29th May 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Right now, any tutor who is teaching a GCSE or A Level student will find their lessons changing quite significantly compared to what those lessons were like, say, 6 months ago. A tutor’s job is to develop understanding so that students are genuinely better at their subject, but there comes a time when developing understanding is a less effective course of action compared to improving a student’s exam technique, and right now that is definitely the case.
Understanding is something that is formed over a long period time. It takes hour upon hour of practice with a student making mistakes and learning from them. A tutor can really speed the development of understanding along, but not as quickly as one might think. There really is no shortcut to understanding a subject well. It takes time.
At the point when a tutor realises that a student needs 3-4 hours tuition over a period of weeks to get a good grasp on a subject, and yet the student’s exam is tomorrow, the tutor needs to switch from genuine teaching, to conveying a method by which the student might get all the ‘easy’ marks that examiners are looking for. It’s obviously not the way in which we intend students to learn, but because of the way that exams are marked, as tutors, we realise that it’s a necessary evil if we want to help the student as much as possible.
What do we mean by ’exam technique’ and a way to get ‘easy marks’? Well, the two are closely related, but not exactly the same. Exam technique is about ensuring that one is ticking the boxes that the examiner is looking for. Generally this should be done in the course of answering a question, but a student must ensure that he/she is answering in the prescribed way. Examples include showing working out in maths, or referencing the relevant quote from a piece of text in English. Sometimes the smaller steps are easy to forget, and tutors spend a lot of time making sure that a student can analyse their answers and identify if they’ve missed something out themselves.
Getting easy marks is a little different. Here tutors will explain how a student can still get some marks on particular questions, even if they can’t answer in full. Examiners have guidelines such as ‘award a mark for writing down this equation..’ or ‘1 mark for identifying metaphor’. It sounds silly, but sometimes, with almost no clue about how to answer a question, a student can get those few extra marks needed to bump them up a grade.
Obviously none of this is really what a tutor wants to be doing. We would much prefer to be able to genuinely teach understanding all of the time. The good news is that there are reforms which are aimed at reducing the reliance on exam technique and taking us back to a situation where the students with the best understanding are almost always those who get the top grades. For those involved in private tuition, it can’t come soon enough.