Exam best practice
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The revision period should focus on taking material you have learnt and ensuring you can remember facts and demonstrate your understanding.
Revising for exams is most effective when done actively. The best techniques involve mental processing of the information and active recall.
- Do practice questions and mark them
- Create and use flashcards (cover–recall–repeat)
- Brain dump topics and check for gaps
- Identify where you lose most marks and target your revision to these areas
You may need to return to learning if you find subjects you don’t understand. In this situation, re-reading and highlighting notes, despite being passive revision, can help you plug your gaps.
You need to master the command words used in an exam. These direct how you answer the question and ensure that your writing matches the mark scheme.
When completing calculations:
- Do not round any values until the final step
- Annotate your working with what each value refers to
- Give your final answer an appropriate number of significant figures
- Check units throughout the calculation
When using a mark scheme, pay particular attention to the DO NOT ALLOW section. These link to common misconceptions.
If you have written something that is ‘not allowed’, review the topic and work out why you thought this answer was OK.
Symbols are context-dependent, and Edexcel’s formulae sheet shows it plainly:
- (weight) sits two lines above (work),
- is density in one equation and resistivity in another,
- is extension in , but perpendicular distance in (moments), and
- Displacement is in the equations of motion and in SHM.
Either symbol is fine in your work. Just stay consistent within a question, and use the question’s own symbols whenever it supplies them, including in “show that” parts.
The Edexcel A-level Physics papers allow for around 70 seconds per mark. This is an average and does not allow for review.
Answering simple recall questions quickly allows more time for multi-step calculations and extended responses.
One strategy is to answer the whole exam paper using a one-minute-per-mark strategy to ensure completion and then to use the remaining time to review and improve answers. Mark answers that you wish to return to with a star.
Multiple choice questions are only worth one mark each.
All marks are equal – spend too much time on the multiple-choice questions at the expense of the rest of the paper.
Use the answer choices on multiple-choice questions. Eliminate wrong multiple-choice answers with visual annotation.
Every wrong answer you eliminate improves your chances of a correct random guess.
Where a multiple-choice question has statements to select from, tackle the simplest statement first, eliminate appropriate answer choices, then assess another statement.
There is only ever one correct answer – it is possible to select the correct answer after assessing only two of the three statements.
Where multiple choice questions are numerical, it is possible to narrow down answers, or even select the correct answer without picking up your calculator.
A good example of this is excluding positive values when you are asked to calculate the gravitational potential energy of a body in orbit.
Where answers vary by order of magnitude, then unit analysis is enough to identify the correct answer, e.g. is the wavelength of visible light closer to ?
Some multiple-choice questions do require more time to answer correctly.
Identify these with a star, and return to them later when you have attempted the whole paper.