I'm struggling with knowing how to efficiently and effectively revise for CP1.. I finished reading the notes a month ago now and feel like I've not made much progress since then. I'm trying to do the general advice of "do loads of questions!!" and "learn all the acronyms". And it's taking me like an hour to do & check a decent sized question (I don't even write it out a lot of the time, just do the planning) and even then my answer isn't explicitly like the mark scheme - sometimes it's obvious I've gone the wrong direction with a question or haven't gone broad enough with my answer but other times I feel I've made valid points and it's difficult to know if they'd get marks or how many marks they would get.. and it definitely feels like I'm blagging it every time with my questions. I'm mostly attempting questions closed book and think some of the material I don't know very well but it's really difficult to know what to focus on to learn as necessity from the notes as there's so much of it. The acronyms do feel like they help for certain topics but other topics feels like a stab in the dark attempting to answer those! How do I feel like I'm improving with this exam? What should I focus on? How are you tackling revision?
Hi, What I can suggest you is (by experience) is that questions practice helps. Just looking at the question and not writing anything would not help you. For two-three weeks, try attempting questions, as in, sit and look at the question. Then see how much points you are able to generate. 7 marks mean roughly 14 ideas. If you see you are lacking ideas, this means you did not well understand this part of the course and might as well have a read. The marking scheme covers more than what is required for a pass, so it is good to practice a question and see the marking scheme as you might know which part you were missing. Then ultimately, you can sit for a mock exam and give someone to mark it, self-mark it or even try ActEd marking. Hope this helps.
I share some of your frustrations. In particular the time it takes to practice properly. In the technical subjects up to now you can mark a whole paper in 20 minutes or so but now I find marking a past paper properly takes me longer than sitting the past paper! Grey areas in the marking are also frustrating. I have found it to be best to be pragmatic but strict. I try to hit the mark scheme pretty closely, but also I focus my attention on those ones where I just went wrong all together.
It's the going wrong altogether I find very frustrating. So often I get utterly the wrong end of the stick because the answer focuses on aspect B rather than A. I'm getting better at it by storming questions by chapter (last sitting I did just do as many questions in a paper as I could, but the lack of direction was no good), though that approach is having zero effect on the 24-30 risk chapters. I think half the magic of learning this paper is being able to spot the very intricate examiners wording to work out exactly what they want you to answer (which isn't obvious).
