Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

The first tip has to be one taken from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - DON’T PANIC! Yes, the exam may feel like the end of the world, but actually, whatever happens, life will continue afterwards.

At a basic level there are all the things that you already know and then there are some other points that may also be helpful -

Before the exam

• make sure you have at least two pens that WORK (you’d be amazed how often I’ve had to hand out pens during an exam)
• make sure that your pens are dark blue or black ink - examiners don’t have to mark anything that you’ve written in glitter pen or luminous pink or even pale blue (they’re very hard to read anyway)
• you might want a highlighter to highlight bits of the question paper that seem important
• double check when and where your exam is, and then arrive early
• make sure you know how long your exam is and how many marks it is worth - that way you can work out roughly how long you should be spending on each question
• make sure you know whether you have a choice of questions and how many questions you must answer

Once the exam starts:

• Take 5 minutes to read the paper
• Identify which questions you have to answer and which ones you can choose
• Ignore any questions on options you have not been taught - ie if the paper has a choice of questions on Crime and Deviance, Education, Health and Youth Culture and you have been taught only Crime and Deviance then DON’T answer the question on Youth Culture (even if it looks easier you are guaranteed to make a mess of it, and believe me I’ve seen it happen!)
• Read the question carefully all the way through and if ideas occur to you then jot them down around the question
• Read the question AGAIN and check that you have understood the question - it may be helpful to highlight key phrases so that you are clear what it is asking you
• Remember you are allowed to jot notes on the exam paper
• After answering a question check that you have done what it asked for - identified/explained/evaluated/outlined
• Unless the instructions specifically say so, you can answer the questions in whatever order you want, so you can start with the one you feel most comfortable with, although the short answer ones are designed to help you ‘warm up’ (there are some papers where answering questions out of order is a BAD idea - eg the OCR A2 methods paper which asks you to describe a research process in one question and evaluate it in the next!)

For Long answer (essay) questions

• write a brief plan before you begin and write it on your answer sheet - this means that if you run out of time the examiner may still be able to see what you intended and give you some credit for it
• give yourself a clear introductory paragraph which outlines the key points and gives some idea of where you are going to take the essay
• if you really struggle writing an introduction at the beginning, then you can leave a gap and come back and write it later - but make sure that you DO write it!
• try to evaluate as you go along - too many students leave the evaluation until the end and then run out of time meaning that they don’t do any evaluation and lose valuable marks
• link each point and paragraph back to the question - this will stop you getting off-track and clearly show the examiner that you are addressing the question
• back up each point with evidence - this might be a theory, a study, some statistics, you can also use recent news stories or government policy to illustrate points
• steer away from using phrases like ‘I believe’ and ‘in my opinion’ - this is not about beliefs and opinions, its about what the evidence shows and the theories suggest
• give yourself a clear concluding paragraph - given the evidence you’ve cited which side of the argument are you coming down on? Sum up what you have said
• this can also be a last chance to briefly mention important points that you forgot to put in or don’t have time to write about
• an essay answer without a conclusion tends to read badly and gives the impression that the overall picture has not been considered - even if you only have one or two minutes try to write a conclusion of some kind