Before exam..

• All the major examination boards have websites these days, usually with sample papers and examiners' reports that you can download. These sites are well worth a visit as they may offer a lot of sound advice.

• Try to get a good night's sleep the night before any exam. Enter an exam well-rested.

• Past exam papers are very useful when organizing your revision notes. Arrange your notes in the same order as the topics appear in the exam paper. Once you've done this, try recalling the key facts needed for each topic. You'll find that organizing your notes makes them easier to remember and improves your memory.

• Make sure to allow for plenty of time when travelling to the exam location. Allow for problems, hold-ups and traffic jams on the way and make sure you arrive with time to spare so that you can go in calm rather than in a frantic rush.

• Some exams require the use of PENS, while others have to be completed in PENCIL. Make sure you know what you should be using in every paper before you go in. Take spare pens and pencils just in case the one you are using stops working.

• Don't cram new information in the night before an exam. Relax if you can by lightly reading over your notes for the next day.

• Disqualifications and mobile phones go hand in hand in the exam room and almost 300 students were disqualified last year for having one. Know the rules on phones. Best leave them at home.

During Exam

• Don't forget to read the instructions and make sure you know what you are being asked to do. You should go into the exam well aware of what is expected of you, but you should always check. Don't, however, waste a lot of time on this.

• When you display any symptoms of anxiety during studying or during the exam, use relaxed breathing to calm yourself. Stay calm and relaxed.

• Often, students start thinking negatively when things aren’t going well on an exam. This can lead to lower self-confidence and increased self-doubt. Recognize and turn off your negative internal dialogue. Focus on the task instead of on yourself. Do not try for perfection – aim to do your very best.

• Forget the exams that you have just taken. There is nothing you can do to influence them now and you are in the worst position to judge how well you performed - but there is a lot you can do to improve your performance in the ones yet to be taken.
• It's your exam after all and you want to be able to sit it under exam conditions. Don't suffer in silence. I didn't when your age, and asked the invigilator to stop pacing up and down. He did. The regular pattern of squeaking stopped and I was then able to concentrate.

• With multiple choice comprehension questions based on a text, a simple trick is to take obvious and prominent words from the text and put them in an incorrect option. Seeing a word or phrase from the text is not enough; these questions are designed to test comprehension not recognition of a word from the passage.

• And if you feel unwell during an exam, make sure your teacher knows. You could get special consideration, if a valid case and you under-perform.

Math tips

• Maths is actually one of the easiest topics to revise - provided that you have understood what you have learned and have solved lots of problems along the way to help you reinforce your understanding. If you have done this then your maths revision should consist of testing yourself by doing past papers, identifying areas where you've forgotten what it's all about, solving more problems in your weak areas and that's it! No strings of dates or foreign verbs or properties of elements in the periodic table to memorise. Whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of thinking that maths is so easy that you don't really need to revise at all or you'll be in for a big shock!

• Have all memorizing done a couple of days before the exam.

• USE FLASH CARDS FOR MEMORIZATION OF FORMULAS AND RULES!!

• Go back over what you had trouble with on your practice exam.