1st December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Understanding versus exam technique probably isn’t something many people think about when they think about private tuition, but increasingly there’s a battle between these two ideas. We’ve written articles before about how tutors have to balance these two types of teaching, ensuring that they don’t focus on exam technique too early or too late. However, parents requesting tuition are beginning to place an emphasis on exam technique from a very early stage.
There is a feeling that GCSE and A Level exams have become too predictable and formulaic, and that, to some extent, exam technique is all that is needed to get an A*. The concern though, is that many more parents are asking their tutors to focus on exam technique much earlier than the exams taken age 16 and 18. It’s not uncommon for tutors to be asked to work on past papers with 7 or 8 year olds, in preparation for an 11+ or Common Entrance exam.
The argument over when to focus on a particular exam style, and stop developing understanding is one which ultimately doesn’t have an answer. Every tutor and every student is different, and experienced tutors are practised in judging when to make the switch. However, it is worrying that parents are requesting this from a very early age, because ‘papering over the cracks’ is undeniably not the strategy to produce the best academics.
It’s understandable for a student to focus on exam technique a month or two before their final A Level exams. For many students their A Levels will decide whether they attend university, the standard of that university, and ultimately their future career. If the student isn’t interested in becoming an academic then it’s quite practical (however romantically undesirable) to sacrifice some understanding for the possibility of an improved grade. The trouble is that every time a tutor does this before a student’s A Level exams they are simply papering over cracks that will become exposed later in the student’s school life.
If a tutor doesn’t tutor numeracy or literacy properly to a 10 year old because it’s felt that the student would be better served to look at past papers, predict the questions that may come up, and learn a formula to answer those types of questions, then eventually that student’s weaknesses will show themselves, and ultimately, even though the student has done slightly better in an earlier exam, he/she will do worse in the GCSEs or A Levels than if the tutor had developed understanding 6-8 years earlier.
What’s the answer to all this? Well ideally parents would ask tutors to focus on understanding, and if you ask most students at Oxbridge then they will tell you that a deep understanding of their subject has always served them better than knowing the tricks of exams. The blame shouldn’t really fall on parents, students or tutors though. The real problem is that the exams are so formulaic, and one would have thought that it can’t be difficult to adequately test a student’s understanding, without giving the student a way to do well without that understanding.