The 4 Mistakes Year 11s Make (and how to avoid them)

I want to go through the most common four mistakes that all year 11s make and how you can avoid them. I've been teaching for about 10 years now, I've had probably over a thousand year 11 students and so I feel like I know basically the situation that a lot of students are in, especially if they want those grades 7s and 9s. So let's go through the four mistakes and how we don't make them. So the first one is leaving exam practice for later. This is something I've mentioned even with year 12s and 13s as well. The key thing here is that some students think they're going to run out of past papers, but the thing you have to bear in mind is the past papers aren't just the ones from 2018 to 2026. There's also papers that are older than that, but there's also things like shadow papers, mock papers and also practice papers of which there's 24 sets of three papers that you can do. So essentially you aren't going to run out because there's over 100 past papers and I don't really know of many students, if any, that actually complete all of the past papers for all of the different subjects. So I would start literally in September doing past paper practice because, bear in mind, you know most of the content already. Your school's covered most of it in year 10. There's not that much to cover in year 11 and you can also just skip out the questions that you haven't covered yet and then come back to them later on. At least you still have that exam practice. The key reason for this, and this kind of applies more to maths than anything else, is that problem solving skills is one of the most costly mistakes that students make. So they struggle to approach questions, they struggle when there's multiple topics all linked together and they struggle with questions that are unfamiliar and the reality is every year in the maths papers there will be questions that have never come up before in any year. The thing that applies to all exams though is exam timing. I have known many many students across all subjects that will come out of an exam and say oh it was really easy I just ran out of time and that costs them those grade 7s to 9s. So again if you practice the exam prep early you'll naturally get faster at answering exam questions which means you can finish them within time and you have time to kind of check your answers and things like that. So really really important that you start the exam practice as early as humanly possible and again with exam timing that's free marks you're not even learning anything from that you're just able to finish all the questions. The last point for this is that schools generally don't give you enough time for preparation for the exam so whether that's because you're still covering content or whether it's because you're revising content the actual exam practice can be quite lacking in different subjects so just bear that in mind. Mistake number two, wasting time when studying. Now you should bear in mind that you need to focus on what actually matters because you have between eight and ten subjects. Eight and ten subjects each of them have around three exams each so you're going to have between 24 and 30 exams and that's everyone so you do not have time to go through and you know do every single little thing for revision you need to focus on what actually matters. Exam preparation is far more important than everything else so I know students who even in January of year 11 will say to me okay I'm going to go through every single subchapter on maths genie or I'm going to go through I'm going to make flash cards on every single topic in biology. The reality is you don't have time to do that for every single one of your subjects. All of that should have already been done and if it hasn't been done you need to just focus on exam preparation because again 24 to 30 exams each that's what every student's going to have. If you don't believe me you can look up how many exams each of your subjects have count all of your subjects and then you're done. In fact count all of your subjects your different GCSEs and times it by three that's a good benchmark for that. So you need to focus on what actually matters exam preparation and your weak points so you need to focus on points that you actually find difficult so for example let's take a maths paper because I'm a maths teacher it makes sense chances are you're not getting zero out of 80 in each paper chances are you're probably getting at least 20 or 30 marks so why are you doing the paper why not focus on the 50 marks that you aren't getting and lastly of course by the way GCSEs are about exam technique more than anything else this applies to all of your subjects but in particular so for example in maths if you do all of the past papers just memorize stuff you'll probably get at least a grade six with biology chemistry physics so just science in general with english history etc if you just memorize past papers and mark schemes you will do very well that's just that's just the reality so mistake number three is not starting or fixing issues early once again you have eight to ten subjects 24 to 30 exams that's a lot of exams you need to start at the beginning of September if you leave it till January February March you will maybe be able to go up one or two grades in a few subjects and this is the key thing is that a lot of students say I'm aiming for nines in everything the problem is from January onwards you'll be able to go up two or three grades in maybe three or four subjects not in eight to ten subjects it's just not possible so there isn't much time there's less than nine months when you start in September just to put it that way so if your lessons aren't going well maybe your teacher's changed maybe maybe your teacher's not covering the stuff that you want to teach or maybe you're missing lessons or whatever or maybe it's distracting whatever if your motivation is low which is a really common problem that I see if you have procrastination or anything you need to sort this out as early as humanly possible so in terms of what that means by sorting it out well it depends right motivation being low the key way to fix this is to look at what you want to do in the future if you're not sure pick something for example pick engineering pick medicine pick something like that and have a look at the a levels you need to do and then work backwards so again I've had students at school where from September to about January February they don't really know what they want to do and then they decide actually I want to do a level maths in March but they want a grade five getting from a five to a seven is very stressful so you want to know from September what grades you actually need now again I lost him to say I just want grade nines and everything but the problem with motivation is it needs to be concrete there needs to be a reason for it so if you look up okay I need to do a level maths chemistry biology so I need a grade seven in maths and a grade seven in science that's something that's a lot more focused and if you can look at universities as well if you have the aspiration to go to Imperial Oxford Cambridge have a look at what the average GCSE results are for that if it's mainly sevens to nines then that gives you motivation with procrastination and with lessons not going well obviously the first thing you should look at is good tutoring so again obviously I offer tutoring so you can just go and book a free trial lesson if you want I also have a referral program where if you invite your friends you can get up to free tuition forever for the whole of year 11 and 12 and 13 if you want I'll leave the links to that in the description and the pinned comment but you want to look at getting good tuition you want to look at sorting out your problems but again don't wait too long if you think the lessons are going well motivation is low tuition is the easiest and the best way to fix that assuming the tuition is actually good which is why you need to either get a trial lesson or look at referral programs like the ones I have and again I'll leave an example of that in the description then the last thing is obviously don't be worried about getting tuition again I've done a video recently about grammar schools doing tuition 30% of grammar school students who are already top students get tutoring so it's grade seven to nine students that get most tutoring so if you want to do well tutoring is obviously one option there may be other options as well mistake number four which is the last one which is spreading too thin so year 11 again you have less than nine months you have eight to ten subjects as I've said before 24 to 30 exams you cannot spread yourself too thin you can't treat all subjects equally so my recommendation is to prioritize so there are subjects that are going to be less useful for you in the future you can neglect those a little bit right for example if you're already on a grade six or seven in something like french german spanish and you know you're not going to take it in the future if you're on a five or whatever then focus on other subjects prioritize the ones you actually need you do not want to miss your grade seven for maths if you need maths in the future you don't want to miss that by one or two marks because you're focusing on another subject that you're not even taking for a level anyway so prioritize your subjects there should be a hierarchy the two most important GCSEs are maths and english language for everyone but from there you can obviously prioritize it a bit more don't cover all of the content focus on your weaknesses as I mentioned before chances are you know something there is no way in hell that you're getting zero out of whatever on all of your tests you need to focus on your weak parts the reason why this is not done very frequently by a lot of students is focusing on weaknesses is boring because you suck at it you'd rather do something that you're actually good at but it's not what you should be doing so again get your last marks or get the marks that you're probably going to do in September look at what you got wrong focus on those topics get get another test do the same thing again and again and again so again when you're going through past papers as well when you're marking them whatever you get wrong that's what you're focusing on before your next mock and that's it so hopefully that's helped you a little bit again leave any comments or questions that you have in the comment sections then I can reply to you and I wish you the best