Gain 10-15 marks in your next maths mock - maths teacher explains

I'm going to give you a couple of tips on how to gain between 10 and 15 marks in your next GCSE mock and it doesn't really matter when the mock is, the mock could be next week it doesn't really make a difference. I'm going to show you the common ways that students lose marks that again it's not even due to intelligence it's just due to technique. So first things first, do not cross out any working out. The reason why this is important is I understand the the idea behind crossing working out out but there's no point. Because it's positive marking, right? So as long as you write something, any part that's correct, whether it's an attempt to factorise something or it's an attempt to make an equation, you get marks for that. The worst thing I've ever seen is when students cross out their working and then they just leave the question so they get zero anyway. So even if, even if you write something you think is wrong, rewrite it next to it and just leave both of them there. Your teachers won't really like you because it's harder to mark, But... You can't lose marks. The only exception to this is if it's like a proof question or a question that has a yes or a no. You can't say yes and no, right? But in the 99% of questions where you actually do some working out, it's best to just leave everything in there so you can get those marks. The second thing is using what the question tells you. So here's an example of a five mark question from a year 11 mock that my students did. And some students left it blank, some students didn't do enough. So I'm going to go through a few examples of this, but you can get marks in... I'm not going to show you how to do the whole question, but I'm going to show you how to get a couple of marks, because getting 0 out of 5, or 0 out of 4, or 0 out of 3 is tragic. You can get, in every single question, 1 or 2 marks, and that adds up when there's 22, 23 questions in the paper. So for this one, okay, it has a trapezium, blah, blah. And he gives us stuff, and he says work out the perimeter, and this is a bit confusing. Now, look what they've told me, though. They've said the trapezium has an area of 165. Now, the area of a trapezium was actually on the formula sheet, and it's a half, A plus B times H. I get a mark for just subbing in the stuff that I already know. So, if I look at this, A is just the bottom side, so 14. B is the side I don't know, and H is 10, and that equals 165. I've done no maths, I've got a mark. Now ask yourself, what do you think they want me to do next? Well, I have an equation and there's an unknown, so solve it. Solving it gives you two of the five marks. So just writing the equation is one mark, solving it gives you the second mark, and that's just a linear equation. Most of you can solve that. The reason why I want to make this really, really clear is a grade six is 45% on average. Right here, two out of five, I've got 40%. So I'm on track for a grade 6, even though I've done very bare minimal maths. Another example is this question here. This question, A is this and C is that, and it says find B, and I accept that this is a fairly tricky question, but if you just sub in, literally all you do is you sub in the stuff that they've given you, so I haven't even done anything yet, that's one mark. If I actually do the multiplying now, so with a vector when you times the outside it's going to, you know, it's going to times the inside, so 10 and minus 15 minus 3b equals 22 and minus 12, that's the second mark, and the third mark is now for rearranging this whole thing, which, okay, that's fairly tricky. This is a four mark question, so I got 50% without really doing any maths, and like I said, a grade 6 is 45%, it's pretty good, so across those two questions I've averaged 45%. I'll give you another example. Okay, there's a lot of stuff here and it is very complicated. So buying pens and selling 20 pens and profit blah blah But guess what? It says here he buys 30 pens for 40p each. So what can you do with that information? Well, can't I work out the total amount he spent? If I do 30 times 40, bear in mind this is on a calculator paper That's one mark already. And then from there, what can I do? Well, he sold 20 of the pens Okay, and he sells each pen for the same price, he makes 50% profit, so can't I just work out 50% profit on this? So 50% is 600, so then his total profit is 1200 plus 600, which is 1800. That's another mark. Okay, what can I do from there? Well, he sells 20 pens, so I can just divide it by 20. That's the third and fourth mark. So the question will tell you how to answer the question, essentially. So look at the information they give you, what can you do with that information to do it? Generally speaking, in GCSE maths questions, there's only one way to get to the answer. And that actually makes your life easier because you use the information, you write an equation, you solve the equation, done. In this case, what's the only thing I could do with this? Multiply it to get the total cost. All right, what's the next thing? Well, he says 50% profit. So it's kind of a step-by-step. With this one as well, it's kind of disappointing to see. Okay, fine, this shaded area looks a bit complicated, but it's two quarter circles and they've given you the radius. So why don't you just work out the area of both of them? Because the only thing you can do right, you want to work out area, it says area, they've given you the radius and they told you it's two quarter circles. So just saying that quarter circle is pi r squared over four gave you a mark. So subbing in both of these values gave you another mark in this particular case. So subbing in that and something that, that was your second mark, that's your second mark, and then what do you think you do? Well you have those two areas, if you subtract them that's the answer, three marks. So again, you can get so many extra marks just by using the question, whatever the question tells you. It's even worse when I see students who have left questions blank and then they're just sitting there at the end of their mock and doing nothing. It's like go through and see if you can just write down an equation. A lot of the equations are on the formula sheet. Try and use the information they've given you. That will gain you 10 to 15 marks easily. Same with this one. Look how long this question is. It's crazy, but look at what they've given you. Just timesing those two numbers Two numbers and these two numbers gets you marks. Because what else are you going to do? It talks about areas somewhere. Okay, try and work it out. The third point is easy win topics. Now, again, I told you that this is going to take a very short amount of time. I don't want you going off. I'm not going to say, oh, yeah, revise all of quadratics. Instead, there are certain topics where the questions are really, really, really basic. And this works for anyone from a grade 5 all the way up to a grade 9. So if you know the bare minimum, so, for example, vectors around shapes, just working out a vector around a shape gets you marks. If you also go to ratio that gives you another mark. So in a four mark question you can get two without really doing anything complicated. Completing the square is technically grade nine but if you actually look up a video on how to do it it is so easy. It's really easy you get like two three marks for doing it. So easy that you can just do it because again when students are revising GCSE maths if they're on a grade five or a grade four or grade six and then they don't like doing the grade nine topics they think they can't do it. But it's not really a Grade 9 topic. Not really. That doesn't exist, right? Trust me, completing the square is very easy. You can learn it. Drawing the basic diagrams, a lot of students lose marks, again, all the way from Grade 4 all the way up to Grade 9, on something that's really, really basic. When I say it's basic, I just mean you could learn this in about 20 minutes for each of these, if that. Box plots, you're just drawing lines on a diagram. Histograms, you're just drawing rectangles on a diagram. Cumulative frequency, you add up the numbers, plot it along. If you learn that, just these three things, I'm willing to bet at least one of them will come up. Across your mocks, 100%. So, I mean, for my personal mock, two of them came up. And these were three four mark questions so two of them's eight marks you can gain straight away there by learning something that's really really basic. Students tend to either revise stuff they already know which is stupid or they go to stuff that's way too difficult. Start with the easy stuff. If you see a box plot every human being on the planet could learn how to do a box plot in about 20 minutes. Really simple stuff. The last one is exact trig values. This one I threw in there, I'm not saying memorizing is easy, but with this you actually have to do some work, right? Like you have to actually do the maths questions or whatever. If you're bored and you're stuck or whatever, you can actually memorize exact trig values quite easily. I've got a video on it about my table method, but there's like, you know, a hand method. There's also just brute force memorizing, just brute force memorizing the whole thing, which can also work. But again, it comes up in the non-calculator paper. All the time. In fact, I'd argue it comes up in pretty much every single past paper. You'll use those trig values. So learn it, you get a free one or two marks just there. So as promised, I said I'd make a very short video on how to do that. Hopefully you found these tips very useful. Again, when you're doing a test, it's not just about testing your knowledge, it's also about testing your technique. Part of that is knowing how to actually answer an exam paper by using what the question tells you, which, by the way, is just problem solving, learning the easy, easy, easy win stuff and moving forward.