Short answer: Specifications (They're rarely mentioned in schools, but believe me, they will be your best friends in exam season!!)
Okay, so what's a specification? An exam specification is a document published by the exam board which tells you exactly what content will be in the exam - so giving you a really good guideline of what exactly you do need to know for your exam - and also what you don't. It also gives you lots of information on how the exams work and how they are marked - which is useful for knowing what to write in the exam. The language specifications will even give vocab lists (which are so useful for learning vocab!)
*Important Note: the specifications do not necessarily contain the actual information you need to learn, they just tell you what you need to learn. The spec might say "be able to explain photosynthesis" but will not actually explain photosynthesis (so you'd have to use other resources to learn that.)
It should be simple enough to find the specification for any subject and qualification, whether it's GCSE, A-LEVEL or BTEC. The process varies slightly depending on the exam board, but this is roughly how to find it (it should come up just if you google it though!)
Just find your exam board website (e.g. AQA, Edexcel etc)
Find the specific subject and qualification
Then open the PDF file (which is the specification)
Using a specification
This is briefly going to show you how to use your spec. All specs are slightly different so this may not be completely the same for your spec, but it should be fairly similar. I'm using the AQA Biology GCSE spec as an example.
Once you've found your specification, you can use the contents page to navigate it. This should make it easier to find a specific section.
There should be a page which tells you a bit about the exams - how long they are, how many marks, and which sections of the specification it assesses.
Then you get to the content. The content is split into the various topics covered by the qualification, and then into various subsections to make it easier to work out what you have to learn. For example, Cell Biology is split into three subsections: Cell Structure, Cell Division and Transport in Cells.
The subsection Cell Structure is divided up too - to make the spec into more manageable bite-sized pieces.
So if we look at 4.1.1.1 (Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes) it tells us three things:
Information that we should know for the exam
Information that we should know for the exam
Skill we should be able to do
So for the first two bits of information, the spec is fairly straightforward: if you don't know it, learn it!!
However, the last one tells us about something we should be able to do. To help us out, they've given us some references from other parts of the spec:
MS relates to maths skills: so use the contents page of the spec to find the maths skills page
We're told to look at MS 1b, 2a and 2h.
These relate to:
Recognise and use expressions in standard form
Use an appropriate number of sugnificant figures
Make order of magnitude calculations
So now we know what maths skills we need to be able to show that we can use.
We've also been told to look at WS 4.4
WS relates to Working Scientifically: so we need to find the WS page
WS 4.4 tells us that we need to be able to:
Use prefixes and powers of ten for orders of magnitude (eg tera, giga, mega, kilo, centi, milli, micro and nano).
So now we understand what the spec is telling us for part 3:
Recognise and use expressions in standard form
Use an appropriate number of sugnificant figures
Make order of magnitude calculations
Use prefixes and powers of ten for orders of magnitude (eg tera, giga, mega, kilo, centi, milli, micro and nano).
Therefore we now have a good idea of what that skill in the spec is - and is up to us to decide if we are confident at it, or if that is something we think we may need to work on.
Determining what you do and don't need to know
Usually the spec for foundation and higher will be combined, so it is worth keeping this in mind when using the spec. The spec will usually say something like HT only (higher tier only) and this means if you are taking foundation, you don't need to learn it, but if you're taking higher, you still have to.
There are two places to watch out for this:
Subsection titles
Before a sentence under one of the subsections
Final Note
One final thing to mention is that different specs will give you different levels of guidance (usually science ones are the most helpful). There are also other helpful pages specific to the subject - for example science specs will have information about required practicals, whereas language specs will have vocab lists etc.
The most effective way to use your spec is when revising a specific topic, go through each section of that topic in the spec, and make notes on the things that you are not as confident on. So when you are revising all the content, you can start with these bits first - this will be the most helpful to you.
Hopefully this has been informative and helpful - and should make revising for exams a lot easier! Any questions/comments just get in touch :)
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