How to read a past paper: the twenty minutes before you attempt a question

Most students use past papers as practice tests: sit, answer, mark, repeat. That is the least useful thing you can do with them. A past paper is information about the examiner, and twenty minutes of reading it as a document, before attempting anything, is worth more than the three hours of attempting.

Minute 0 to 5, the structure. How many sections, how many marks each, how much choice. Where the marks are is where your revision time goes. A section worth forty percent that you have not revised is a bigger problem than a section worth ten percent that you find hard.

Minute 5 to 10, the verbs. Underline the instruction word in every question. Define, state, list: one mark each, one line each, do not write a paragraph. Explain, describe: you need the mechanism, usually two or three linked sentences. Compare, differentiate: two things, a table, and the marks are for the differences, not for describing each one. Derive, prove, show that: every step, and the marks are in the steps. Students lose more to the wrong verb than to the wrong fact.

Minute 10 to 15, the repeats. Take three years of papers and look at which topics appear every year, which appear in alternate years, and which appeared once. The every-year topics are not optional. The alternate-year ones have a pattern; check whether last year's paper had it.

Minute 15 to 20, the marking scheme. If the board publishes one, read it before the questions. It tells you what a five-mark answer contains: usually five distinct points, not one point written five ways. Answer to the scheme, not to the question.

Then attempt one question, timed, with the marks-per-minute ratio in mind. A 100-mark paper in 180 minutes is under two minutes per mark. A ten-mark question gets eighteen minutes. If you are still writing at twenty-five, you are stealing from another question.

After marking, write down not the answer you got wrong but the kind of mistake: wrong verb, missed a step, ran out of time, did not know it. The kind of mistake is what you fix. The answer is just one answer.

My Study Skills & Exam Technique guide has the full method with a one-page template. This is the part of it people tell me they actually used.