Practical Exam Tips
- Pens and Pencils
- Some exams require the use of PENS, while others have to be completed
in PENCIL. Make sure you know what you should be using in every paper
before you go in.
- Websites
- All the major examination boards have websites these days, usually
with sample papers and examiners' reports that you can download. These
sites are well worth a visit as they may offer a lot of sound advice.
The examiners' report, for instance, can give you an idea of exactly
what it is that they are looking for.
- Take Spares
- Take spare pens and pencils just in case the one you are using stops
working.
- On time not In time
- Allow for problems, hold-ups and traffic jams on the way and make
sure you arrive with time to spare so that you can go in calmy rather
than in a frantic rush.
- It may sound stupid, but ...
- Don't forget to read the instructions and make sure you know what
you are being asked to do. You should go into the exam well aware of
what is expected of you, but you should always check. Don't, however,
waste a lot of time on this.
- Honesty- 1
- A language exam is not a test of honesty and you will not be penalised
if you tell the examiners that you are CANCER rather than SAGITTARIUS
in a written question simply because you are sure of how to spell it.
Language Tests are quite simply that; they are designed to test your
language and not your honesty- don't worry about lying or being economical
with the truth in order to show off your accurate language use.
- Zzzzz
- Try to get a good night's sleep the night before any exam.
- Hangovers
- Try to avoid alcohol the night before an exam, especially in quantity,
as a bad hangover is among the very worst things to be suffering from
in an exam room.
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Writing Tips
- Writing- 1
- Don't carried away and overload your writing with too many obvious
connectives and contrastives; if every sentence has two or three such
words or expressions, then the writing can seem strained and artificial.
Remember- you can try too hard as well as not hard enough.
- Writing- 2
- Write on alternate lines (leaving every second line blank) so that
you have space to make changes when checking through your work.
- Writing- 3
- Always credit your sources in academic writing, even when you are
referring to ideas rather than actually quoting.
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Multiple Choice Tips
- Psychological Warfare
- Examiners can choose the same letter successively for the correct
answer. After three consecutive answers with the same letter, many students
may well start to feel confused and worried. Eventually, many candidates
will start changing their answers simple because they don't believe
that examiners would have half a dozen of more questions with the same
letter one after the other. They can and sometimes do; this is a real
test of your comprehension and reduces the possibility of scoring by
guessing.
- Right word, wrong answer
- With multiple choice comprehension questions based on a text, a simple
trick is to take obvious and prominent words from the text and put them
in an incorrect option. Seeing a word or phrase from the text is not
enough; these questions are designed to test comprehension not recognition
of a word from the passage.
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Speaking Tips
- Speaking- 1
- Don't bother learning speeches and trying to say them verbatim (word-for-word)
in interviews; examiners will usually spot this without too much difficulty
and mark you down for it. It is very hard to do this and sound natural.
- Speaking- 2
- Do think over your answers to common questions about yourself. This
an opportunity for examiners to get a general picture of your language
level, especially your ability to talk about past, present and future
experiences, so run these thing over in your mind and try to include
corresponding verb forms accordingly.
- Speaking- 3
- If you are asked to talk about or describe a photograph, don't get
too hung up on describing every visible detail. Instead, be prepared
to speak in general terms about it and how the theme it illustrates
affects you.
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Listening Tips
- Listening- 1
- You are often given false information first that sounds as if it could
be the answer to the question. An instance of this is where the information
given matches one of the answers, but does not fit the criterion given
in the question- the person could be talking about last week, say, when
the question asks about next week. The correct information usually,
but not always, comes afterwards.
- Listening- 2
- Nearly right is not the same thing as right; examiners often give
information that sounds more or less correct, but is in some way unsatifactory.
Adverbs and modals are often used to send you the wrong way; the listening
text might use 'She may well be late' and the question 'She will be
late'- this is not an exact match and consequently could easily be the
wrong answer. It has to be 100% accurate to be right.
- Listening- 3
- In longer listening passages, they often try to lull you into losing
concentration by having quite long sections where no information relevant
to the exercise is given, then out of the blue they hit you with a couple
of answers in quick succession.
- Listening- 4
- Although most longer listening passages begin with an introduction
that lets you get into the flow before they start testing you, you cannot
depend on this; the first word could in theory be the answer to the
first question.
- Listening- 5
- Examiners will often place a word directly from the passage in a wrong
answer and use a synonym *[syn.] in the correct answer; check the meaning
and do not rely on word recognition to get the right answer.
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Examiners & Exam Myths
- Examiners- 1
- Examiners are, by and large, sadistic so-and-sos. Their sole aim in
life is to trap you and catch you out.
- Examiners- 2
- In multiple choice exercises, examiners have been known to use the
same letter for the correct answer several times in succession (a, a,
a, a, a, etc). This is unsettling and can make students worry that their
answers must be wrong; it does not. I once gave a Cambridge Proficiency
group an entire Reading Comprehension exercise (25 questions) with the
same answer for all. The students started changing their answers and
choosing wrong ones because they couldn't believe that this was possible.
While I have never seen it, there is nothing to stop them doing it.
They are there to test your understanding and will play psychological
games to make you doubt yourself, and this is one little trick they
use. It also has the advantage of reducing the possibly of inaccurate
scores achieved by guessing, as few would guess in a regular pattern,
but would try to vary their answers across the range of possibilities.
From their perspective, grouping a few consecutive answers with the
same letter makes sense.
- Examiners- 3
- Many students and teachers try to analyse exams and work out patterns.
In one Cambridge First Certificate exercise, there were usually between
four and six correct sentences. Then one year there were only two. Patterns
may help, but beware of relying on them; examiners will change them
without warning.
- Exam Myth 1
- Apparently, a philosophy student got a first class grade for a paper
which had "Is this a question?" as an essay title. Instead of going
into the nature of questions, etc, he or she simply wrote "Yes, if this
is an answer." Perhaps you should read Exam Myth 2 before feeling encouraged
to do likewise.
- Exam Myth 2
- When asked "What is courage?", another philosphy student wrote "This."
He or she failed; even though it was, indeed, courageous to stake their
degree on such an answer, it was not held to have answered the question.
The answer was an example and not an explanation.
- Exam Myth 3
- An Oxford undergraduate, or so the story goes, discovered an ancient
regulation that allowed a gentleman to send the invigilator to buy a
quart (Two pints or 1.14 litres) of ale (beer) during the exam for the
student's refreshment. He duly ordered it and produced his evidence
and was bought the beer. The following day, the invigilator approached
him with a hat, gown and sword, which another old regulation stipulated
had to be worn at all times. So, the student had to to sit through the
exam in a stuffy hall on a hot day in a heavy hat, etc.
- Exam Myth 4
- A student used amphetamines (a chemical stimulant) to stay awake to
study all night in the days leading up to an exam, hoping to make up
for lost time. Feeling shattered on the morning of the exam, they took
a huge dose to make sure they were bright and alert and didn't fall
asleep halfway through. Throughout the exam, they scribbled away frantically;
writing page after page. Unfortunately, they'd taken so much of the
stimulant that they failed to notice that they had written everything
on the same side of paper, which meant that instead of handing in a
dozen sheets of paper, they had one so covered in writing that it had
turned black.
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