We’ve put together a few pieces of advice for how your students can get the most out their trial exams with processes for completion and review.
Have students do the first 2-3 trial exams open-book and untimed. These initial trial exams will be an exercise in refreshing their content knowledge from across the course. The objective is for students to become familiar with different types of exam style questions and the way different parts of the course are linked together.
After those first few trial exams, the remainder should be done under exam conditions - closed book, timed, and with as few distractions as possible. Breaking the exam up into sections is a good way to ease into this. There are two options for when students get stuck on a question: 1. Put down what they can remember, and move on. When they go back and review that question later, they will get a better sense of what they didn’t understand. 2. Stop the clock and refer to their notes, then restart the clock and continue under exam conditions. Just as long as they are not copying their notes into the questions.
Students should mark their own trial exams before getting help from you. By doing this, they will review how much detail they were able to produce, get a sense of what is required from mark allocations, and find improvements by comparing their answers to the sample solution.
Once your feedback is provided, encourage students to document their errors and key takeaways, and then review those notes before starting the next trial exam. This is a great resource to read through in the lead up to the final exam.
2020 Adjusted Trial Exams are available now online for prompt delivery.
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