How I Deal With Bad Exams (GCSE & A-level)

so the gcsc and a level exam season has started so it's time to lock in what happens if you step into the exam Hall basically 100% confident that you're going to smash the test and then you come out basically on the verge of tears trust me even if this hasn't happened before to you dealing with this scenario is something crucial it's one of those things that it's better for you to have and not use rather than need and not have why well imagine you go into an exam you drop a stinker and you don't know how to deal with it you think about it all day if not all week to the point where you can't even focus un revision for the next exam that one bad exam will cause you to do bad on the next exam because you didn't revise for it and so on you've now set off a chain reaction that's going to destroy your chances of getting the top grades that's why you need to be equipped with how to deal with a bad exam just in case so here's my four step protocol on dealing with a bad exam step one and this is going to apply whether you did well on the exam or you did badly and that is under no circumstances should you compare answers after an exam I can't tell you how many times I thought I smashed an exam but then after it I start comparing answers with friends and other people that I thought were and by the end of it all the questions that I thought I got right were actually wrong that then sends me down a path of questioning every other answer I had and that will only eat up my valuable time and energy which I should be channeling into getting the top grades into revising listen I get it it's very tempting that amazing feeling you get when you're finally done with a hard exam makes you want to go around and ask everyone else how it went but there's no point in doing it I mean let's think about it logically what's the point of finding out whether the questions that we had were right or wrong let's say they were right sure you might get a happy feeling for a little a little bit but then that Fades away but then what if you find out that the answers you put were actually wrong then what you can't go back and change the answers can you it's a high risk lower reward and game so just avoid comparing answers after the exam there's no point to it but sometimes even when you don't compare answers you just know when an exam goes bad what would you do then well step two of my bad exam protocol is when you know that an exam went bad after that exam when you go home and you sit down and whatever you dedicate 5 minutes and 5 minutes only to asking why why did it go bad i' sit down and reflect over what just happened and I'd ask myself what went wrong and was it in my control or was it outside of my control was it a lack of knowledge or was I just tired if it was a lack of knowledge i' ask myself is there any more preparation that I could have done for that exam cuz let's be honest sometimes exam boards would just screw you over for no reason trust me I know that especially well from physics a level sometimes we would just get the most cursed questions that no level of preparation could prepare you to do if that's the case then I'm not really going to blame myself there's no point I just say alhamdulillah it is what it is but if there was something I could have done maybe an exam paper that I skipped over or a couple of practice questions that I didn't want to do then I'll be honest with myself because at the end of the day if I'm lying to myself I'm only harming myself that leads me to step three of the bad exam protocol which is to make changes now that I've sat down and reflected and figured out what went wrong I would then ask myself if it was in my control how can I change my studying routine to cater for this so that it doesn't happen again in the next exam if all of the things that went wrong were 100% outside of my control which is let's be honest rarely the case then there's not really anything I can do about it but if there are some things then I'll add them to my studying routine so I don't fall into the same mistake again the next time you see with the right protocol you could take a bad exam and actually use it to improve so without a protocol like this like we talked about before a bad exam could affect all your other exams negatively but now we've used it with this protocol to improve on the next exams and actually turn it into a bit of a blessing now step four and the final step of the bad exam protocol once you've highlighted the changes that you need to make and implemented them in your studying routine you forget about the bad exam and you just move on you don't despair it's now in the past you've taken all of the benefit that you can from the situation so why would you take some of the harm as well by letting it eat up your time and energy you can go back and reset the exam so just forget about it and let's be honest that's easier said than done you can just forget something but one of the things that's going to help you do that and overcome you know the bad feeling of that exam something I usually talk about and that's to dramatize something for example I'll take a piece of paper write down the exact code of the exam or whatever the exact date I wrote in whatever and I'll just scrunch it up and throw it in the bin me dramatizing that to my brain will signal that you know not in the past there's no need to think about it anymore try that if you can't forget about the exam and hopefully you can just fully move on and also know that we can't really have everything not every exam can go our way sometimes we need to be humbled by a bad test so that it shapes our character I actually do think that doing badly in some tests in school shapes our character it's something that's good for us as young people we haven't really faced true rejection and failure and so when eventually we do face true rejection or failure you know in the workplace or University or whatever how are we going to deal with it if we haven't had that character building experience from When We Were Young of two people person a got humbled a couple of times but they eventually got over it and they got decent grades and person B they aced all of their exams Maybe person B does slightly better gets you know slightly better grades but when true adversity when a true failure hits both of them who's going to deal with it better person a who's had some setbacks but they moved on or person B who's never experienced failure before so if you're still thinking about that bad exam take that into consideration and try to turn it into a blessing

Channel: Shiggs

Views: 7,024

Keywords: how to get all 9s, how to do well in gcse, how to get over a bad grade, a level exams, 2022 gcse exams, gcse exams, exams, 1 day before exams, mental health, day before gcses and a levels, do grades matter, gcse maths, night before gcses and a levels, overwhelmed, exam, did badly on a test, failed a test, how to, grade 9s, year 11 gcse 2022, bad grade, high school, what to do for gcses, report card, revision tips, help, bad test taker, a revision tips

Id: 70zoEoIEEfw

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024