Here is your step-by-step guide to getting ready for your exams this year! 

Step One - Exam Boards and Exam Dates

What are your Exam Boards? Even though you still gain the same qualifiaction in a subject, you can take exams produced by different exam boards, which are chosen by your school. The main four are AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas (part of WJEC).  Make sure that you know what boards your are doing for each subjects (these will usually be on the school website, but if you ask your teachers they will be able to tell you). The reason this is important is that content differs slightly between board and the way they set out content in exams differs, so you want to make sure you are using the format of papers you will eventually take in Summer.

When are your Exams? Exam Boards have already released their exam timetables for Summer 2023, which have been summarised below. Make sure to take a screenshot of this or write it down, so you know when you are working towards. In addition, be careful as not to book tickets for concerts or organise anything that is too close to any of your exams - you will have plenty of time for this during the summer.

Step Two - Content

What do I need to know for my exams? Now you know when the exams are, you can start to revise the content needed for them. What you may not know is that the exam boards release a document called a specification, which outlines all the content that they could ask you in an exam - this doesn't include how they may ask you to apply it, but if content is not specifically stated in the specification then they cannot ask you to apply it. To find these, go to the subject (eg. GCSE Physics), and under the 'Resources + Content' subehading press the 'specifications' box. From here, select your exam board, and either download it to your computer for future use or print it off.

Now, go through this specification, highlighting the subheadings using RAG (red, amber, green) for how confident you feel for each topic. An example is shown below. Then, write this down in a list.

Now, when you sit down to revise, you know exactly what to focus on. Over time, your gaps will start to reduce and you should start to feel increasingly more confident with the  content.

Step Three - Practice, Practice, Practice

Why do I need to practice, I know the content? In the new GCSE Exams, questions are not only about more content, but use application and are a lot harder to gain full marks on due to how specific mark schemes can be. The best way to overcome this is to practice using Past Papers, as these will show you how questions are often assessed. As there is only a limited amount of ways they can ask questions about a particular topic, many times questions will be similar if not the same between years. Past Papers will become your most useful tool as you get closer to your exams.

So how do I find them? The Zahra Classroom website has past papers for all exam boards for Maths, Chemistry and Physics. To find these, click onto the correct page (eg. GCSE Maths) and scroll down to past papers. Then click the box for your exam board, and you will have access to all the publically avaliable past papers for your exam board, grouped by year. 

You should try all the past papers in exam conditions, as there are only a limited number avaliable and it will show you whether you need to increase in speed. Once completed, you should mark your paper using the mark scheme for that paper, also linked in the google drive. These can sometimes be hard to understand, but if you ask your teacher they will usually be happy to mark it for you. Once you have a grade, you can use the grade boundaries on the website to give yourself a grade. Write this grade down, along with the year the exam was from and any questions you struggled with on a spreadsheet or grade tracker so you can see your improvement. For any of the topics that you struggled with, go back through the content to ensure you feel confident with them. Maybe also keep a note of the questions you struggled with, and try them again after revising the content again.

After completing all the past papers avaliable, you should not only have consolidated all your knowledge, but also feel confident about how to apply it and what the exams will be like, ready for you to smash your GCSEs and go on to enjoy a long (and hard earned) holiday!