26th November 2009 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The problem of being familiar with different examining boards is a concern for many new tutors. However, each examining board is supposed to test the same skills, so the fear of learning a completely new syllabus when taking on a new student should be dispelled. In fact, the differences between examining boards are usually in the style of questions asked, and the way ideas are linked together.
The specifications (syllabuses) are all freely available from the UK’s main examining boards, Edexcel, OCR and AQA. As a tutor, you should always have a copy of the correct syllabus when you teach a student, and you should have familiarised yourself with that syllabus before the lesson. This is rarely because there will be something which you don’t know, but more to ensure that you don’t teach something your student doesn’t have to know (certain ideas might be in the same module for one board, and in different modules for another).
It can be difficult to acquire as many past exam papers as you would like. This is sadly because some of the examining boards don’t make their past papers freely available, and ask for a fee and/or require application through an examination centre (school etc.). If a board doesn’t provide free past papers then they usually provide sample papers, which are intended to mimic past papers, but can contain problems because they haven’t been through the rigorous scrutiny of a real past paper. Some of the boards do provide downloadable past papers though, and also students are generally given past papers by their schools, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting what you need. Unfortunately a company like Blue Tutors is unable to provide past papers to their tutors because of copyright laws.