Learning comes last in exam strategy. No marks for guessing why.
Why the most extreme advice for exam success is also the most plausible
As a tutor, I am often asked to advise students on exam strategy. We usually have a timeframe of weeks/months rather than years. Working back from the student’s target grades, my advice invariably comes in three parts:
· Practice the exam under simulated exam conditions
· Identify your knowledge gaps
· Learn just enough to fill those gaps
Rinse, lather, repeat, grabbing hold of every available past paper (and a few more).
I promise my students that after several iterations, they will become acquainted with the format and time constraints of the exam. That they will know how to time their response to each exam question to optimise their overall performance. That they will identify the high frequency exam topics to focus their limited revision time on. And that by interrogating the mark scheme, they will become master exam tacticians, knowing which questions to pick off first, and how to salvage partial credit for the items that stump them.
I resort to Sun Tzu in expounding the virtues of planning (“victorious warriors win then go to war”). I tell my students that the quality of revision matters as much as the quantity. We employ the most effective tactics for medium term knowledge retention — tactics such as spaced reinforcement and active retrieval.
The learning is secondary to all of the above. It is always restricted to the particulars of each exam. Why burden ourselves with understanding and inquiry when simple execution of procedures will do? We can probe the depths of calculus another time; for now just brush up on your standard derivatives (and the most high frequency ones at that).
As a tutor, I have earned my bread by capturing the most essential principles of exam performance. I am acutely aware that exam success and learning are separate educational objectives, with little overlap between the two. Knowledge that is acquired solely for exam purposes is unlikely to hang around for long. I can testify to learning my Chemistry facts ceaselessly and earning my grades. Six months later, the facts were gone. The understanding? Barely there to begin with.
It’s why every tutoring project I undertake begins with a few caveats:
This is not about your intellectual development.
It is not about preparing yourself for the workforce. You may develop some self-regulation skills along the way, but rarely will employers hire you for them.
It is all about grades; the lamest signal of your intelligence, but the one that has currency in our society.
This, folks, is the farce of high stakes exams. My advice is extreme to be sure, but it only reflects the absurd dynamics that our assessment system instigates.
It is why I stand with Barnaby Lenon, who caused a furore last week with his exam preparation advice to GCSE and A Level students. The chairman of the Independent Schools Council, and former headmaster of Harrow, advised students to study for seven hours a day over the critical Easter period, amounting to around 100 hours of total revision time. Lenon’s advice has drawn sharp criticism: ‘unrealistic’, ‘unbelievable’ and ‘nonsensical’ were among the responses.
I’d love to add voice to the naysayers, but Barnaby Lenon is simply wise to the success criteria of high stakes exams. Lenon realises that exams privilege the mass consumption and recall of knowledge — more knowledge than most can bear in any single revision cycle. That is why intelligent preparation and practice is king. One hundred hours may even be considered paltry.
Instead of directing our ire at the messenger, we should be calling for an overhaul to our exam system. The alternatives, whatever they are, must take account of the behaviours induced by structure and consequences of assessment.
Assessment of any kind must be resistant to Campbell’s Law which, in turn, means removing the high stakes accountability of any single exam. The most basic criteria for any assessment must surely be that learning is the first imperative.
As a tutor, I should never be employed for my deft advice on exam strategy, as much as my ability to instil joy and understanding in my students. A chief benefit of working with primary students is that their exams do not carry stakes high enough to distract from the learning (except, of course, when they sit the 11-plus). We are free to get on with the learning.
I look forward to the day where I can say the same for all my students, regardless of where they are in their educational journey.
