Are they taking the right Exam?

Are they taking the right Exam?

Often students are made to take Maths exams that are wrong for them.

When I lived in the UK, during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I worked as a Maths tutor for a small education company. My task was to make sure that the student raised their grades by at least one level. That means, if they were likely to get a C, working with me would mean they were likely to get a B or an A.?

How was this achieved?

We made sure that we entered them for the right Maths exam.?

Not all Maths exams were the same. At that time, there were many different examination boards each of which tested a subset of the possible Maths topics.?

My first task was to interview the student. My second was to find the Maths exam that suited their skills and interests.?The company would enter the students for the relevant exams.

Some students were surprised that they were allowed to take the exam that was easiest for them. I would offer them this parallel, “Imagine you are competing in the next Olympic Throwing Event. Would you prefer to compete in the discus, javelin, hammer or shot? You don’t have to compete in all of them.”

Having established which of the Maths topics the student preferred, we set about finding out which exam board best suited them. Then we studied what the exam board required us to know. We did that together, or I would invite the student to read the materials themselves.

• The result of the interview was that the student became more strongly focused on what they could do, rather than trying to ‘cover everything’, and fixating on what they found difficult.
• The benefit of choosing the right exam board was the student’s increased confidence that they were doing the right exam and were going to get the highest grade possible.

The Map of Mathematics

Exam Practice Sessions?

I used a similar approach when I taught Maths in Secondary School. We invited the so-called borderline final year students, who were likely to get a D or a C (both were passing grades) to come to Exam Practice sessions during their lunchtimes in their final term.?

The students who were likely to get an E or f (f is fail) needed to focus on completing and handing in coursework to support their grades. They could get a good grade on coursework alone if we argued they suffered from exam nerves, which was true, they all hated exams.

The Maths teachers at the school had collected sample exam papers and the school’s mock exam papers from previous years. The students’ first task was to collate three or four similar questions from different papers. The second task was to recognise what topic the questions were examples of, eg. Quadratics.

Then the students set about solving the questions. Finally there was a discussion on the solution-methods in general for that type of question. Often we would hold up questions one by one and ask, “What’s this?” and “How would you go about solving it?” without asking them to solve that particular question.

• The benefit to the students was they gained a broader and more relaxed perspective of the exam questions. They became confident that they could identify the type of question and select one of several solution-methods.
• One of the side-effects was the students took over responsibility for their grades. They changed from seeing the teacher as the one to convince to the examiner as the one to convince.

Students who handed in poor coursework could be given a passing grade based mainly on their exam results. We could argue that the student had matured in their final year, which was true of many boys.