Divide lefthand vertical into as many subject areas as seems appropriate from your inspection of syllabus and past exam papers. Do this very careful and only after you have become very familiar with exam topics. Also, make allowance for any coupling of topics because sometimes examiners like to link one topic with another. If you have, say, a dozen past papers and a particular linking has only come up once, you are probably save to forget it. But if it has occurred, say, three or four times it needs to go down.

So now you have large set of cells, each of which relates to a particular year and to a specific topic. Place a cross in each cell for year in which a given topic has come up. If there is a pattern, and very often there is, you will soon see it. The relative frequency with which various topic come up will now be easy to see.

It is not that examiners are doing a parallel kind of exercise to determine structure of next examination they set. They might well be unaware of kinds of patterns we are talking about. But examiners do have at least a mental scheduling of relative importance of particular topics and an impression of what have been chosen recently.

Now use spare column on right-hand side, which relates to year you are going to sit exam, to mark those subject areas which seem most likely to come up this next time. These are ones which you need to spend extra time on. The other areas need to be covered as well, but your projections need special care and attention.

In case of some examinations such a pattern may not seem to emerge. But often it will. In any case, it is worth investment of time to find out, and whether it does or not it would be foolish not to inspect as many past papers as possible. You need to see how questions are phrased, how they are divided, sometimes even subdivided, whether there are any special conditions imposed, such as papers which are divided into different sections with different lengths of time allowed for each, and so forth.

Overall, many students just seem to accept constraints of an examination system as a barbed wire fence they can do nothing about. But foregoing might just give you a set of wire cutters!

Words = 860

There may be other variations in phrasing of question, but approach you adopt needs to be always same: present examiner with what is effectively a concise answer to question. It usually takes no more than a few lines, maybe a dozen at most. He/she will jump up and down in excitement at having found someone who not only knows answer but who can also actually make it explicit.

2. The expansion of essay is simply a development to show that whatever you said at 1. is correct or relevant. This takes up most of essay. Use a new paragraph for every new point. Don't be afraid to be pedantic. End each of these paragraphs by relating what you have said directly back to question. e.g. "Hence it can be seen that..." and so forth.

If, during course of writing your answer, you suddenly remember a really major point which really should have come earlier, just "knit" it in as if this is where you always intended it to go. Thus: "Of course, a further point which needs to be given especially emphasis at this juncture is..." Try and make it seem most natural place to put it. The examiner may think it better put elsewhere, but he will not usually penalise you for that700

3. The conclusion will be little more than a restatement of introduction - but you do need a conclusion. During writing of essay you may have thought of some other points not mentioned in introduction. If so, be sure to mention them in conclusion.

Read Before You Write Always spend at least six/seven minutes out of a three hours exam reading question paper. Read it three times. The first to get a general impression. The second to mark any question which you can reasonably attempt. The third to check that your second reading decisions were accurate - sometimes, in face of nervous tension, they are not. This is time well spent. As an invigilator, one often groans within at seeing student grabbing their pens and beginning to write before clock has stopped chiming hour to commence!

Dividing Time Unless some questions have unequal shares in total marks possible, always divide your time equally between questions. There are severe diminishing returns to each extra minute spent on present question - more could be added to overall total by going onto next.

Conclusions year through bad or none existent exam technique. With good technique it is, in fact, possible to do rather well with skimpy knowledge (although one does not advocate practice!), whereas it is commonplace for students to underachieve by neglecting their technique.

950 words