30 September 2020
On Tuesday 29 September, Lower Sixth Form students took part in an excellent session on study skills. This was designed to help them achieve their best possible results at A Level and built on preparation work made in Year 11 now that the students are a few weeks in to Sixth Form life and experiencing the differences first hand.
In an engaging and energetic seminar, Ollie from Elevate Education shared techniques used by the UK’s top students. He first looked at what he described as “the basics” of A Level learning, including knowing the exam board’s specification for your subject, regular note taking and keeping work organised in subject-specific folders. His tip of using trigger words or phrases to reduce the number of words in revision notes was really brought to life in an example he shared of 88 words being reduced to 12 compared to the hundreds of thousands of words students take as A Level notes (not to mention the millions written by individual university students!).
The seminar then moved on to advice for achieving “mastery” of an A Level subject – the feeling of being prepared for whatever question should appear on the exam paper – and concluded with tips on how to make a paper stand out impressively to examiners.