There are now five days until the P.E. exam. And while most of you are probably suffering through other exams, you need to start thinking about the rest. So here are my recommended steps for the next few days.
Go over the study design
Sit down with the P.E. study design next to you and go through it, step by step. The parts listed under ‘key knowledge’, in each of the four Areas of Study, are the things that you should know and the things that VCAA will probably examine you on. If you don’t know anything, or it’s feeling a bit vague, open up your textbook (or chapter summaries, if you’ve made them) and read over this section a few times, or, even better, answer some questions on it.
The dot points listed under ‘key skills’ are what VCAA expects you to actually be able to do with your knowledge. Go through them to make sure you can do them – but most of the time if you have the knowledge, and you know the content really well, you should be fine.
Hunt out the tricky questions
Hopefully, at this stage, you’ve got most of the basic content pretty much down pat. If you haven’t don’t panic, but start to work on it. If you have, that’s fantastic – it means you can devote the next week to learning those extra details which will set you apart from everyone else.
So, when you’re doing practice exams over the next week, there’s often no point doing basic questions over and over. If you’ve done a basic question a few times, and you’re 100% confident that your answer will score full marks, leave it and move on.
Hunt out those curly questions which will really challenge you and continue to expand on your knowledge. Because, you never know, that might just be the really tough question that VCAA decides to put on the exam this year.
Go back through your practice exams
If you’re anything like I was, you will have completed quite a few P.E. practice exams by this stage. It’s really useful to go back through and see where you lost marks, on each and every practice exam that you’ve done (particularly the ones you did first).
I would advise (if you’re after a really high mark) that you rewrite your answers on any question that you lost marks on, until you’re confident it would score full marks.It’s a bit time-consuming and quite challenging, but it’s well worth it.
Those ‘perfect’ answers that you’ve written will stick in your head, and hopefully you can then reproduce them on the exam.
Know your strategy
You don’t want to go into the P.E. exam without a clue what you’re going to do, like a lot of students do. Over the next week you should work out your strategy on how you’re going to work through the two-hour exam. More importantly, you should practice it on the few practice exams that you do between now and then.
My strategy was really simple – I started at the beginning, with the multiple-choice questions, and work through to the end of the exam, skipping any really tricky questions that I wasn’t sure on. I’d come back to them at the end.
Whatever your strategy is, my only advice would be not to over-complicate it – you don’t want to be sitting there flicking through pages the whole time!
Work hard over the next few days, and you’ll reap the rewards later.
