels and is working very hard. When she has a test / mock etc at school she completes her revision by looking at as many past papers / specimen papers as possible and marks herself.

However, because of this when she does the tests she recognises lots of the questions (either because teachers use old papers or a mixture of questions from old papers), and ends up with high grades.

She is saying that because of this she has inflated grades and can't get a true representation of her knowledge / revision methods. She's feeling deflated .

I've suggested she tells the teachers to write some questions for her - has anyone got any other ideas?

meer53

Stop using past papers for revision ?

freda

Mock exams, in the subject I teach (maths) are usually the last 2-3 years past papers. Might be rather late now, but revise using pre 2013 papers and save the more recent papers for revision a month or so before the exam, when mock/college tests won't matter.

Flyonthewall

If questions asked over the years are the same or similar then chances are the questions in the actual test will be similar to past papers.

If she can answer them and it's on what she's learnt then she shouldn't have any problems as the test should also be on what she's learnt.

They use past tests for a reason, to give you an idea of what to expect. The only issue is if she knows there's an area they studied that is highly likely to be on the test and there's no questions on it on past papers. In which case she could ask the teacher for some questions and/or just make sure she revises that area well.

As long as she has good knowledge of the topic she should be able to answer any questions they give on it. The past papers should still give an idea of how they may ask the question for that topic even she doesn't have any questions specifically for it.

Person_one

She could just not revise for the next mock exam and see how she does.

onlyroz

Revising using past papers is absolutely the best way to revise. And questions do tend to repeat themselves anyway. I'd suggest obtaining papers for earlier years and practicing questions from a wider range of papers.

onomatopoeia99

For the subjects I did at A level (Maths, Physics, Chemistry) they set essentially the same questions every year. They'd be couched in different terms, but when you got through all the words describing the problem to the core principles from the syllabus they were testing, then the process for getting to the answers was the same.

They can't do anything else really, at least not in those subjects, they are very pure and there's nothing subjective. I imagine for other subjects which are more essay based and might ask for opinions on texts this isn't the case, but we don't know what the OP's daughter is studying.

Jagraf

Maths, chemistry and psychology. She's fine with psychology x

missbiggles1

Jagraf wrote: »

My daughter is in the first year of her A levels and is working very hard. When she has a test / mock etc at school she completes her revision by looking at as many past papers / specimen papers as possible and marks herself.

However, because of this when she does the tests she recognises lots of the questions (either because teachers use old papers or a mixture of questions from old papers), and ends up with high grades.

She is saying that because of this she has inflated grades and can't get a true representation of her knowledge / revision methods. She's feeling deflated .

I've suggested she tells the teachers to write some questions for her - has anyone got any other ideas?

This shows what happens to bright students when education stops being about challenge and academic rigour and becomes about mark grabbing and teaching to the test.

What a shame and what a waste.:(

anna_1977

buy loads of revision books too they will have lots of mock style questions

Serendipitious

Are there still different exam boards?

If so, it might be worth getting old papers from a different exam board. Though from what people are saying, it seems that subjects like Maths and Chemistry have very similar questions year on year. Might be reassuring to her, though, if different boards also have similar questions.