This week's reflections
Two students sit down on a Sunday and both do six hours of Biology. Both work hard, both finish tired and both feel like they have earned the rest of the evening off. One of them is heading for a C and the other is heading for an A*.
Nothing about the six hours explains that. It isn’t effort and it isn’t motivation and it certainly isn’t how clever either of them is. The hours were the same. What went on inside them wasn’t.
This is the thing that almost nobody says out loud at A Level, which is that revision isn’t a quantity at all, it’s a method, and two students can spend exactly the same time on exactly the same topic and come away with completely different amounts of learning to show for it. So the question worth asking at the end of a Sunday isn’t how long you revised, it’s what you actually did with the time.
On my mind this week
The student heading for a C spends the six hours re-reading notes, highlighting, watching a YouTube video and copying a diagram out neatly…and all of it feels like it’s going in. That feeling is the trap, because the ease you get from looking at something familiar is not the same thing as being able to produce it from nothing in a silent hall in June…and only one of those is being tested.
The student heading for an A* closes the book and tries to write it out from memory, gets it wrong, checks, tries again and then does exam questions on a topic they haven’t looked at for three weeks precisely because they haven’t looked at it for three weeks. It feels far worse whilst you’re doing it. That’s rather the point.
Then there’s the half of this that I only see when I’m marking. Most of the marks that get lost are not lost because the student didn’t know the content. They’re lost because the student knew it perfectly well and didn’t say it in the way the mark scheme asks for. The answer was nearly there and it missed the key word, or it described something when the question asked for an explanation, or it gave three separate points when what was needed was a comparison.
Reading your notes again will not fix any of that, because your notes are not a mark scheme…and the only way to find out how the exam wants an answer written is to write answers and mark them against it. One of these students has been doing that all year. The other has been learning the content and hoping the marks follow.
Study tip
Take a topic you’re pretty sure you already know.
Find an exam question on it, set a timer for the number of marks and answer it in full. Everything closed until the timer stops…and that includes the mark scheme.
Then mark yourself against the real mark scheme rather than against your notes.
Anything you missed, go back to the textbook and work out why that answer is right. This is important.
Only then write the phrase down word for word.
Come back to the topic in a fortnight with a different question.
If you glance at the mark scheme whilst you’re still writing, you’re just copying… and you’ll walk away thinking you knew it when you didn’t. The other shortcut is to skip the understanding altogether and just learn the mark schemes off by heart, which falls apart in the exam because the question is never the one you rehearsed and a phrase you’ve memorised can’t be applied to a context you’ve never seen.
For parents
There’s a kind of support that feels like the most loving thing available and makes it all harder…and it’s worth naming because most of us have done it.
“You’re so clever.”
“You’ve always been the smart one.”
The difficulty is that praise like that ties your child’s worth to something fixed, so when a topic gets genuinely hard or a mock comes back badly, the explanation available to them isn’t that their method needs changing, it’s that perhaps they were never that clever after all. That’s a frightening thing to think about and the safest way to avoid thinking it is to stop putting yourself in situations that might prove it, which is why very able children sometimes go quiet at precisely the time the work starts asking something real of them.
Adler separated praise from encouragement…and the distinction is useful here. Praise comes down from above as a verdict on the person, whilst encouragement sits alongside them and comments on what they did. One builds a child who needs your approval to keep going and the other builds a child who can keep going without it.
So the change is small and it’s to talk about the method rather than the person. Not “you’re so clever” but “you tested yourself instead of just reading it and that’s why it stayed in.” Not “you’re brilliant at this” but “you found the topic you didn’t understand and you did something about it.” And when a grade disappoints, hold off on the rescue and ask what they’ll do differently, then trust the answer they give you. A child who believes their grade comes from their method has somewhere to go next. A child who believes it comes from their brain has nowhere at all.
Quote of the week
“No matter what has occurred in your life up to now, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.”
