Using past papers effectively

Saturday’s somewhat-long-blogpost: Using past papers effectively and a brief introduction to designing assessments

It’s a Sunday afternoon and you have nothing better to do than printing past IB exams ready for a long grinding session. Or you’re trying to calm down your own full-blown panik stations after doing my trivial mock exams. Whichever camp you’re in, a question you may ask yourself is how to get the most out of these papers. Don’t worry,  I’ve got your back.

 

When to use past papers?

Perhaps a couple months before the exam, ideally when you’ve finished most of the content. No sooner than that.

 

If you’re used to doing past paper questions, you tend to focus on the particular types of questions that crop up rather than the concept(s) behind them. Just a tiny little tweak and you may find yourself panicking because you haven’t been “prepared” for that question. No, exams are not supposed to be predictable and no, you’re only panicking because you don’t truly understand the content. The former is true because the exam should measure what you know, not what you memorise. The latter is also true because you aren’t exposed, by your teacher or during your practice, to a wide range of questions on the same topic.

 

Important note: If you’re only looking for a 3 or 4 on the exam (maybe 5 at SL), you can totally use the trick I’ve told you, especially at SL. Some questions do show up times and times again over the years. Luckily, the grade 5+ questions are less predictable and you have to know your shit, which is what’s expected from a grade 5+ student anyway.

 

Why using past papers?

For me, there are two main purposes of doing past papers.

- Have a sense of the difficulty of the exam as a whole, and

- Practise in the same environment you’d write your exams.

 

Have a sense of the difficulty of the exam

If you’ve done a couple past papers, you can’t help but notice that

- The first question or two in section A (AA) or Paper 1 (AI) are very predictable. Some of them are no-brainers. They’re there to calm you down and boost your confidence; to get you warmed up for the spicier questions.

- The next block of questions isn’t challenging but isn’t trivial either. Sure, you might have seen them popped up during your very-comprehensive-review-of-exam-paper (if you’re a nerd like me, you’d look all the way back to 2008 and before!) but even if you haven’t, you still know what to do if you really know your stuff.

- Towards the 3^rd third of section A, the difficulty starts to ramp up significantly. They tend to test the hardest stuff on the syllabus (example: combined chain rule at SL or restricted domain when finding the inverse function at HL). They may also put a twist on the normally-perceived-to-be-easier topics.

 

And everything starts going back to normal at the beginning of section B (AA) or Paper 2 (AI).

- Usually 3-4 questions for AA per paper and 7-8 questions for AI.

- The first question or two should be relatively straightforward, with the exception of the last part. If you’re shooting for a 4/5, this is where you must get the majority of your section B/Paper 2 marks, because you can’t really pick up anything down the line.

- Theoretically you should be able to pick up a mark or two on other questions even if you don’t have a flipping clue, but consider the fact that you’re knackered after the first hour-ish, it sounds a bit improbable.

 

Practise in the same environment you’d write your exams

This is one of the most important things you can do.

When you study in a different environment than what you’re used to, you create some connections between the content you’re studying to the place you’re at. Think about the times when you listen to a particular song you recall going to other places when you’re listening to the same song in the past. After reading every single word in this article, pack your shit and study somewhere else, let it be the library or the park near you.

 

This is up for debate, but I would normally take practice exams when listening to music (or even Camellia when I’m in the mood). The exam room isn’t gonna be silent. You’ll have kids sharpening their pencils, quickly writing hieroglyphics during the last five minutes, bursting in tears halfway through the exam because they couldn’t do question 2, someone’s phone going off despite the number of times the invigilator told them to turn the bloody phone off. You name it. If you’re used to focusing in a distracted environment, you’re golden. Nothing people do can affect you.

 

Give yourself about 75% of the time allowed to do the paper. This leaves you with sufficient buffer in case your brane is fried in the middle of the exam as well as 20-ish to 30 minutes to tackle the hardest questions.

 

Alright, I’ve done the papers, what next?

Great job. You’ve done two papers, time to go do another 50. Off you go. /s

 

For real, great job. I know you’re impatient to know how you did, so feel free to dive right into the markscheme to see how many marks you get for each question. Add them all up, use the grade boundaries to find where you’re at, determine what you need to do to get gud.

 

Well, that’s rather useless Andrew, any particular advice?

In an ideal world, you’d learn from your mistakes, see what you did wrong, understand the method the markscheme uses, try similar questions and move on. But you see, I’m a lazy person, so I’d simply classify the errors I’ve made into two categories.

 

- Careless errors, let’s say, dropping a ‘-’ when copying down the line above or 2³ = 6 = 3², the world’s well-known identity.

Solution: the more questions you do, the more automated your process is, the fewer errors you’d make. You aren’t experiencing cognitive overload because you clearly know what you’re doing, so you actually have the energy to do the questions carefully. I wouldn’t sweat too much about this; it’s just a matter of practice.

 

- Conceptual errors, i.e., forgetting to reject an extraneous solution to a logarithmic equation.

Solution: go back to your notes. Let’s take logarithmic equations as an example. The first thing I’d do is clearly writing down the restrictions. It’ll force you to reflect on the results you’ve obtained and decide if you need to reject one or more solutions.

 

If the question is too hard and you don’t know how to start, maybe you’re not at that level yet. That’s perfectly fine; it’s pretty fucking hard to get 100% on IB. The one thing it tells you is that you aren’t completely solid with the basics, so go back and do a shit ton of questions. Eventually they won’t be as intimidating.

 

The good news is you don’t need 100% for a 7; it’s usually around 80%, so you can safely miss 20% of the marks and still end up with a 7!

 

There’ll be another blogpost in a couple weeks where I’ll share how I’d tackle the paper.

 

The Wolf has spoken, aroooo.

Credit: AdventurousAndrew#7499