Exam prep: your last minute guide to English

So there’s good news and there’s bad news. I’m going to do the mean thing and start with the good news first:

English is the one exam where you go into the exam knowing about 80% of what you’re going to write before even seeing the paper.

And no, I don’t mean that you know there’s going to be a question on Discovery (like that one guy that makes that joke every time you’ve got a discovery exam the next day), I literally mean that you should be walking into Paper 1 with your story and essay memorised and walking into Paper 2 with a Mod A, B and C essay memorised and ready to adapt to any question.

The bad news is that I’d be lying to you and dooming you to an eternity of regret if I told you that that was all you needed to do to maximize your marks heading into that exam.

As sweet as it is to know your essays like the back of your hand, it’s pretty darn difficult to waltz in there ‘knowing’ what the question will be, even for English nerds like yours truly. And surprise, surprise: you hear it every year. There’s always that one English question that just gets everyone geed up because it’s from way out in left field so it just mauls everyone it comes across kind of like that wave thing in Lord of the Rings.

So it’s definitely worth being prepared for that. Luckily, this study guide is going to help you do exactly that.

A trip down memory lane

It might not be everything in English, but memorising your essay and story for Paper 1 and then your three Paper 2 essays is essential because it means in the exam your main focus will be on adapting, which is pretty sweet.

But there’s always those kids who leave memorising no the night before (do not recommend), so if you’re one of them then the best thing to do would be to sit there and write out the evidence from each of your essays in order. You need to be walking into the exam knowing your evidence really well.

If you have memorised, this is your chance to prove it yet again. Use this time to practice writing out your story and essay back to back whilst timing yourself, which shouldn’t be new to you as you should've been doing this in the lead up to these exams anyway. The beauty to doing this the night before is that it solidifies how quickly you can write them out so when you walk into that exam tomorrow, you know exactly how you’re going to use your time wisely.

This is like the warm up before the big day, which means time restraints and exam conditions aka goodbye to your phone and Facebook (trust me, you’re not missing out on anything that important anyway!)

Now I know what you’re thinking: “okay Serg, but what about comprehension?” Which brings me nicely to my next point:

Build up your arsenal

So with comprehension, there is only so many practice papers you can do before you realise that the main thing you need to know in these responses is technique after technique.

So I think the best thing to do would be to create a list of about 10 basic techniques for written passages and poems, and about 5-6 for images that you know and can use. If you need help you can always check out our prose or our images videos for the attached techniques pages.

The point is that you can walk into that exam room and go all rolling-thunder on your exam paper by dropping a tonne of techniques at once because you know them and know how to link them to the stimulus.

Just make sure you’re straying on the side of normal techniques like metaphor and anaphora rather than absolute mind-bendingly silly ones like ipsedixitism and zeugmatic hypophora. Half the time they’re just made up words and contrary to popular belief, that gets you nowhere in English.

Now you’re at the point of the calm before the storm. You know your stuff and you know it well. There’s really nothing more you can do than maybe reading through your essay and story one more time, then hitting the hay.

Rest is essential for the big day tomorrow.

Game day

The day of your exam has arrived!

First thing’s first: your alarm should be set an hour or an hour and a half earlier than normal. It’s time to get up and write out your essay and creative writing one more time, or if it’s Paper 2 all three essays.

If you stayed up all night to binge the new season of Rick and Morty, then you’ve done yourself no favors. The best you can do is read over everything one more time.

Next up, make sure you have a good breakfast and have it well before the exam. There’s nothing worse than copping brutal stomach cramps mid creative writing or falling into a food coma in the middle of a three essay exam.

Believe me it’s not a fun situation to be in.

Exam room

It wouldn’t be fair to finish this blog post without going through the thing that’s kind of the most important bit in this whole process. The actual exam.

Now when you’re in that exam room, you absolutely have to set up your essays for every success possible. This means you have to understand the question and make sure you’re adapting.

The thing is, no matter how good you think your essay is, you can still cop a generous 10/20 if you don’t respond to the question and go off on some random tangent about love when really the question is about Discovery.

So the main thing to do in the exam is recognise the key words in the question and if you need to, highlight or underline them. And I don’t mean “Discuss” or “Explain” I mean the words that form the main juicy parts of the question: words like “values” or “attitudes”.

These words need to be coming out regularly in your response. If you keep saying ‘context’ but the question uses the words “time and place” e.g. the 2013 HSC Hamlet paper, then make sure you are using those specific words within your answer. This shows the marker that you’ve attempted to answer the question even with a pre-prepared essay. This goes for comprehension too.

So that’s pretty much what I did and it helped me feel confident heading into any English assessment that I was doing. Good luck guys and feel free to let us know how you went!