Redeem your GCSE grades in less than 3 months
LikeAs a private biology tutor, I have many GCSE students who worry about their grades and how they can improve them. There are just a few easy steps you need to take to take yourself from 3s and 4s to 7s and 8s this year. GCSE exams are coming up and it may have finally dawned on you that you need to take this seriously, so how do you get started?
1. Get your specification
Have your exam board specification printed, saved or written - whatever works best for you. If you don't know your exam board, ask your teacher. Exam specifications are available online to print or save. This will be your progress tracker. You are going to go down the specification, ticking off each spec point as you've consolidated it.
2. Learn the content
Choose a specification point. You can watch a video on that specification point, or read a textbook/revision guide page on it. Whichever one you choose to do - pay attention. If you´re watching a video, avoid making notes while watching. If note-making is your form of revision, make them when you rewatch the video for the second time. Watch once with full focus. When reading, read the page out loud. If something is hard to understand, pretend your teaching it to someone else and it will come to you.
3. Active recall
Put away the book, close the tab and get a pen and paper. Write down everything you remember. If it helps, write down some small prompts before hand, only 2-3 words. Once you've written down everything, grab a different coloured pen. Rewatch the video, reread the page and fill in your gaps after watching it. If there are still gaps, fill them in with a third colour while 'cheating' and make a note of these for you to focus on
4. Exam questions
Complete some practice exam questions for each topic you cover. Mark them and then make flashcards on the ones you struggled with using the mark scheme answer
5. Repeat
Make sure to repeat this for everything, and keep going back to stuff you've done before. If you dont regularly go back to earlier content, it will be forgotten.
Following these steps, and a bit of extra reading and you are capable of reaching 8s and 9s with the extra effort. Make sure to know your subject before knowing what to focus on. Maths will be improved by doing exam questions again and again, English will require thorugh content knowledge and essay plans. Once you to know what is the key to your subject, reinforce that with the active recall method above and be prepared to be over the moon on results day.
If it´s biology you´re struggling with, perhaps hiring a private biology tutor can help. I am a private tutor offering biology lessons for GCSE. Feel free to contact for more information!