28th August 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At this time of year GCSE, AS and A’ Level results are released. For many students, this will be a time of great celebration and they will go on to start 6th form and university courses having achieved the grades they hoped for. However, many other students will be evaluating their situations, and in particular considering the possibility of retakes. After a summer with a lower number of requests, tuition agencies receive an influx of tuition requests after the publication of results. Many of these requests are from students who want to re-sit their exams, and hire a tutor to ensure that they perform as well as possible next time round.
There are a number of reasons that students may not perform as well as they had hoped, and tutors must assess each student’s needs on an individual basis. One of the most common problems, especially in arts subjects, is that bright students may write good answers but which do not meet the necessary assessment objectives. In these cases tutors can go through the syllabus, explain the kind of points that the examiners will want to see, and provide practice questions which will allow students to feel confident that they will be able to improve their grades. For students predicted top grades, receiving unexpected and disappointing results can severely damage confidence, and a large part of a tutor’s job is to rebuild their students’ self-belief.
Another common problem is that the exams reveal that a student has not grasped certain key concepts. Particularly in schools with large class sizes, it is easy for students to fall through the cracks if they have missed something. If this is not addressed before the exams, the results will be disappointing. In these cases tutors must assess their student’s grasp of the subject, and ascertain where there is a deficit in understanding which they can address. Here again, building confidence is important, and finding creative ways to explain concepts to students and ensure that they have understood them is crucial.