You’ve slogged through the twenty-odd pages of your GCSE maths paper. You’ve got a good feeling about this one – you think you’ve got most of it right. And you’ve got ten minutes of the exam left. So what do you do?
When I was sitting my exams, the usual answer was ‘count ceiling tiles’ or ‘look for prime factors of my friends’ phone numbers’. I was an odd child. It turns out that the correct answer – as evidenced by my 99% mark for one paper in which I mis-measured a circle – is to check your work.
Believe me, it’s less tedious than counting ceiling tiles, and much more rewarding. There are many ways to check your work:
- Look for a different way to do a question
- Check that your answer makes sense – is your sale price lower than the original price?
- Measure all the things you were meant to measure, twice.
- See if you can get back from your answer to the numbers in the question
- Read each question to make sure you’ve given the answer they asked for
- Did you write your units down?
There are probably a dozen others I’ve overlooked – do you have any tips?
Tags: counting ceiling tiles, feeling good about this one, measure it twice
