Using Past Papers Effectively | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to our series and studying effectively for gst season a levels in this video i will be talking about how we can use past papers most effectively i won't really go into why you should be using past papers because most of you will know that you should be using past papers because they're literally as close as you can get to your actual exams that you will be sitting and they give you an opportunity to see how much you know how much you don't know what to focus your revision on and stuff like that in the final few weeks and months and most importantly they make use of active recall which as we've established before is the most powerful studying technique anyways as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video

so the first thing i like to do is to keep track of which past papers i'm doing and on which days and the scores i'm getting so i know which ones to repeat as well i explained this in my previous video on organization how to do this using a trello and excel so do watch that if you haven't seen it a link will be in the description down below but the most important thing to remember is not to feel tempted to do every single past paper of course you should do the new specification papers and maybe a few of the old specification papers if there are many new specification papers for you to do i would suggest that when setting up your own version of the excel sheet go online and see how many years worth of papers there are for you to do as part of the new spec and if there are a good few years then do those but if you don't think there's enough for you to do then i would suggest finding some old specification papers uh that were just before the change in the specification as for whether you should actually do the old specification papers which are i think pre 2017 or 2015 it depends on you the subject you're doing the old specification gcse or a level maths papers isn't going to be very useful because the style of questions is really quite different the questions on the old spec papers were generally more guided and very repetitive and didn't have many out of the box thinking style questions that you find on the new spec whereas for something like a level chemistry or physics the questions aren't so different in my experience and you can still do a few years of the old swag papers to get yourself up to a good enough level by which you can practice the newspaper papers and make them most of them but ultimately i would suggest that you ask your teachers whether you think that all respect papers are worth doing for their subject or not so tracking your past papers is quite useful because it helps you to decide how many you should be doing each day between now and when your exams are so do you look up going to be by asking your teachers or looking up online and between now and then uh you can space out say 12 a level 5 maths papers and maybe 10 a-level chemistry papers or something like that and you may well have some days where you're doing like three to four papers a day of these to holidays or something then again it does depend on how long the papers are going to be generally a-level papers are a bit longer so doing like three a-level papers it may be just as much as doing say five gc papers in a day

so i'm going to briefly show you how you can find new and old specification past papers so for the new spec if i search something like a level uh chemistry a ocr which is my exam board and then just search past papers after it then i will be taken to the ocr website over here and i can see all the as past papers and a-level past papers if i go to question papers mark schemes and reports now you can see that usually the first one or two um they're usually locked behind a login for teachers only uh so you usually can't access those as a student but for the older ones you can access those and the reason they lock them is because usually the most recent papers are used as mocks by your school and whatnot so anyway if we go to one of these and we can see that we have free papers which is a normal question paper for periodic table synthesis and unified chemistry so then you can just download these papers and print them off or something like that now if we want to find the old specification papers um because you can see this only goes up to 2017 when the first new specification exams were set if we want to find the old specification papers for ocr country then we can search ocr chemistry a level old specification past papers and when we search that we see a website like this and this website just has all those old specification papers listed now do bear in mind that some of these will be in a slightly different format to the new spec uh just because of the nature of the old specification paper with how things were grouped up so i can just click on this question paper and answers so then i can do this paper print out and stuff like that and then mark it using the smock scheme as well and another useful website for findings papers is physics and math tutors if i go there then go to past papers scroll down to a levels chemistry and then for my example ocr chemistry a these are the new specification papers from 2015. i can pick any of these over here or i can go to the old specification and for ocr it was split up into unit one two four and five uh with unit one two being sat in a s and then unit four and five being sat in your second year of a levels uh so then you can just go over here and see all these uh past papers as well as the grade boundaries at the top which is quite useful because then you can see how you performed if you actually sat that exam that year on that note you will see that there are a lot of old specification papers too and i would say that if you're making the most of your past papers then doing four to five years of past papers well and actually learning from those mistakes is much better than doing say like 10 years of past papers without putting any real effort into them or trying to learn from your mistakes after completing the paper and that brings me

on to an important point of when you should start doing past papers in a normal year in england gcse's and a-level exams usually last from mid-may to mid to late june i would suggest starting your past papers in early to mid-march because that way you have a solid two months to do as many past papers as you want we're planting days off in between to relearn any content that uh you're struggling on but if you haven't covered all the content in class by early to mid march because maybe you have two to three weeks of content like to cover then reading ahead a bit to learn the content on the weekend or something can be helpful for helping you start past papers sooner and being able to attempt more of the questions because you have covered more of the content but if you don't want to read ahead or you don't have time it's totally fine to still do the past papers and skip questions on any topics which you have still like to cover and then subtract the marks those questions are worth from how many marks a paper is worth so you can get a percentage score from all the content you have covered so far just make sure not to look at the mark scheme for the questions you haven't attempted yet and make a note to come back to those questions later after you've learned the content in class

now i think a point worth addressing here is whether you need to know every single bit of content inside out before you start doing past papers and the answer is no whilst you need to know a good amount of content and understand things well enough and before you start doing past papers to make the most of them you don't have to be perfect on all the content the whole point in doing past papers is to figure out which topics you may need to revisit by attempting questions on them you may make selling mistakes sure but you will realize that for some questions you just don't know the content as well as you thought you did and that's not an issue at all that's the whole point in doing past papers to identify which topics you need to work on whilst also getting some exam practice in so after identifying the topics which you keep getting questions wrong on from past papers i would suggest going back to your flashcards that we made earlier uh on the relevant topic and checking the content of the flashcards that you're learning from if it's not similar to what the question on the mark scheme is trying to get at then it means your flashcards may be incomplete and that just means you have to go back to youtube or whatever other resources you use to make those flashcards and then add some more content to them which is required but if you don't do any of that and you're just in past paper after past paper without thinking too much about the questions you're getting wrong and why you're getting them wrong then quite frankly i think you're just wasting your time as you're not making the most of those past papers so ultimately you don't need to know the entire subjects inside out before you start doing past papers as a whole points in doing past papers is so you can identify which areas you need to work more on so you can then know the whole subject inside out remember that past papers form part of the whole learning process you may have learnt a topic to say 80 90 completion and then you need to consolidate to apply uh the topic by doing questions so then better understand the material by doing past papers now as for doing past papers

themselves the question is should you be doing them on times conditions and whilst it is ultimately up to you i would highly recommend that you do under timed conditions i would recommend that if the time runs out then instead of stopping the paper and marking questions you haven't attempted yet i would suggest that you switch pens and then start using a different color pen to do the questions you couldn't complete within the time outside the time window i think that you should still make an attempt on all the questions that you couldn't complete uh despite the time running out and still market them so you can learn a few things from them it is quite easy to spoil yourself by looking at the mock scheme too soon and feeling yourself into thinking that you would have gotten the answer right uh had you attempted the question so i would highly recommend attempting the question before marking it even if and that you have to attempt that question outside the time which is allocated for doing that past paper spoiling a question for yourself by looking at the mock scheme without making an attempt at that question is a pretty bad move because there are only a limited number of questions in the new specification and you are essentially just throwing one out the window and destroying opportunities for learning anything from that question but as far as reflections are considered it's helpful to look back on the paper and think about where you spend most of your time after attempting it maybe you spent too long on a particular question because you couldn't quite remember the content in which case it may be helpful to go back and improve your flashcards or you may have spent just too long on a question in general in which case you may want to get a small watch a wristwatch which you keep on your table and then you use a timer function on that wristwatch to keep track of how long you're spending in the exam and looking up every now and then it helps you know how long you're spending on each question or you may have spent too long on an out-of-the-box thinking question because you haven't made that particular connection required for that question before and like we discussed earlier in the series on tackling and difficult questions if you run out of time and still haven't attempted it and so marking that question is wrong and looking at the mark scheme it may be more helpful to come back to that question later and try and figure it out by thinking about it using diffused thinking because like we said before once you have made a connection once before then it's much easier to make the same connection uh later on if something similar comes up after all figuring out the connection for yourself is so much better than just being presented with it because you're much better able to remember the connection and you just get better and faster and making connections in general now this

brings me on to using mock schemes and examining reports now mock schemes are important because it's an opportunity to mark your exam papers yourself and over time you get an idea of what the mock scheme looks for in answers they are generally more useful for science subjects than they are safer maps because in maps they tend to just show you a method you may or may not understand and generally in maths uh you get all the marks regardless of how you got the answer if you do get the answer i think that mark seems like more useful for subjects like physics chemistry biology and whatnot where you may understand the concepts but you just need more practice in using the keywords that the examiners are looking for and doing enough past papers you generally notice a pattern in the keywords i'd like to see for certain topics so if a topic comes up again on your real exam then you roughly know what keywords examiner's looking for so after marking a paper it's helpful to make a note of any keywords that the mock team likes to use and see whilst you don't need to use these exact words to get the marks and it's up to the examiner's judgment see whether your response is close enough to this i find it's more helpful and you can be more certain that you're getting the marks by using the keywords they like to see after marking a paper and making a note of the keywords on a word document or a separate piece of paper i found it helpful to add these onto my flashcards and make the keywords bold and put them in capitals to make them stand out and to tell myself that when i'm going over the flashcards i have to say these keywords otherwise i can't mark the flashcard as rights that helped me to make sure i was learning the keywords required whilst going over my flashcards and for anything else i got wrong on the past paper for whatever reason and for anything else i got wrong for whatever reason on past paper i would add it onto my mistake extra content file that i mentioned in a previous video about exam technique and avoiding silly mistakes it could be simple stuff like forgetting to use comparative words like in chemistry saying different bond strengths instead of stronger and weaker bonds because you need to use the comparator words to get the mock or it could be how to properly draw lens diagrams for physics or anything like that but ultimately whatever i put in the file the best part was that before my marks and my real exams i could read through the file and see the mistakes i was making most frequently and i would know exactly what to look out for during the exam and i think it does more good than harm being reminded of all the mistakes that you make before an exam because then you know exactly what to look out for but of course before doing past papers also try to look over the file as it develops so you make a habit of looking for those mistakes as well

now another useful resource or examiner reports essentially after each exam is set and all the papers are mocked the senior examiners get together and comment on how students spend the exam so if we find one of these using a level ocr chemistry a which we saw earlier in the video then we can read some of the comments so if i open up the examiner's report for the first paper of 2018 then i can scroll down and find some of these comments on how students did so like this question 14 it says this question was almost universally correct and then for some of the more challenging questions it says only high ability candidates were able to explain the term average bond enthalpy and stuff like that so you can go through the paper after completing it and read through some of these comments and usually they have a few examples as well of like good responses that they found from students as well and you can see how this student has laid out that work quite well so after doing some new specification past papers i found it helpful to read through the examiner reports for the paper i had just done and mocked because they gave me a chance to read through uh read about how other students found the exam and what most other students made mistakes on as well and whilst these are usually read by teachers students can read them too and learn what examiners like to see any mistakes which come up frequently and the examiners often give recommendations for teachers to cover slash emphasize a few more things in their lessons or a few more minor details which do come up on the exam so that's always helpful to read about now this was particularly helpful for any questions which i found hard because generally i find it reassuring to find out that many other students also struggled with that question so in the end i usually read the examiner reports for the new specification papers and any old specification papers that i tried as well i didn't really bother reading the examiner report unless i did really bad on that paper and then it was reassuring to know that many of the students found many of the questions difficult as well now the next and perhaps the most

underrated resource is using past paper videos on youtube usually after doing a past paper if i couldn't figure out a question and still didn't understand the mark scheme and even looking back over the content wasn't enough then i found it helpful to search the exam board subject year and paper name on youtube generally you can find a video of a teacher going through the past paper and find them explaining the questions that you may have found hard or struggled on there are quite a few on all specification papers but many more on the new specification and of course i didn't watch the whole video i just skipped the questions that i got wrong because i wanted to hear how a teacher thinks about those questions but if a video didn't exist and i still didn't understand how the mock scheme got the center i would email or ask a teacher that question and then explain my reasoning for why i think this should be the answer my answer and my line of reasoning explaining it gave them an opportunity to correct any misconceptions i may have had and a final thing that i also found

useful i mentioned in my video on tackling hard questions is having a hard questions folder after doing a past paper any question that i got wrong at all required a lot of thinking or was generally quite tough i would take a picture of it and put it in a hard questions folder on my google drive alongside a screenshot of the mark scene so i didn't have to dig up the mock scheme again i find this to be helpful as a few days later i could come back and re-attempt the question to make sure i actually relearned the topic properly and how you had to do a question of that style and even close to exam time when i had done every past paper that i wanted to and i had repeated the past papers that i scored the lowest on i would use a hard questions folder to keep myself occupied in the final few days and i would re-attempt those hard questions and generally by that point i find those questions to be much easier because i had done a lot more practice over the previous few weeks after doing the hard question for the first time anyways i hope that video was useful and

i'll see you next one