EXAMINATION HINTS

Those who have an examination in view however, need to make the best of available time. Here are some guide–lines which may help.

            First of all make yourself thoroughly familiar with the syllabus. When studying your syllabus, take a careful note of its organization and length. It would be of help in your study to obtain some of the past papers set by the Examination Board. The Ordinary Level (O/L) courses usually take over two years depending on the number of subjects studied. You should plan your work carefully so that you have covered all the subject material a month or two before the examination. This will give you time for a complete revision of everything this building your confidence and re–inforcing your understanding of what you have learned.

            Tackling the work itself: Try to do this in complete privacy and quietness so that you achieve maximum concentration. Read a will of study through from beginning to an end slowly and carefully. Then try to recall its shape or argument. Ask yourself what were its chief points. Look up all unfamiliar words or pace names in the glossary or dictionary or an Atlas. It is obviously essential for you to have a great atlas or will be your constant companion through the course.

            As you study each section take notes, make a brief summary of the main points. The purpose of note taking is to help you understand and remember the essence of what you have learned. You will develop your own system of note taking but avoid merely copying the text book verbatim. It is your own ideas and understanding of what you have read that counts. The purpose of these notes is that you keep going back to them from time to time refreshing your mental image of the topic, re–inforcing your memory and understanding.

            When you think you have a good grasp of the unit, test yourself by answering the past questions. As you progress in your course, you should try to answer questions under conditions as close as practicable to those of the examination. Here the time element becomes important. If your GCE papers shows that five questions have to be answered in two hours, you should allow yourself twenty minutes for each question.

            Spend few minutes thinking about it and jotting down, on a spare piece of paper a plan for the answer. List the main points or facts. Get them into logical order. Then begin to write. This preliminary organization will help you to make clear, tidy presentation of your answer avoiding crossings–out or after thoughts, and this will go very much in your favour.

            Leave two or three minutes at the end for reading through again and correcting any obvious errors. Give the same amount of time to each question. Don’t be tempted especially in the actual examination to write at length on one subject if it means over running your time and sacrificing something else. All questions count equally and available points will be lost you leave any unanswered.

            Where a question calls for a sketch map or diagram, remember that more information can be conveyed clearly in this way than in any number of words.

            Your illustration should be as concise and accurate as possible but should give only the information asked for, don’t waste time putting in irrelevant details.

            In a sketch map there is no need to try to reproduce the intricacies of a say a coastline. Your coastline can be simplified and rounded, but the map should be drawn quickly and recognizable. As you work through the course practice drawing maps of the countries you are studying so that you can easily reproduce them for the examination. In fact the best help you can give yourself, all along the way is to shape your written and illustrated work towards examination requirements, shorthand.

            The study of geography does not end in the classroom. This is only a prelude to the appreciation and enjoyment of geography for its own sake. But at this stage, you will be equipped with knowledge and techniques that will enable you widen your studies, recognizing the relevance of geography with its many facets, to everyday life and the world about you.

            A common complaint of teachers is that their students cannot help their ideas when asked to answer an examination question or write an essay. The student may have a mass of relevant ideas and a considerable number of basic facts about the subject but they do not know how to organize these ideas to produce a coherent essay. Their main difficulty is not constructing grammatical sentences though they have trouble with this too but rather in organizing the paragraph in such a way that it secures a definite purpose such as narrating, arguing, defining, describing, analyzing.

            The writer tries to organize sentences into unified paragraph in order to communicate. In this study guide I will define a paragraph in expository writing as a group of sentences all related to one topic and organized in a logical manner. This means also that sentences built around a topic do not constitute a paragraph unless they are arranged logically. The topic or central idea may be expressed in one as a whole. The positions of the topic sentence varies according to the type of text, but it is usually at the beginning and sometimes at the end. When the topic sentence is the first sentence of the paragraph, it refers briefly to the theme of the preceeding paragraph or to the theme of the whole text if it begins the introductory paragraph, as well as indicating the theme of the new paragraph. But when the topic sentence is at the end it usually summarizes the paragraph in which it occurs.

            The topic sentence or central ideas may be developed in a number of ways. It may be developed by examples, comparison and contrast cause and effect, enumeration of details, analysis of positive and negative characteristics. In whatever way the topic sentence is developed, the structure of the paragraph must be held together by a unity of theme and by logical organization. Looking beyond the sentence into the paragraph is significant for a student both as a reader and as a writer that is both as a decoder and as an encoder of message.

            As a reader the student will be able to see at a glance the component parts of the text and thus makes better use of his time and attention. He can look for central idea, supporting details, examples, to illustrate general ideas and various relationships, causual, temporal, etc. he can enhance his reading efficiency by making use of such clues as transitional words or phrases and grammatical texical links.

            In making notes the students will be able to discriminate between what is basic to paragraph and what is not. Thus preserving the right relationship.

            As a writer, the student will be aware that to form a paragraph he must organize a group of sentences around a topic and link them together to form a unit. He will realize that the paragraph itself should generally be a component unit of a larger whole and that a group of unrelated paragraphs will not make an essay just as a haphazard collection of sentences will not make a paragraph.