How To Survive GCSEs

We - Viola and Arya - have just completed our GCSEs and are awaiting our results on the 22nd August. Over the course of the year we lived in a state of constant stress, fear and panic as we realised many of the mistakes we made along the way that could have been avoided. Hopefully the mistakes we made and how we could ideally have avoided them will help you to complete your exams in a slightly less anxious way. So here we go ...

1) Leaving our notes to the last minute - having failed to create effective notes as we went through the courses, we realised that, one month before our first exam, we had no notes to revise from, leaving us in a panicked state, up all night, attempting to climb the endless mountain of French verbs, English literature quotes and science key words. If we had been productive and proactive the mountain of notes that needed to be made would have been significantly smaller and more manageable, allowing us more time for practice questions and past papers.

2) On the subject of questions and papers, we regret not actually using the endless practice resources supplied - despite spending many a lunch and break printing off heaps of questions, very few were ever completed. They still all sit, gathering dusts, in folders on my desk, never to be used or even looked at. We would have been a lot less shocked by the papers, had we spent valuable time reviewing set questions and old papers.

3) Buying too many revision guides and workbooks - the appeal of £1.50 textbooks from charity shops drew us in, yet it was money wasted as they were never touched, let alone used. Practice questions and useful diagrams, especially for GCSE can easily be found online (e.g. BBC Bitesize, Physics and Maths Tutor, Seneca). Unused revision guides are filling our shelves, wasting space, when you only need a maximum of one or two per subject, or one for every English set text. As we currently discovering, this money is greatly needed to pay for the A-Level compulsory text books and trips.

4) Not using YouTube resources early enough - we didn't properly start making use of Mr Bruff, Primrose Kitten and Free Science Lessons until the start of our exams or late in revision. We can both attest to the fact that these YouTubers, among many others, have saved our grades and also greatly reduced the stress. I - Arya - watched all the relevant videos on these channels the night before my exams and found that lots of the content from them that I wasn't previously sure of came up, meaning they were of great use.

5) Not using flashcards or recall methods for all revision - we soon realised as exams approached that our methods for the rapid-fire creation of notes was not efficient or effective as we do not learn the information as well from rereading notes than responding to questions. Before every science exam, we would sit together and test each other on all the content from our pre-written recall notes* which we found to be insanely useful yet unfortunately we only had this form of notes for Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Computer Science.

* If you would like a post on how we made these recall notes, please contact us or leave a comment and we will do so in future

These were are main tips for and regrets from GCSEs. Good luck and don't forget to follow our social medias.

Arya and Viola