Importance of Past Papers
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Importance of Past Papers
It does not matter whether one is student of O level or A level. It also does not matter which subject one has chosen to study in O level or A level. It also does not matter whether one is taking O level or A level exam through any of Cambridge International Examinations, Alliance for Qualification and Assessment, Edexcel or one of many other boards. All a student desires are higher grades and that is exactly where one’s future success revolves around. If one is looking for excellent college placement or interested in a particular profession for practical life, higher grades take you where you dream of.
Expectation & Simulation
It is widely, and perhaps truly, believed but seldom practised in letter and spirit, that past papers of a subject of any qualification and any board are most reliable reparation material. These past papers extend a helping hand in more than one ways. These not only give one a very clear and concrete idea about what to expect in exam but also provide a “simulated” environment to learn how to manage time and stress while taking actual exams.
Ingredients of Exam Preparations
However, these are only secondary type of advantages of solving past papers for O level and A level subjects’ preparations for examinations. As the adage goes, practice makes a man perfect.
So is the case with exams, if one wants to stand perfect among others in exams, the only way out is practice, practice and more practice. But one may, perhaps must, be interested in knowing to practice exactly what. Next we analyze what are the main ingredients of an exam preparation.
Learning Application of Theory
One’s exams require one to solve some problems in a given specific time. Hence the path to success in exams is twofold; understanding a theoretical concept so that one can solve a given problem. This can be easily achieved by following your class lectures or self-study of your text/reference books. Even text/reference book exercises may also take you an extra mile.
Learning Time Management
However, solving a given problem within a specified time requires only and much more practice. This is what past papers make you do. Here comes the role of past exam papers. Since you are required to solve exam questions, you need to practice exam questions.
True Exam Questions
For this to achieve you need exam questions. In this regard, no other resource can claim to be as large a question bank of exam questions as the past exam papers. Even if there is some resource with such a claim to be as huge exam question bank as exam papers, it cannot claim to be the true exam question bank. That is the peculiarity of past papers and only of the past papers.
Huge Practice Resource
Once availability of exam questions is fixed one needs to solve them which requires a theoretical concept and its application to a real life problem but with a restriction on time limit.
One may be very comfortable with a theoretical concept, however, implementation of the same to solve real life problems, or for that matter real life exam problems, within specified time constraint demands practice with actual real life questions which are only available through past questions paper. Luckily, past papers of all subjects of both O level and A level are made available by all the examination boards. All these past papers constitute a huge exam questions’ bank.
Practice & More Practice
Therefore, it is strongly recommended that one must thoroughly study the text/reference books for the theoretical concepts and must solve the exercise given in the same text/reference book to have an idea of how to apply these theoretical concepts to real life problems. However, after that one must solve each and every question of all the available past papers. Each of these questions has been asked at one point in time or the other in exams. These questions contain that peculiar sting of the exam questions which may not be available anywhere else.
Various Examination Aspects
Solving these question, each and everyone, reveals most if not all the aspects in which a one’s theoretical concept may be put to test in a given real life scenario within bound of a time limit. Each time a question is solved from past papers; the theoretical concept gets revised and becomes part of learning.
Once all the question papers are solved, one may like, and is urged, to start it all over again. If all past papers of a particular subject of a given qualification are solved in a mock exam environment for a couple of time, or until one feels confident, it is highly likely that it would result in higher grades. Ultimately, dreams coming true.
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