Mock Exam Experience

By: Anooshay Khan (Year 10)

Hello there! It’s me again. For this segment of the pAAAper, I would like to talk about how mock exams are like for a Year 10. Although it is not compulsory for a Year 10 to do mock exams, some people can have early entries to see if they can take the iGCSE paper this year. Although I only did one mock exam this year, I would like to share my experience with you, so if your child does the same you will know what to expect.

What subject’s mock did I take?

I took a math mock exam this year, sometime in January alongside the Year 11s.

Where did it take place?

The mock exam happened in the sports hall. We did not take up the whole of the sports hall, it was more so just half as it was separated so children could still do P.E if necessary.

How do you study for it?

Although my habits of studying may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I will still explain it to you. However, before reading this, please understand that different children will have different things that will work for them, so my method may not help your child.

The first and foremost thing I did was plan. Planning is crucial for me as I need to know what to do and when to do it. If I don’t plan, I become overwhelmed with stress and flooded with worry and anxiety.

Since the mock happened after the winter break, I did not have lots of time to revise as I had to go to my home country for a week and a half. Therefore, that made me a bit vexed since I wanted as much time as possible to revise. However, my maths teacher, Mr. Kilding, did allow our whole class to do revision during class, even before the winter break so we did have lots of time to revise in class.

My plan included dates, and what topics to do and when to do them. Every day I revised 5 or so topics from my maths textbook, with the help of multiple videos and online past paper questions. Although I had a tightly packed schedule, the plan did help me quite a lot. For a week I studied just topics that were not my strong suit. Then, I went on to do past paper questions for the remainder of the time left.

If you were wondering what app I used for revising; I used an app called “Notion” which allows you to not only make lists, but it also allows you to embed links of countless videos so you don’t lose which video you used for what topic.