The Little Black Schoolbook: The Secret to Getting Straight A's at School and University, Volume 2: Exams

The Black Schoolbook Little THE SECRET TO GETTING STRAIGHT ‘As’ AT SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY Volume 2: Exams Mark Lopez...

Author: Mark Lopez

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The

Black Schoolbook Little

THE SECRET TO GETTING STRAIGHT ‘As’ AT SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY

Volume 2: Exams

Mark Lopez, PhD

TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING A CONNOR COURT BOOK

Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Taylor Trade Publishing An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rlpgtrade.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Distributed by National Book Network Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Mark Lopez First published in 2009 by Connor Court Publishing PTY Ltd First Taylor Trade Publishing edition 2011 Cover design: Cath Pirret Design All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-58979-581-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-58979-590-7 (electronic)

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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The Secret to Getting Straight ‘As’ at School and University

For Elaine Lopez

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The



Volume 2: Exams

Mark Lopez, PhD



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For Elaine Lopez

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The Little Black School Book

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Contents CHAPTER 1 A NEW APPROACH TO ACHIEVING CONSISTENT SUCCESS IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM....................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 THE REALITIES ABOUT ASSESSMENT AND HOW YOU CAN TURN THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE...........................................................5 Accommodating the ‘method behind their madness’.....6 Handling official and unofficial assessment standards..........................................................................7 Assessment standards in senior high school............................................8 Assessment standards in university...........................................................13

Handling examiners’ approaches to assessment...........16 Overworked or slack examiners................................................................17 Grading on ‘autopilot’................................................................................19 Criteria-based assessment and criteria scanners.....................................22 Lopsided criteria-based assessors.............................................................25 Balanced criteria-based assessors..............................................................25 Gut feeling assessors.................................................................................26 Assessment through comparison and contrast......................................26 The impact of context on assessment.....................................................30 The impact of ideology on assessment...................................................33 The chattering classes and the whispering classes................................................34 Irrationality in assessment........................................................................35 5

The



Volume 2: Exams

Mark Lopez, PhD



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For Elaine Lopez

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Contents CHAPTER 1 A NEW APPROACH TO ACHIEVING CONSISTENT SUCCESS IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM....................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 THE REALITIES ABOUT ASSESSMENT AND HOW YOU CAN TURN THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE...........................................................5 Accommodating the ‘method behind their madness’.....6 Handling official and unofficial assessment standards..........................................................................7 Assessment standards in senior high school............................................8 Assessment standards in university...........................................................13

Handling examiners’ approaches to assessment...........16 Overworked or slack examiners................................................................17 Grading on ‘autopilot’................................................................................19 Criteria-based assessment and criteria scanners.....................................22 Lopsided criteria-based assessors.............................................................25 Balanced criteria-based assessors..............................................................25 Gut feeling assessors.................................................................................26 Assessment through comparison and contrast......................................26 The impact of context on assessment.....................................................30 The impact of ideology on assessment...................................................33 The chattering classes and the whispering classes................................................34 Irrationality in assessment........................................................................35 5


Textbook conformity and assessment.....................................................39 Assessment manipulated to discipline or motivate................................41

Handling different assessment systems........................42 Autonomous single examiner....................................................................42 External double assessment ....................................................................42 Internal double assessment.......................................................................46 Assessment systems for Honours, Masters or Doctoral theses..........48

Lobbying for higher grades............................................50 Breaking out of a categorisation created by the teacher’s prejudice..........................................................52 Transforming a hostile teacher into an ally....................57 Handling educators’ ticks, comments and corrections...60 Handling educators’ egos...............................................70

CHAPTER 3 MAKING EXAMS AN EASIER OPTION..............77 The right attitude...........................................................78 Effective exam technique: Long-term preparation..................................................83 Planning.......................................................................................................83 Preparing study notes................................................................................92 Preparing for Mathematics...............................................................................97 Preparing for foreign languages.........................................................................99

Short-term preparation: Six, four, or two weeks prior to the exam season..........101 Clearing the decks.....................................................................................102 Further preparations ...............................................................................105 Perfecting study notes and skills ...........................................................109 Perfecting study notes.....................................................................................110 Practising skills.............................................................................................111 6


Textbook conformity and assessment.....................................................39 Assessment manipulated to discipline or motivate................................41

Handling different assessment systems........................42 Autonomous single examiner....................................................................42 External double assessment ....................................................................42 Internal double assessment.......................................................................46 Assessment systems for Honours, Masters or Doctoral theses..........48

Lobbying for higher grades............................................50 Breaking out of a categorisation created by the teacher’s prejudice..........................................................52 Transforming a hostile teacher into an ally....................57 Handling educators’ ticks, comments and corrections...60 Handling educators’ egos...............................................70

CHAPTER 3 MAKING EXAMS AN EASIER OPTION..............77 The right attitude...........................................................78 Effective exam technique: Long-term preparation..................................................83 Planning.......................................................................................................83 Preparing study notes................................................................................92 Preparing for Mathematics...............................................................................97 Preparing for foreign languages.........................................................................99

Short-term preparation: Six, four, or two weeks prior to the exam season..........101 Clearing the decks.....................................................................................102 Further preparations ...............................................................................105 Perfecting study notes and skills ...........................................................109 Perfecting study notes.....................................................................................110 Practising skills.............................................................................................111 6


Practising essay writing..................................................................................113 Practising short-answer questions....................................................................117 Practising multiple-choice questions.................................................................122 Preparing for open book exams.............................................................124 Exam options to be avoided...................................................................126 Planning for the allocation of time during each exam......................127 Familiarising yourself with the venue....................................................129

Preparation during the exam season.............................129 Exam performance........................................................134 Trouble-shooting during exams..................................................................141

After the exams.............................................................145

CHAPTER 4 THE SUCCESS ORIENTATION.........................147 Understanding ‘the system’ in order to succeed in it.....149 Proceeding with confidence..........................................156

CHAPTER 5 CLOSING THOUGHTS.......................................167

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CHAPTER 1 A NEW APPROACH TO ACHIEVING CONSISTENT SUCCESS IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM Success in the education system primarily depends on how effectively you deal with people in authority over you. This is the fundamental principle that we learnt in Volume 1. This is the principle that will reorientate your thinking – to see old things in new ways – to set you on the path to the immensely satisfying feeling that comes from achieving consistent success in the education system. Everything that I will teach you starts with this principle and comes back to this principle. The transformation begins here, with an idea. This principle forms the basis of a powerful new paradigm, or framework of understanding, for achieving consistent success in the education system that is based on a more realistic understanding of what really happens, which, I suspect, is in accordance with what you always suspected was the case. It was initially derived from my experiences in the education system and then fully elaborated during my extensive experience as a private tutor when I devised many additional means to solve the problems of secondary and tertiary students to enable them to succeed in any circumstance they encountered. To this fundamental principle of our paradigm, learnt in Volume 1 and repeated above, let us add some others:  Essays are primarily exercises in persuasion. Every time you submit an essay, you are, in effect, attempting to persuade your examiner to award you an ‘A’.  Assessment for most assignments and tasks is primarily subjective. 1


 Make your teacher’s bias your friend because if you do not it will be a formidable enemy.  Do not follow teachers’ advice according to what they say about their attitude to assessment, rather observe their behaviour and learn what to do from what they actually respond to.  You have to succeed in an unfair world, a world that includes realities that affect the progress of you and every other student regardless of whether you acknowledge them or not.  It is important, no matter how competent some of your educators may be, to take responsibility for your education to give yourself the permission to compensate for any limitations that may arise.  Make your enemies your friends and your weaknesses your strengths. What follows from these illuminating principles is that to achieve your objective of consistently high grades, you need to do what is necessary to persuade those people in authority over you, your educators/examiners, to award you ‘As’. We learnt in Volume 1 that there are two complementary dimensions to this endeavour. You apply ‘the Method’, which involves compiling a psychological profile of your examiner so that everything you put in an essay is calculated to press the right psychological buttons to pay a dividend in grades. You also pursue success by achieving merit, with merit, of course, being a dimension of what is required to persuade those in authority over you to award you ‘As’. In the pursuit of merit, in Volume 1 we learnt the art of research, note-taking, essay writing, report writing, public speaking, and more. In this volume, we will build on this wisdom to add substantially to your perceptiveness and refine your skills to increase your ability to achieve everything you want from school and university. We will begin by deepening your knowledge of the nature of assessment. Following this, we will turn to the important art of succeeding in exams. We will also look at how a greater understanding of the nature of the education system will help you to succeed in it. In addition, we will examine the personal qualities you can cultivate to orientate yourself towards success, showing you how to make positive changes on the 2


inside first, so that positive changes in your outward circumstances follow. I suspect that the contrast between most students’ hopes and expectations for fair, objective and accurate assessment for every paper they submit, and the less than ideal reality regarding the way students’ work can often be assessed, constitutes the most profound contrast within the education system. To continually succeed in this system, students need to adopt a more realistic understanding of what happens in it and then take the necessary steps to succeed in the light of this reality. In your strategy, it is especially important to acknowledge the least favourable circumstances for assessment that could potentially arise. If you are prepared for these, you are prepared for anything. Fortunately, there are some simple, sensible, necessary precautions you can take to maximise your opportunities, no matter the circumstances. It is to this vital knowledge and skills that we will now turn.

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CHAPTER 2 THE REALITIES ABOUT ASSESSMENT AND HOW YOU CAN TURN THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE Assessment defines success in the education system. It is what decisively matters. To adopt an apt phrase from accountancy, assessment determines the ‘bottom line’ of study, the grades. In addition to qualifications, there are many benefits to be obtained through formal education arising from the content of the courses but it is the quality of the grades that determines whether students pass or do well, or, in accountancy terms, stay in business. We have already learnt that the assessment upon which students depend is for many tasks in many subjects a remarkably subjective process, being more complex and problematic than many people assume. However, despite these characteristics, it is possible to confidently take control of the situation so you can capitalise on both the strengths and the weaknesses of your examiners to consistently succeed because you know what is really happening and precisely what you need to do to generate favourable results. Some degree of merit is essential for success. Although merit is fundamentally important, one does not always succeed by merit alone, as too many students assume. We learnt in Volume 1 that sometimes merit can even compromise high grades, due to the impact of an examiner’s bias, or when a clever student has exceeded the knowledge of his teacher who is too ignorant, incompetent or narrow-minded to recognise and reward this degree of accomplishment. We also learnt that there are additional factors at play involving interpersonal dynamics, which have nothing to do with what is written on an assignment or exam paper, which affect the success of students whether they choose to acknowledge them or not. Consequently, 5


there is a risk that improvements in merit alone may not automatically bring improvements in grades unless they are combined with an astute knowledge of the human factor in regard to your examiners and how to turn this factor to your advantage. It is the effective utilisation of both of these dimensions (merit and psychological manipulation) that provides the surest means to consistent success. In this chapter, we will return to examining the psychological dimension of assessment that I described in Volume 1 when outlining the Method, building on your understanding and skills so you can confidently and effectively handle virtually any situation you encounter. The key to positive assessment in assignments and exams is to determine what your educators think they want (officially), as well as what they need (psychologically), and then appear to provide the former while actually providing both, with a covert emphasis on the latter. Although this chapter of the book deals primarily with deepening your understanding of the subjective psychological dimension of the assessment process, we will also be deepening your understanding of what educators officially want. This involves determining the educators’ intentions behind their courses, and for particular assignments in those courses, as well as scrutinising the official grading scales and assessment criteria for high school and university.

Accommodating the ‘method behind their madness’ As a student who is seeking high grades from your educators, you need to consider the ‘method behind their madness’, to determine the purposes that the educators who designed the course had for the overall course, as well as for each year level and for each assignment in that course. Many students are not used to thinking along these lines, having habitually turned up to classes and dutifully followed their teacher’s instructions without pausing to conceptualise their course in this fashion. Consequently, they may have skimmed over or skipped the documents that stated the course instructions or 6


assignment guidelines that clearly articulated these official educational intentions. In future, this material should be scrutinised because it provides valuable information that can prevent some errors of focus when completing assignments. This lesson was appreciated by one of my tertiary students beginning her first year at teacher training college who had to do an assignment on how she approached learning a topic, any topic. She chose the art of buying and selling real estate. When she initially drafted her assignment, her emphasis was on sharing the formidable knowledge she had acquired on her chosen topic. When she presented her material to me, impressed though I was by the content, I had to remind her that the purpose of the assignment was to promote various theories of learning rather than to teach the examiners about buying and selling real estate. Her emphasis was not in the right place for this course. By reminding my student of the purpose of the assignment, she was able to refocus her draft to emphasise her appreciation of the theories of learning advocated by her examiners. This revised answer was in tune with both the official purpose of the assignment and the (unofficial) desire of the examiners to promote the theories that they valued. These errors in focus are easy to make, especially when a student uses an assignment to pursue a personal interest. These mistakes can cost students heavily in grades, yet these unpleasant surprises are easily avoided if you pause to reflect upon the purpose of the educators. If you think about your assignments in this fashion, you will become more in tune with the expectations of your examiners and therefore be better able to meet them.

Handling official and unofficial assessment standards In addition to making yourself aware of the official purposes behind the course and its assignments, you need to appreciate the official designations of standards regarding the awarding of each grade, especially the criteria that determine the highest grades, such as the ‘A’ used for high school assessment or the grades of High Distinction or Distinction used at university level. This information can tell you 7


a great deal about the expectations of examiners and what is required for you to do well. When capable, competent teachers assess students’ work, they usually have at the forefront of their mind a sense of the criteria that constitutes an ‘A’. You should note that they tend to think primarily about the criteria that define this top grade rather than what defines the lower grades, and they use this understanding of the characteristics of what constitutes an ‘A’ as a yardstick to assess whether the students’ assignments and exams measure up – to either be on target or to fall short – and then award the grades accordingly. Consequently, it is advantageous if students also familiarise themselves with the criteria that determine the top grade and allow it to influence their efforts. Of course, this official information only tells you part of the story. We are well aware of the subjective nature of assessment and the impact of bias, etc., on the awarding of grades. To compensate for the limitations of the official standards in regards to what they can tell you, I have devised another unofficial set of standards that reflect other criteria by which grades are awarded, which you can use to complement the official standards to gain a very sophisticated understanding indeed.

Assessment standards in senior high school There are numerous versions of official grading standards for senior high school, which may vary marginally from education system to education system, or from school to school, so what follows is a distillation and synthesis of several of them to produce what could be regarded as a definitional example or archetype. Official standard for the ‘A’ grade (80 to 100%) ‘excellent’:  Demonstrates a precise understanding of the demands of the question or task.  Shows a knowledgeable and perceptive command of the topic, and an ability to deal with complex ideas and to make some impressive or insightful points.  Presents a cogent, coherent well-structured argument that effectively uses reason and evidence. 8


 Demonstrates an appropriate use of footnotes and presents an academically impressive bibliography.  The work is well written, employing an appropriate and effective (usually scholarly) vocabulary with competent spelling and grammar. You will notice that the criteria for the official standard for the highest grade awarded at senior high school are impressive and demanding, encompassing very worthy qualities that are intrinsically valuable and just as beneficial for work produced outside the education system as inside it. Ideally, they should be pursued for their own sake as well as to do well in school. Nevertheless, some students may find these criteria somewhat intimidating. While other students may look at these demanding criteria and feel a little bewildered because they recall receiving ‘As’ for work that was less exacting. It may reassure you to know that the educators who draft these lists of criteria tend to overuse superlatives when describing the standard that is awarded an ‘A’ grade. In reality, most ‘As’, including awards of ‘A+’, are given to work that is less than perfect. In addition, this list also becomes far less intimidating or bewildering when appreciated in conjunction with the unofficial standard for the highest grade, which consists of other qualities that I have observed to bring the highest rewards. In practice, these unofficial qualities can complement, modify or even cancel out some of the criteria in the official standard. It is probably the case that while many teachers may perceive themselves as assessing according to the official standard, they are actually operating more according to the unofficial standard, which is easier for students to achieve. Unofficial standard for the ‘A’ grade (80 to 100%) ‘excellent’:  The opinions presented reflect the teacher’s ideological, theoretical, or political bias.  The material presented mirrors the teacher’s understanding of the topic (at whatever level that may be), flatteringly reflecting the teacher’s ideas back at the teacher, or presenting other agreeable ideas that the teacher wished he had thought of himself.  The argument is reasonably well structured and competent enough 9


in its use of reason and evidence to make the analysis easy to follow and enjoyable to read.  There are many and varied footnotes and a lengthy bibliography.  The work is reasonably well written, employing the teacher’s preferred forms of language and ideally also using the teacher’s pet words and phrases. The quality of the vocabulary, spelling and grammar is at a standard commensurate with the teacher’s ability to judge in these regards. Upon reading this unofficial list of criteria, many students, who may have presumed they were rewarded for meeting the official criteria for the highest grade, may realise, upon reflection, that they actually inadvertently met the unofficial criteria and they were probably rewarded, at least in part, for doing that. On the other hand, many students who had submitted work that they believed measured up to the official standard for an ‘A’, but received a lower grade, may not have realised that this work had unfortunately fallen short of influential unofficial criteria about which they were not fully aware. I have observed in documents defining assessment standards that while the official criteria for awarding the highest grade are often clearly and comprehensibly expressed, the justifications for the lower grades are often imprecisely described because the relevant information is incomplete. This is because lower grades can be awarded in two ways. They can be awarded due to work being perceived to fall short of ‘excellence’ in some manner, the greater the shortfall the lower the grade. Most of the official criteria that I observed only described this dimension of assessment, by defining a declining scale that designated an ‘A’ as ‘excellent’, a ‘B’ as ‘very good’, a ‘C’ as ‘good’, a ‘D’ as ‘basic’, and an ‘E’ as ‘unsatisfactory’. However, lower grades may also be caused by the presence of problems; the omissions or errors that are appreciated by examiners as offsetting the gains made by the good, very good or excellent elements of the work, the more problems evident, the lower the grade. This sliding scale of positive versus negative elements is only occasionally explicitly expressed in statements of official grading standards. However, because this dimension would inevitably feature in any competent assessment process based on official assessment criteria, I have included it in my characterisation of the official assessment standard 10


for lower grades, such as for a ‘B’. Official standard for the ‘B’ grade (70 to 79%) ‘very good’:  Demonstrates a clear understanding of the demands of the question or task.  Shows a very good degree of knowledge and command over the topic, as well as some ability to deal with complex ideas and to make some very good points.  Presents a reasonably cogent, coherent and well-structured argument that is very good in its use of reason and evidence.  Demonstrates a competent use of footnotes and presents a very good bibliography.  Uses language accurately and is reasonably competent in spelling and grammar.  Contains a few omissions or errors regarding the factual content, argument, or expression that prevent the awarding of a higher grade. This official standard for the award of a ‘B’ grade is very informative, but it does not tell us everything we need to know about this interesting grade that represents either an impressive effort by a student who was usually awarded lower grades, or a potentially successful attempt at an ‘A’ that fell short for some reason. The unofficial standard for the ‘B’ can help fill in the gaps in our understanding. Work that is awarded a ‘B’ can often be excellent work that was unjustly graded, a problem that can be avoided if students incorporate into their work an understanding of the impact of the unofficial criteria. Unofficial standard for the ‘B’ grade (70 to 79%) ‘very good’:  The opinions presented imperfectly reflected the teacher’s ideological, theoretical or political bias. Alternatively, the work contravened the teacher’s bias but was generally of too high a standard in other respects to allow the teacher to bust the grade down to a ‘C’.  The material presented did not sufficiently reflect the teacher’s idiosyncratic understanding of the topic to consequently be seen as faulty in the teacher’s eyes, even though the work may possibly reflect an understanding that is more sophisticated than that of the teacher. 11


The ‘C’ grade (60 to 69%) is officially awarded to work deemed to be ‘good’. This means that it is good in its understanding of the question and topic, in the quality of the points made, in the structure of the work, in the use of reason and evidence, in the use of footnotes and the quality of its bibliography, and in its choice of language as well as its degree of competence in expression. In addition, it may contain a number of omissions and errors in the content, argument and the expression to compromise the awarding of a higher grade. In terms of assessment according to official criteria, the ‘C’ may be awarded to work by high-flying students who have fallen noticeably below their standard, to students considered to be reasonably competent or average in this subject by the teacher, or to battling students who have risen from a ‘D’. The ‘C’ grade may also be awarded, unofficially, to work that contains quality ideas that substantially contravened the teacher’s bias but was not of a high enough standard in other respects to prevent the grade from being cut less dramatically. Similarly, the content may be so out of step with the teacher’s idiosyncratic understanding of the material to therefore be seen, from the teacher’s perspective, as significantly flawed. In addition, the ‘C’ may also be awarded to work that was unable to entertain or stimulate the interest of the teacher. Interestingly, you too may have noticed that the ‘C’ grade can be awarded to work that has elements that noticeably bother or concern a teacher a great deal as well as to work that barely attracts their curiosity. It should encourage you to know that I have found that students who usually receive ‘B’ or ‘C’ grades have the potential to consistently receive ‘As’ if they acquire the appropriate study skills, such as those presented in this book. The ‘D’ grade (50 to 59%) is officially awarded to work that is deemed to be of a ‘basic’ standard. For example, it demonstrated a basic understanding of the topic and used the basic references. Often work is awarded a ‘D’ grade when it contains too many omissions or errors to be awarded a higher grade but not enough to fail. The ‘D’ can also be awarded to work that worries a conscientious teacher who is concerned that a student is on the verge of falling below standard to receive an ‘E’ grade. Work that is awarded an ‘E’ (0 to 49%) is 12


considered to be ‘unsatisfactory’ by falling short of what is expected for the task. Unofficially, teachers tend to award a ‘D’ grade to students whom they perceive to care little about their work and to be unwilling to put in a reasonable effort. In this context, sometimes this grade may be awarded as a form of punishment or to provide an incentive to encourage improvement. Alternatively, teachers can award the ‘D’ to work that barely interests them or to students who barely interest them. Interestingly, the issue of crossing the teacher’s bias is much less of a problem for work at this level because it is perceived as having too many problems for its opinions to be taken seriously. Rarely are high-flying students busted down to a ‘D’ or failed for crossing the teacher’s bias, although it can happen. Curiously, while some teachers are ruthless assessors, there are others who cannot bring themselves to award an ‘E’ and fail a student even if the work falls below standard, so they may award a ‘D’ instead. In this respect, as is generally the case regarding the unofficial grading criteria, the grade that is awarded arguably tells us as much or more about the nature of the teacher than the quality of the student’s work.

Assessment standards in university An awareness of both the official and unofficial standard for being awarded an ‘A’ can make students much more aware of what they need to do to consistently receive the highest grades at high school. It is the same at university, where the grading scale varies significantly from what many students were used to dealing with at school, and this can come at a surprise for students who are making the transition. At university, the standards are raised, so work that would receive an ‘A’ at high school would probably receive a Credit or even only a high Pass rather than the highest grade, the High Distinction, which can also be called First Class Honours. Furthermore, the official standards can vary from university to university, from faculty to faculty, as well as from department to department, with many institutions describing the standards as follows:  High Distinction, ‘HD’ (85% +) ‘excellent’ 13


 Distinction, ‘D’ (75 to 84%) ‘very good’  Credit ‘C’ (65 to 74%) ‘good’  Pass ‘P’ (50 to 64%) ‘satisfactory’  Fail ‘F’ (0 to 49%) ‘unsatisfactory’ Meanwhile, other institutions describe the standards in the following terms, by using terminology and a scale of corresponding percentages that is marginally different:  First Class Honours, ‘H1’ (80% +) ‘excellent’  Second Class Honours level A, ‘H2A’ (75 to 79%) ‘very good’  Second Class Honours level B, ‘H2B’ (70 to 74%) ‘good’  Third Class Honours, ‘H3’ (65 to 69%) ‘competent’  Pass, ‘P’ (50 to 64%) ‘satisfactory’  Fail, ‘N’ (0 to 49%) ‘unsatisfactory’ As with the grades for senior high school, I have distilled and synthesised several statements of university assessment standards from different institutions to determine what is typical. Again, as with the standards for high school assessment, I will complement the official assessment criteria with the unofficial criteria that are the product of my analysis of additional realities that affect the awarding of grades. Although often officially described as awarded for work that is ‘excellent’, the highest grade given at university, the High Distinction (or a First Class Honours over 85%) is more appropriately awarded for work that is beyond excellent, for work that is outstanding. In terms of your expectations, you should also be aware that, unlike in high school where awards of full marks are possible, it is customary at university to never award a score of 100%, while scores of over 90% are rare. Furthermore, the grade of High Distinction (or a First Class Honours over 85%) is supposedly reserved for work that is original, insightful, sophisticated, impeccable in its documentation, shows evidence of wide reading, and exhibits a confident understanding of the relevant academic debate about the topic. Most importantly, it should contain elements to make it potentially interesting to academics working in the field and therefore publishable. Consequently, this grade is understandably given infrequently. Even with the decline in academic standards following the 14


expansion of quotas of full-fee-paying student places in Australian universities during the 1990s, a substantial degree of merit is required to achieve a High Distinction. Consequently, you will need to make use of the skills outlined in Chapter 3 of Volume 1 and in Chapter 3 of this volume that show you how to maximise merit. However, you are far more likely to achieve the highest grade if you also meet several unofficial assessment criteria. Most importantly, the originality or insight displayed in the work should reinforce rather than challenge the examiner’s preferred theoretical approach and understanding of the topic. To contravene the examiner’s bias can easily see work of the highest standard unjustly busted down to receive only a Credit. It can also help your chances if your work competently informs the examiner about aspects of a topic about which he did not know, thereby assisting him to enhance his knowledge. While doing this, the opinions in the work should, of course, complement rather than contravene the examiner’s bias. It is also advantageous to favourably make use of the examiner’s ideas expressed in his publications, a gesture that can be very well rewarded indeed. Even though the High Distinction is worth striving for, the Distinction or lower end of the grade of First Class Honours (80 to 84%) is more realistically achievable on a consistent basis. The time available for students to complete an assignment is often insufficient to produce work of publishable standard. In addition, the degree of merit required to reach this standard takes time to acquire, so it is unlikely to be achieved in the first year of university. For a Distinction, the work has only to be excellent rather than publishable, displaying a high level of analytical insight, argumentation, research ability, documentation, expression, evidence of reading beyond what is strictly required for the task, and a grasp of the relevant academic debate about the topic. Of course, unofficially, a Distinction is far more likely to be awarded to work that also reflects the examiner’s bias. In addition, the opposite is also the case, with a Distinction far less likely to be awarded to work that contravenes the examiner’s bias. Most examiners at university tend to award comparatively few very high grades and very few low grades, tending to predominantly award Credits and Passes, which is where they believe most students fall. If this data was entered into a 15


graph, it would form what sociologists describe as a bell curve. The grades awarded at high school tend to form a roughly similar pattern, although teachers tend to award more of the higher grades than do university lecturers and tutors.

Handling examiners’ approaches to assessment Fair and accurate assessment by an astute examiner who understands the assessment standards, accompanied by constructive criticism when necessary, can be some of your most valuable educational experiences. Milk this feedback for everything it can tell you about what you have achieved and what you may need to do to improve. A number of educators will put considerable effort into this task and their care should be appreciated. When you encounter those examiners who are especially skilled, you should savour their assessments as precious opportunities to learn and grow. In this sense, I recall that when I was at university some of my less accomplished essays produced some of my most valuable learning experiences because I was determined to learn from my mistakes. Those educators who took the time and effort to constructively criticise my work in a manner that encouraged me to improve, contributed significantly to my intellectual development. I remain profoundly grateful to those educators as I am to others who have provided the same quality service to some of my students. However, there is a very real chance that the ideal situation regarding examination may not occur. Therefore, if you are pursuing high grades it is more advantageous to assume that you will not be assessed fairly or rationally and take the appropriate precautions. The trick is to assume the worst, and to do what is necessary to succeed with the worst examiners. Consequently, your work will be able to succeed with any examiner rather than be precariously dependent on competent treatment for a just reward. With this cautionary principle in mind, it is appropriate that we explore some of the kinds of attitudes and thinking of educators that can influence the assessment process. 16


Overworked or slack examiners If your examiner is overworked and pressed for time, the quality of their work can suffer. Teachers may find themselves overwhelmed by their diverse responsibilities, especially if they have a range of classes and subjects at different year levels, making their lesson preparations burdensome, cutting into their time for assessment. Similarly, academics can be overwhelmed by a combination of their lecturing responsibilities, research commitments, administrative duties, etc., which can accumulate at the times of the year when the demands of assessment are acute. Few students have seen the enormous piles of papers that can fall into an educator’s ‘in tray’ waiting to be assessed. Sometimes the perception of overwork may be due to an educator’s poor time management skills, but with others, it is a very real problem, and the otherwise efficient educator is not to blame. Many overworked educators may have the best intentions but be so overwhelmed by the deluge of correction, especially at the end of the academic year with final essays and exams, that they feel unable to devote as much time and effort to assessment as they and their students would prefer. Virtually the same problems regarding assessment, which are the result of overwork or perceptions of overwork, are also produced by a completely different attitude, by those examiners who are simply slack. While teachers and lecturers often proclaim the problems of overwork, the amount of slackness in assessment is higher than education departments, schools, universities, or individual lecturers and teachers are willing to admit publicly. The evidence that an examiner may find assessment a tedious ‘chore’ to be completed and put out of the way as quickly as possible is that there are few or no corrections or comments on papers that warranted attention. Although a similar symptomatic lack of correction can also indicate that an educator is overworked, the slack educator is betrayed by their corresponding slackness in other duties. If they are slack elsewhere, they are also likely to be slack in assessment. Correction and constructive criticism require a degree of time and effort that the slack examiner is unwilling to provide and the overworked examiner feels unable to provide. Even though the phenomenon of overwork may make students understandably 17


concerned, while slackness may make them annoyed or even angry, the smartest approach is to take the necessary precautions to succeed in an environment where overwork or a slack attitude to assessment can happen. In other words, don’t get angry at the weather, put on a raincoat. Both overworked and slack examiners feel the need to get the task of assessment over with quickly, so they tend to read the introduction of the essay reasonably carefully then skim read the rest. The tendency of some examiners to skim read is not helped by the way that external examiners for high school final exams, and auxiliary staff hired to examine end of year papers and exams at university, are often paid at a piecework rate for each assessed paper, not by the hour, so it is more profitable to correct many papers in a short time. The way for students to succeed in this environment is to write a detailed scholarly introduction to their essays that clearly states the contention, defines the key terms and, importantly, provides an outline of the argument to follow. This means that the essay can confidently be rated highly by the examiner from what is read at the outset. To produce a brief introduction, as many teachers recommend, and rely on being awarded for quality material buried deep in the essay may not succeed with an examiner who is interested in judging the essay primarily by its opening and who may overlook quality material as they skim through the paper. If you take these necessary precautions, even if your examiner skim reads your essay, you will probably still receive the high grade you deserve. In addition, there are other ways to improve your odds for fair assessment from an overworked or slack examiner. Firstly, the potential pitfalls may be avoided if the student has established a persona that educators like to reward, that of the keen, diligent capable student or of what I term the ‘chip off the old block’, which is when the student’s positive attitude reminds academics of what they were like when they were at university. Consequently the examiner would perceive these students positively from the outset and therefore treat them like individuals, and worthy ones at that, so their papers are unlikely to be graded as if they are lumped in with the bulk of submitted work but given individual consideration. In addition, if your introductory 18


paragraph indicates that your paper clearly shares your examiner’s bias, this can often trigger an attentiveness, and a most favourable one at that, which will make a more considered examination of the paper more likely.

Grading on ‘autopilot’ Another factor students need to bear in mind is the tendency to assess papers in a psychological state of consciousness that I describe as grading on ‘autopilot’, a condition that can affect almost all examiners, especially the more experienced ones. By grading on autopilot, I mean that they are assessing papers in a state of consciousness that is less than being fully alert and focused. To some degree, this is understandable and not surprising. It is analogous to the differences in the states of consciousness involved in learning to drive a car or in being an experienced driver. When one begins learning to drive a vehicle one has much to think about, such as operating the controls, the road rules, and navigating past obstacles and potential hazards. As a consequence, learners will be alert, focused and may resent it if someone distracts their concentration by starting a conversation. By contrast, the experienced driver is able to drive while listening to the radio and chatting to a passenger. The experienced driver comfortably applies a different level of consciousness to the task of driving, one that involves less concentration. When drivers are in this state of consciousness they fall back on their behavioural conditioning to operate and navigate the vehicle. This situation is similar to when experienced educators are engaged in assessment. Having assessed many papers over several years they become so used to the process that they typically find themselves falling into a state of consciousness that involves less concentration, which is a level of concentration less than what many students would assume would be the case or necessary for accurate assessment. However, just as it is with experienced drivers, often this degree of consciousness will be adequate, but at other times, it will not, such as when the teacher, or driver, encounters something unusual. What is important for students to realise is that when teachers are assessing in this less alert state of consciousness they tend to fall back on their behavioural conditioning 19


to guide them regarding how they should respond to the student’s work in front of them. Over time, through repetitive behaviour, teachers become conditioned to rewarding certain things they see in essays and penalising others. The more often they have rewarded something in the past the more conditioned they are to reward it in the future, without recourse to fully conscious thought. Typically, they are conditioned to rewarding what resembles well-structured argumentative essays written in scholarly English. Meanwhile, they are also conditioned to, for example, penalising the use of conversational or colloquial language, even when the student believed, often correctly, that this language was perfectly suited to the task. This tendency for experienced examiners to go into autopilot while assessing means that it can be risky to deviate from the stereotype of what teachers are used to rewarding. I discovered this tendency among teachers while helping one of my very keen year 12 English students. His teacher, who taught Politics as well as English, instructed my student’s class to produce a piece of writing that expressed a point of view, and the format was optional. My student chose to write a letter to the editor. My student enjoyed the opportunity to be creative, adopting a fictional persona for the task and devising appropriate language that suited it, which included several lines that were either conversational or colloquial to give the material an authentic quality, as well as some spice, like the more effective letters to the editor he had read in newspapers. Apart from those lines, the material and argument were generally scholarly. It was a very fine effort and, according to the official assessment criteria, it deserved an ‘A’. My student confidently submitted the draft to his teacher for comment, as he was required to do, but he was surprised by the teacher’s response, and so was I. The teacher had critically circled in red all the lines that were conversational or colloquial, these being the lines that my student had put the most effort into devising. But this was not all. The teacher asked for footnotes to be added. Footnotes, in a letter to the editor, how ridiculous, I thought to myself. A letter to the editor does not have footnotes. My student and I found this request bizarre. However, it is often the case that the most apparently absurd and extreme comments are the most revealing as to the nature of what really goes on in teachers’ minds during assessment. My student understood that he was seeking an 20


‘A’ from this teacher and not the one in the class down the corridor, so he was willing to do what was required to be awarded an ‘A’, no matter how absurd it seemed. As I guided my student to make the changes his teacher requested, I noticed that the work no longer looked like a letter to the editor. Instead, it was just like an argumentative essay written in scholarly English – and then it struck me – I realised what was really going on. The teacher had made my student transform the work into a format that he was used to rewarding. In addition, he had requested the removal of all the elements that he was conditioned to penalising, these being anything that was different from what was appropriate for a stereotypical argumentative essay written in scholarly English. My student made the changes, submitted his essay and received an ‘A’. Reflecting on this and other similar examples, which seemed to be everywhere after I realised what was happening, I developed the theory about grading on autopilot. Since then, I have recommended to my students who have the option to write in a range of formats, to choose one that closest resembles the format that teachers are conditioned to reward, this being an argumentative essay written in scholarly English. They have benefited immensely from this advice, and so can you. They avoided any format that invites them to creatively go into character and deviate from using scholarly English, such as in a speech or a letter to the editor, instead choosing to write either essays, opinion pieces or editorials. Interestingly, I have read many of the annual examiners’ reports that cover this exercise in the year 12 final exams, and they routinely praised as the best responses those that were in the formats that closest resembled an argumentative essay written in scholarly English, such as the editorial, and not the speech or letter to the editor, even though accompanying statistical data showed that those options were very popular choices. I would suggest that the grading on autopilot theory provides at least a partial explanation for this apparent coincidence. The grading on autopilot theory, as well as helping to explain the favouring of particular writing styles and forms of language, also complements our understanding of the tendency of some teachers towards favouring a narrow concept of the right answer, one that resembles what the teacher imagined the right answer to be, to the 21


exclusion of other possibilities. In this context, the theory also contributes to our understanding of the tendency of some teachers to adhere rigidly to a long-standing prescribed textbook as the source of the ‘right’ answers, to the exclusion of other valid sources of knowledge. If you want to improve your chances of receiving the highest grades, stick to producing material that closest resembles what your examiners are behaviourally conditioned to rewarding and avoid what they are behaviourally conditioned to penalising. Remember, any creativity and originality that deviates from the familiar stereotype entails risk. It should be noted that the more competent, broad-minded and sophisticated of the experienced teachers who tend to grade on autopilot may be conditioned to reward everything that they should reward and penalise everything that they should penalise. They do not present a problem. However, many others will not be this way, having become habituated to rewarding a narrow stereotype. Furthermore, I said it is risky to produce work that is distinctly creative or unusual and still be rewarded, but it is not impossible. The most capable of the experienced teachers who tend to grade on autopilot will snap automatically into a more alert state of consciousness to apply greater concentration when they encounter something unusual, just as an experienced driver does. However, many others will not. A very strong opening in an essay that prompts the examiner to be more alert and open to something new can be effective, and it will be more likely to succeed if it is in tune with the examiner’s bias and values. However, during exams it is opportune to minimise risk, so conform to the stereotype and receive your ‘A’, saving your precious creativity to be expressed elsewhere, where it will be appreciated.

Criteria-based assessment and criteria scanners As well as the generic assessment standards for grades (such as ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, etc.) that cover most subjects and tasks, you may also need to consider additional specific assessment criteria that pertain to particular tasks. If this information is made available, these criteria can be very helpful for students who seek to clarify what is expected 22


of them for each assignment. In addition, the prospect of being judged according to openly circulated task-specific criteria is a fair and reasonable concept. The statement of clear assessment criteria can sometimes bring out the best in examiners, by providing them with the basis upon which to make a fair and proportioned response. In these circumstances, most students would expect that the essays that best fulfill the criteria would usually be awarded the highest grades. Nevertheless, despite how sensible and fair this concept is at face value, the use of specific criteria can produce some curious behaviour among some examiners that requires special tactics to handle profitably. This was learnt by one of my year 12 Australian History students. He had to produce a research essay that would be assessed according to several specific criteria, such as its ‘evaluation of evidence’ and its demonstrated ‘understanding of problems associated with representing the past’. My student, who was clever, industrious and ambitious, threw himself enthusiastically into the project. He drew on additional sources to his designated school textbooks and painstakingly refined his analysis until it was just right. He was so proud of the finished product that he shook my hand at the end of our lesson to express his delight after I told him how impressed I was by his draft and his effort. He had done some excellent work. He deserved to be proud. He submitted the draft to his teacher for comment, which he was required to do, but he did not expect what followed. His teacher was unimpressed, indicating that the likely outcome of this prodigious effort would only be a ‘C+’. At our lesson that came after this bad news, my bewildered and disillusioned student could not understand what had happened. Indeed, it was puzzling. He believed, correctly, that he had fully met all the assessment criteria, so he had no idea what else he could do to improve. I consoled my student that his work deserved an ‘A’, so there must be another reason for the disappointing assessment from his teacher. To determine what my student could do to change the situation, I carefully reread his essay along with the teacher’s sparse comments, then I realised what had happened. Instead of reading his essay as a normal person would, as an argument that flowed logically from point to point, his teacher was scanning the essay for evidence that each of 23


the assessment criteria had been covered. It was more like the way a person would scan nearby carpet for a dropped paper clip than the way one would read an argument. Because of the subtle and reasonably sophisticated wording of the essay, this teacher had simply not noticed that my student had met all the criteria on the list. Alert to the problem, I instructed my student to simply take words and phrases from the official list of assessment criteria and then incorporate them into his essay. It was as if we were drawing attention to the student’s coverage of the criteria by lighting it in neon, so it was unmissable. Therefore, instead of having intelligently evaluated evidence and discussed various problems in representing the past, etc., then hoping that it would be rewarded, as my student had originally done, this time my student used blatant language such as ‘an evaluation of the evidence suggests that…’, and ‘one of the problems associated with representing the past is that…’, and so on. No new material or analysis was added to the essay, only some of the wording was changed, and not much at that. My student submitted the final draft to his teacher. This time the teacher commented on the immense improvement that had been made between the first and final draft. Remember, no new material or analysis had been added. Instead, this time while scanning through my student’s essay, the teacher had noticed the relevant material. My student received the ‘A’ he deserved. Since then, I have noticed that this ‘criteria scanner’ was not an isolated example. So I have advised many of my high school students to take care to avoid subtlety in the wording of their essays and to instead use words and phrases from the assessment criteria wherever possible. ‘Light it in neon’, I tell them. Most students assume that if they receive a disappointing result that it is due to the quality of their work. This may not be the case. It may have been because the work was not presented in the manner necessary for it to be rewarded by an examiner with a curiously irrational approach. This problem is more common than many students realise, yet it is easily overcome by taking some simple precautions.

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Lopsided criteria-based assessors I have also noticed that a number of teachers who follow official assessment criteria tend to reward the fulfillment of some criteria more than other criteria. I call them lopsided criteria-based assessors. Many examiners are lopsided to at least some degree, tending to treat the quality of the content as the most important or lead factor when assessing an essay, which is not unreasonable. Consequently, if the content is assessed as excellent, the overall assessment is likely to be very favourable. I have also noticed that many teachers tend to give more weight to the criteria that they feel they would be most able to satisfy if they were doing the assignment themselves. They tend to favour the criteria that boost their self-esteem by reinforcing their personal sense of competence. This is human nature. The examination process is for them, at a deeper level, an exercise in marginalising or suppressing their awareness of their failings and weaknesses while giving emphasis to their competencies. For example, a creative or imaginative English teacher with poor skills in spelling and grammar may emphasise the assessment criteria that reward the quality of the student’s ‘exploration of ideas and issues’ rather than their ‘control of the mechanics of the English language’, while a teacher with the reverse strengths and weaknesses may tend to do the opposite. Balanced criteria-based assessors By contrast, some teachers deliberately take care to avoid lopsided assessment. If a student falls short on, for example, one of a half dozen assessment criteria, the teacher may still award the student an ‘A’ because the level of achievement regarding most of the criteria was rated very high. The teacher kept the shortfall in proportion. At the beginning of the academic year, when you compile your psychological profile of your examiner, you need to determine their attitude to assessment. You need to take note of their competencies and therefore their corresponding biases regarding assessment criteria, so you can be aware of what your teacher prefers to reward, to therefore emphasise what they value most when you prepare your assignments. Although the production and circulation of official assessment criteria may 25


represent a worthy attempt at making assessment more objective, it is still the case that many examiners interpret these criteria subjectively, and this requires additional measures to be taken to achieve the most favourable outcomes.

Gut feeling assessors Gut feeling assessors are the most subjective examiners. They are either unaware or uninterested in official assessment criteria or they have internalised their understanding of the standards so effectively that they no longer have to consciously think about them. Gut feeling assessors award grades primarily according to their feelings generated by reading the essay; if they feel good they award a good grade, if they feel very good then they award a very good grade, and so on. We have already learnt that there is an emotional dimension to assessment and students who become aware of this can take steps to psychologically manipulate this factor in their favour. Gut feeling assessors can be either the best or the worst examiners. Luckily, they are among the easiest to influence. You just take the necessary steps to generate the appropriate positive feelings in your examiner and then wait for your reward. The opening paragraph should be used for this purpose. If it is scholarly and competently expressed, ideally also reflecting the examiner’s bias or is in tune with their values so you appear to be delightfully like-minded, this will usually generate the appropriately positive gut feeling. As I have mentioned before, getting ‘As’ is primarily an exercise in persuasion. It is as if the teacher has a jar of lollies on her desk and your objective is to say and do the right things to persuade her to give you one. If something does not work, change your tactics until you succeed. If those tactics cease to work, change them again. Assessment through comparison and contrast In addition to using assessment criteria or focusing on gut feelings, there are many other examiners who assess papers primarily according to a process of comparison and contrast. Most examiners will employ this process at least in part. This involves the examiner continually 26


comparing and contrasting their estimation of the quality of the papers as they work through the pile. In effect, they are grading the paper they are currently examining against the papers they recently assessed. If it is seen as better or the same or of a lesser quality, then it receives a higher, the same or a lower grade accordingly. If a paper contrasts dramatically in quality to recently assessed papers by being noticeably better, it may receive a much higher grade than if it had been assessed following several other accomplished efforts. This is because the process of comparison and contrast can make this paper seem relatively better than it would have seemed if seen in another context. Consequently, if you produce some excellent work it would hopefully receive an ‘A’ because it stood out from the other papers that were assessed before it. It follows that it can be highly beneficial to ambitious students if their papers are assessed following several average ones. Instead of leaving this to chance, there are means to engineer this advantage. For example, it can be quite advantageous to sit among the slack students during tests or exams (this being the only time when it is beneficial to do this) so your paper will end up in the pile among theirs to later be compared to these papers during the examination process, so its quality stands out more impressively than if it had been seen elsewhere. For my students who have attended disadvantaged schools populated by many students who are uninterested in their studies, I encouraged them to see this as an opportunity to capitalise on the formidable advantages to be gained from being comparatively assessed. These students soon discovered to their delight that moderate gains in merit were far better rewarded at their school than would have been the case elsewhere. Interestingly, a number of my year 12 students who attended academically oriented schools, where the students’ grade average tends to be higher, told me that some teachers attempted to discipline students by threatening to deny them the opportunity to sit their final or university entrance exams at their school, to instead send them to the major centre where they would be among many thousands of students from typical high schools, which tend to have lower grade averages. I explain to my students that this is far from being a punishment. Although deprived of doing the exam in the comfort zone of familiar 27


territory, which is something that can be easily compensated for by making an exploratory visit to the centre in advance to familiarise yourself with the surroundings, this so called ‘punishment’ could increase the chances of a clever student receiving even higher grades than may have otherwise been the case by ensuring that his paper will be assessed among papers from which it is more likely to stand out impressively. Rather than being viewed as a punishment, this option represents a potential advantage that ambitious students should actively seek. However, even when examiners are dedicated, able and fair, in using assessment criteria or employing the comparison and contrast technique, it should be recognised that accurate and fair assessment is difficult, and mistakes can easily be made. Even when an examiner may be astute in awarding a particular grade, such as a Distinction or Credit, determining precisely where the paper falls within the Distinction standard may be difficult. While the examiner may be confidently able to place the paper in either the high end (80 to 84%) or the low end (75 to 79%) of the Distinction, it can be very difficult to determine whether a paper deserves either, for example, 75, 76, 77, 78 or 79%. Some examiners make a quick estimation and do not worry further about it, while others engage in a process of comparison and contrast. If three papers are deemed to deserve a Distinction and one is seen as a little better than another paper but not quite as good the other, then that paper will receive a grade of 78%, while the former will receive 77% and the latter 79%. This process of differentiation through comparison and contrast becomes more difficult when allocating Credits and Passes where there may be many more papers in each category. Students who later compare results among classmates may become aware of how easy it is for examiners to make mistakes when they notice that one paper that received 62% is noticeably better than another that received 64%. Since this problem is more prevalent among the lower grades, the trick is to achieve the merit and employ the psychological tactics necessary to escape that standard as soon as possible, which is the purpose of this book. Another dimension to the employment of comparison and contrast in assessment is when the examiner compares and contrasts the 28


student’s work to their perception of their own abilities. Students need to be aware that an educator’s perception of their own competence can influence their approach to assessment. We briefly noted this tendency earlier when we looked at lopsided criteriabased assessment. This tendency probably affects most examiners to some degree without them being fully conscious of it. It often determines whether an educator can be considered to be a ‘hard’ or ‘easy’ examiner. This situation is not dissimilar to the way that rugged individualists who struggled and succeeded in the ruthless free market tend to see this experience as a tonic from which everyone would benefit, and rate others by this standard, while those who find that environment daunting are inclined to value social welfare. Tough examiners are often those teachers who feel confident that they could consistently measure up to exacting criteria, so they expect the same from their students. Meanwhile, the easy examiners can include those who secretly feel unable to meet exacting criteria, so they assess in ways they wish they were assessed when they were at school, giving higher grades to students of roughly equivalent ability to themselves when they were young. This tendency of educators to compare and contrast their students to themselves is likely to be noticeably pronounced among the most inexperienced, such as recently appointed university tutors who may not have familiarised themselves adequately, or at all, with grading standards or criteria, so they use themselves as the yardstick to judge others. These tutors are selected from accomplished postgraduate students who are given the opportunity to earn some money and prepare themselves for a possible academic career. This means that they are selected from the most capable students whose educational experiences would be different from the majority. Consequently, if they judge their students’ papers against their own body of work they are likely to be tougher than many students would prefer or regard as reasonable. On the other hand, experienced lecturers are more likely to be easier examiners. They may have begun like the new tutors, but years of assessment experience have lowered their expectations, making them more realistic. Instead of assessing students against themselves, they assess them against their knowledge of the average 29


standard of thousands of past student papers. Nevertheless, some experienced lecturers may be tough examiners. Not only do they perceive themselves as able to meet exacting standards, they care deeply about standards and they seek to uphold the value of university qualifications. While some students may find it opportune to select tutorials headed by tutors or lecturers who will be easy examiners, it can be more beneficial in the long run to be assessed by examiners who care deeply about standards and to make it your aim to measure up to them. Using the methods in this book you have choices; you can do what it takes to measure up to the standards demanded by tough examiners or sidestep these educators for tactical reasons, if you have the opportunity to select your tutorials and therefore the tutor or lecturer who will be your principal examiner.

The impact of context on assessment While looking at the impact of comparison and contrast, we briefly touched upon the influence of context on assessment. However, there is more to this important concept that deserves our attention so we will examine it in more detail as to how it affects how you and your work are perceived by your examiners and what you can do to use this knowledge to your advantage. Many people who are seeking to persuade others overlook the impact of context in shaping people’s perceptions and opinions. Context shapes perception and therefore influences opinion. Put another way, I am referring to the way things can be perceived differently depending on the context in which they are encountered. For example, a neat pile of bricks on the pavement is a neat pile of bricks on the pavement. But if it was placed in an art gallery, it can become a conceptual work of minimalist art. Alternatively, I once visited an art gallery where I saw a pile of chairs and boxes in the corner of a temporarily unused but open exhibition room. Interestingly, I noticed that a sign had been politely placed on the pile cautioning visitors that this was not an exhibit. It wasn’t. It was simply a pile of chairs and boxes. However, because it was in an exhibition space some people had obviously gathered around it and discussed its merits as a work of art, hence the polite warning sign. Their mistake is a reminder of the power of context. 30


While at school, no matter how talented you may be, you are perceived as a student and your work is perceived as schoolwork, which means it is not perceived by your teachers in the same way as they would look at published material, especially that by well-known or renowned authors. When a teacher reads the work of a well-known or renowned author, especially one whose work is prescribed for study by higher educational authorities, the teacher will often be intimidated by the text. They will feel obliged to look for the merit in this work even if this is not immediately apparent to them and it takes repeated efforts. If they do not understand its meaning, they will blame themselves and feel inadequate. By contrast, if they do not understand the work of a student, they will blame the student, not themselves. Moreover, without being aware that they are doing so, many may go further and assume that there is nothing sophisticated or profound to find in student work so they will be oblivious to the possibility of it being there. What they do not expect to see, of course, they do not see. I would suggest that it is possible that if a lesser known work of a renowned author was covertly submitted as student work to an unsuspecting teacher it may risk being awarded only a ‘C’, while if a competent piece of student writing was published and first encountered by the teacher as a set text for study, the teacher would go out of their way to find merit in it and praise it to the utmost. What this teacher would have done if they first encountered this student’s work as schoolwork would be another matter. One of my very capable year 12 students who was doing Legal Studies had been taught a profound legal argument by his father, who was a distinguished magistrate, to aid him in completing an assignment. Despite the impressive quality of this material, it was not appreciated by the teacher. However, I would suggest that if this student’s father had visited his son’s school as a guest lecturer, his Legal Studies teacher would have enthusiastically taken note of every word of the same material had it come from the mouth of a magistrate and not first been seen in a student’s assignment. For many accomplished parents who have helped their talented children with their homework, now you may have a greater understanding why the results may not have been what you both hoped for. 31


One of the most frustrating dimensions of my work as a private tutor has been to help talented students to produce some sophisticated writing or analysis only to see it misunderstood, unappreciated and unjustly rewarded by the teacher. What was sad for me was sadder for my students. However, there are means to fight back, and we do. Talented students may need to adjust their expectations regarding the degree of recognition they can receive in the context of school assignments and exams. They may either ‘dumb down’ their work or simply conform to the stereotypes that teachers prefer to reward almost without thinking, which are the easier options; or they can attempt to change the context in which their work is perceived, which is the trickier option. Provided your teacher is not unconvincingly narrow-minded regarding their concept of the right answer, you can announce to your teacher when you commence the project that you are attempting something special, such as an essay that communicates at a number of levels of discourse by using analogies, motifs, signifiers and symbols, then keep them up to date with your progress. This briefing can help to alter the context in which the teacher perceives your work, alerting them to expect something different while tactfully including them in the process. The key to this strategy is to make the teacher feel as if your accomplishments are due to their teaching, so they will feel a sense of ownership of your success, despite the fact that you may have, unknown to them, consulted others, such as expert parents or a private tutor. In this more advantageous context, you are likely to be rewarded because when the teacher rewards you they are also, indirectly, rewarding themselves. Fortunately, the situation at high school, where the power of context usually works against talented students being appreciated for producing sophisticated work, changes noticeably at university, and it is not surprising that many talented students who went through high school under-appreciated find greater recognition and flourish at university. While some undergraduate assignments can provide talented students with the opportunity to be creative, the most ideal context for them to be appreciated is postgraduate study, where insight and sophistication are expected and therefore more likely to be rewarded. However, if you suspect that the power of context may work against your lecturer 32


or tutor appreciating your efforts, you can adopt one of the above recommendations to assist high school students.

The impact of ideology on assessment In addition to context, ideology also shapes perception. People tend to see what they want or expect to see. This is as true for examiners as for anyone else. I have already pointed out to you that the exploitation of an educator’s bias by reflecting it in your work provides immense opportunities for receiving high grades. It is like ripe fruit there for the picking. Although I have already discussed elements of this when I explained, in Volume 1, the effect of ideology on creating either a critical or non-critical frame of mind in an examiner, I would now like to deepen your understanding by explaining additional effects that it has on assessment. People, including educators, tend to be primed to question what conflicts with their ideology and accept what conforms to it. Ideology shapes perception, especially perceptions of proportion and quality. Many times when helping my students I have noticed that, for example, a politically correct teacher who fervently supports, for example, multiculturalism will often appreciatively accept without question virtually any argument and evidence that seemed favourable to multiculturalism, but severely query even the slightest thing that could be interpreted as detrimental. Ideology influences people’s perceptions of proportion. It is one thing to notice a pebble on a beach, and another to notice it in your shoe. This can mean that if the student’s work has some problems but is in accordance with the examiner’s ideology, these problems have to be reasonably significant before they are noticed and quite significant before they are penalised, and even then they will probably be penalised less than would comparatively minor errors in work regarded as politically incorrect. Ideological affinity can work like insulation against close critical scrutiny because it can have the practical effect of concealing mistakes and minimising the penalties for error. However, this insulation is not failsafe. So rather than treat ideological affinity as a deterrent against critical scrutiny, instead pragmatically treat the prospect of 33


receiving less critical scrutiny as a beneficial side effect, because the degree to which scrutiny will be reduced usually cannot be predicted or guaranteed. Nevertheless, despite some uncertainty in the variation of the degree of critical scrutiny that may be received, it is the case that those students who exhibit an ideological affinity with their examiners will receive an easier ride than otherwise. Now that you are aware of this tendency, not only will you notice it in the assessment of essays, you will see it everywhere. It is frequently evident in book reviews, film reviews as well as in political commentary and analysis. For example, when politically correct reviewers review agreeably politically correct books, little mistakes are often ignored or marginalised and excused, while for politically incorrect texts, little mistakes (real or perceived) are treated as if they characterise the quality of the entire work, justifying severe criticism or condemnation. Meanwhile, any virtues are played down or overlooked. You will see this behavioural pattern again and again because of the power of ideology to shape perceptions of proportion and quality.

The chattering classes and the whispering classes When discussing the effects of ideology, I have highlighted political correctness as I have done previously because it constitutes the dominant or hegemonic ideology in most parts of the education system in Australia, as it is in other parts of the Western world. When you encounter the effects of ideology in the education system during this period in history, they are more likely to be due to political correctness. However, the same tendency to question what conflicts with their ideology and to accept what conforms to it is also observable among the minority of educators who subscribe to different ideologies, the politically incorrect, or those whom I describe as belonging to the ‘whispering classes’. The politically correct numerically and ideologically dominate the education system, the arts, the media, and they are more likely to be employed in the public sector, but they constitute a minority in the overall population. They have been facetiously nicknamed by their critics the ‘chattering classes’, because of their taste for conversation 34


where they happily expound their beliefs, reputedly over Chardonnay or caffe latte, to the like-minded. Following this theme, I have named the ideological dissenters in the same sections of society the whispering classes. This is because they have witnessed the boldest of their ranks venture forth to challenge the politically correct in the public arena only to receive a torrent of vilification and persecution until they were marginalised or silenced. In addition to observing these periodic public spectacles in horror, the politically incorrect may have experienced similarly unpleasant encounters with the politically correct to those more famous examples that attracted the media spotlight. Consequently, the politically incorrect usually choose to play it safe and keep many of their beliefs secret, revealing them only to the most trusted, hence the appropriateness of the term whispering classes. Students can benefit from this ideological divide. If you suspect that your educator is a member of the whispering classes, they may be even more appreciative of students who show an ideological affinity with them than the politically correct educators can be. The politically correct educators, who are often stridently confident due to their ideological domination of most of the education system, can take it for granted that students would or should agree with them. Meanwhile, the politically incorrect educators can be so grateful for student allies that they readily reward apparent affinity in grades.

Irrationality in assessment Although you may be thinking that the strategy of reflecting the educator’s ideological bias in your work constitutes sound advice, you may be curious as to what you can do when their bias is difficult to determine or when the topic does not seem noticeably ideological enough to lend itself to this kind of treatment. Be reassured, an effective solution is at hand. You apply the principle of polarity aversion and then strategically adopt the middle ground or compromise position. In Volume 1, when we looked at the analogy of the ‘black shoe’, we noted how many teachers tend to assess students’ work by judging it against their own concept of the right answer (which can sometimes be one that ignores several other legitimate options or it may even 35


be the wrong answer). They then rate the student’s work according to whether it corresponds or deviates from this yardstick; the closer it corresponds, the higher the grade awarded. This means that to do well with a teacher who adopts this approach to assessment, students need to mimic the teacher’s understanding of the right answer. That approach is straightforward, but only if you know your teacher’s concept of the right answer. The attractiveness of the principle of polarity aversion is that it can, in the absence of an obvious ideological explanation, help you to determine how a number of teachers reach what they perceive to be the right answer, allowing you to predict it and therefore mimic it. This principle is especially relevant to how they take positions on topics about which they are not expert or know little, which may include a debate about a current event. I have noticed a tendency in human nature that is repeatedly evident among teachers. When they look at an unfamiliar issue where there is a debate between two apparently extreme positions or polarities, they frequently seek the middle ground (except, of course, when their ideology biases them towards one of the extremes). Similarly, when presented with a choice between two extremes and a middle option, they tend more often to choose this middle option. What I suspect, after many years of observation, is that the thought processes involved in their decisions are more intuitive than rational in most but not all instances. It is analogous to being worried about a crooked picture frame on a wall until it is straightened rather than being a process involving systematic reasoning. What the teacher would probably quietly think to himself, when faced with either of these scenarios, is that the two extremes cannot be right because they are so far apart, so the truth must reside somewhere in the middle. Meanwhile, their process of reaching a compromise, I suspect, is only slightly more rational. Although they would assume that each extreme position cannot be right, they would also assume that each position must have some merit otherwise it would not command any support, yet the distance between these positions bothers them. This is resolved by a synthesis of their preferred elements from each position, which is something that resembles a compromise that is considered to occupy the middle ground. 36


The adoption of the middle ground is a psychologically comforting decision, although the way it is reached is often somewhat irrational, yet it will not remotely seem that way to the teacher. For example, imagine a choice between three options: 1+1=2, 1+1=3, and 1+1=4. The tendency to polarity aversion would nominate the second option, 1+1=3, as the ‘right’ answer. It is not. The rational response would be to rate each option individually according to its merits rather than according to a comparative process involving an aversion to polarities. In addition to the chance that one of the extremes is the right option, one should appreciate that sometimes the middle option may be the right option, or there may be several right options, or several partially right options, or no right option. As I said, although irrational, in part or in full, this approach to making a choice between options does not seem that way to the person. It seems like the intelligent or respectable person’s response, partly because it also seems to conform to, or be rationalised by, ethical notions of fairness or democratic sensibilities. Now that you are aware of the tendency towards polarity aversion, you can probably recall many occasions when your teachers have recommended the middle ground or a compromise position. What is so delightful about this predisposition is its predictability and consequently its exploitability. Quite a number of my students’ ‘As’ have been largely, or partly, due to their capitalisation on this psychological tendency among their examiners. Here is a typical example involving one of my year 12 English students who employed the polarity aversion strategy after I taught it to her. The class had been asked to present an argument on a current issue of public debate selected by the teacher. Following the strategy, my student deliberately adopted the middle ground or compromise position. She made this clear in her introduction, even using the word ‘compromise’ when she stated her contention. She was slightly anxious, as some students tend to be when they have tried something new. I reassured her that everything would be fine. The polarity aversion strategy is won or lost when the teacher reads the introduction. This is the crucial moment. At our lesson after when my student’s paper had been assessed and returned, I remember reading it. 37


At the end of the introduction to the essay, the teacher had commented, ‘Good, contention clear and shows awareness of issue’s complexities’. Wonderful, I thought, the teacher had obviously taken the bait. After that, I just followed the trail of ticks to the end of the essay to learn my student’s result, an ‘A–A+’. The teacher’s final comment confirmed the role of the polarity aversion strategy in my student’s success: ‘A very reasonable and well-developed argument that takes it beyond a simple “either/or” proposition, yet still has a strong contention’. Bull’s eye! It was a perfect outcome. The teacher was happy. My student was happy. Everybody was happy, which is the way I like it. My student chalked up another ‘A’ on her way to her goal to qualify to study Law at university, which she did. In addition to helping with assigned essays, the polarity aversion strategy is very helpful in exams when the examiners are unknown to the students and their ideologically preferred response to the question may not be apparent. Just adopt the middle ground or compromise position and the examiners will probably perceive you as clever and thoughtful, just as they perceive themselves. On the other hand, by not adopting the polarity aversion strategy, students risk producing answers that resemble one of the polarities to which teachers may be adverse. One of the beauties of this and other similar study skills is that not only do they work, they will work over and over again, allowing you to profit from the psychological vulnerabilities of each examiner instead of risking becoming a casualty of them. Most academics are far less prone to intuitive or irrational thinking than most teachers. Therefore, at university a more systematic and fundamentally rational variation of the polarity aversion principle needs to be applied. For example, if you have to assess the viability of several competing theories, in the absence of the examiner having a preferred theory or their own published theory, some sort of synthesis (or compromise) is very popular among academics and is often the kind of response that is most rewarded. However, in these essays, you will need to demonstrate sound reasons for this synthesis that are related to an analysis of the intrinsic merits or limitations of each theory. In some theoretically focused university subjects, such as Sociology or Cultural Studies, an appreciation of the polarity aversion principle expressed 38


in the form of a theoretical synthesis may constitute a component of most essays submitted.

Textbook conformity and assessment Another form of narrow-mindedness that affects assessment is the tendency of some teachers to derive their concept of the right answer exclusively from the set textbook as if it is the only source of wisdom in that subject, assessing students’ answers solely according to the degree to which they conform to what is in it, the greater the conformity, the higher the grade. This is a tendency that I have observed in a wide range of subjects, such as Politics and Economics. Reliance on a sound textbook is not necessarily a bad thing. With some teachers, their solid understanding of an insightful and comprehensive textbook is an expression of their professional competence, and it is a very worthy attribute. In these classrooms, to a significant degree, the set textbook teaches the students while the teacher facilitates this process. The achievement of high grades in subjects organised on this basis becomes a routine process of using the textbook to diligently answer a succession of short-answer and essay questions. Problems can potentially arise when the set textbook is of a poor standard, which, regrettably, can happen. This situation transforms some of those teachers who unquestioningly rely on this textbook into the (unwitting) enforcers of what is, on occasions, problematic or erroneous knowledge. However, if the students rely on this textbook as heavily as their teacher does, any problems in its factual content or analysis are unlikely to be detected in this quarantined incubator of a study environment. While a poor quality textbook creates problems in terms of the quality of the education received in this course, it does not necessarily present problems in the pursuit of high grades since a wrong answer is likely to be rewarded as if it is a right answer if it is what the teacher perceives to be the right answer. However, problems in the pursuit of high grades can potentially arise when curious students who are eager for enlightenment inquire beyond the set textbook, only to find their teacher acting as an obstacle to this quest for knowledge by penalising answers that differ from the material routinely derived 39


from the set textbook. Of course, not all teachers are like this, but a surprising number are, and in their classes intellectual inquiry beyond the set textbook, despite its intrinsic educational value, is counterproductive in the pursuit of high grades. When I began working as a private tutor while completing my postgraduate studies, I was initially confronted by this dilemma when I first started helping several students in year 12 Politics. Concerned that the set textbook was analytically shallow at best and in error at worst, I sought to compensate by introducing my students to several perceptive texts written by masterful academics, some of whom had been my lecturers during my undergraduate studies. Encouragingly, these texts were listed in the official curriculum study design as suitable additional reading for year 12 Politics. Furthermore, I shared insights with my students drawn from my own Doctoral research into the democratic system of government and the public policy process, which were derived from my interviews with, and access to the personal papers of, former prime ministers, ministers, departmental secretaries, and interest group leaders. My students revelled in this knowledge, but not their teachers when it was later expressed in my students’ essays. After all, it was not in the set textbook. Their initial essay drafts were assessed lower than they would have been had they simply paraphrased the set textbook, a process that required far less effort and intellectual rigour. From this disappointing experience, my students and I learnt much about the nature of the education system and what is required of students to succeed in it. I did not make the same mistake again. These early private tutoring experiences helped to crystallise my awareness that receiving ‘As’ is primarily about persuasion, so with these Politics teachers, as with any teachers, we had to determine the most effective means to persuade them and apply it. For students of mine who encounter this kind of teacher, I still work towards developing in them a sophisticated knowledge of their subjects so they graduate with a good education, but we keep it for ourselves and the externally assessed final exam, while for answers to be assessed by this kind of teacher we rely on the set textbook, and do extremely well. 40


Assessment manipulated to discipline or motivate Sometimes the assessment process has less to do with what was written on the student’s paper and more to do with the educator’s approach to motivating or disciplining students or to the relationship between the educator and the student. There is also the temptation among many educators to reward those students whom they perceive as deserving even when this judgment of the student’s attitude does not perfectly correlate with the quality of the student’s essays. This factor can influence many educators to at least some degree, while with some it can be the principal basis upon which they assess. To fully benefit from this tendency, at the beginning of the academic year you should adopt the kind of persona that educators prefer to reward, that of the keen, diligent, capable student or the ‘chip off the old block’, so they are only too pleased to reward you for ‘effort’. In addition, you should avoid penalties that may be meted out for submitting work late, by starting your assignments as soon as possible and organising yourself to complete them within the available time. If you encounter delays, make sure that you employ effective excuse or permission letters (explained in Volume 1) to keep your examiner sympathetic and unlikely to penalise. In addition, in many university subjects, ten per cent of the final grade can be set aside for ‘tutorial attendance’. In reality, the allocation of this ten per cent often has much less to do with attendance than it has to do with a reward for those students who present the appropriate persona and whom are perceived by the tutor as deserving. This ten per cent affords the tutor the power to play God, being enough to push a student from a Pass to a Credit or from a Credit to a Distinction. It is therefore in your interests to appear to be deserving. So, if your exam paper was near the border just below a Distinction, your tutor can use his discretionary ten per cent to push you successfully over the line.

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Handling different assessment systems Autonomous single examiner By far the majority of assessment at school and university involves a single examiner who is usually the teacher or lecturer or tutor who conducts the class or tutorial attended by the student. In this situation, the examiner is autonomous and therefore not accountable for assessment decisions, so to be consistently rewarded with high grades, students need to construct their essays to suit this examiner in regards to their biases, values and understanding of the topics. The realities of the assessment process and the corresponding techniques to effectively deal with them that I have shared with you should help you considerably in this typical assessment context. However, there are other assessment scenarios. Although these techniques will be just as helpful in these less-often encountered circumstances, sometimes they may require tactical adjustments so you can triumphantly handle every assessment situation you may face. External double assessment External double assessment is often used to assess final or university entrance exams. It involves the students’ exam papers being assessed by two examiners who come from outside the students’ school. In addition, these examiners, who are drawn from the pool of teachers, do not know each other. Nor do they know the students who are identified only by an examination number. Consequently, each party involved remains anonymous. If these examiners’ assessments differ significantly, a third examiner, often the chief examiner, who is usually expert on the subject and examination practice, will intervene to resolve the difference by providing a third assessment. This system usually produces the fairest and most accurate assessment you will ever have at high school. It also presents students with the greatest opportunity to be appreciated primarily for merit, provided it is expressed within the parameters of the prevailing ideology in the education system, which for most subjects and most teachers at this time in history is political correctness. 42


When facing external double assessment in exams, those competent, capable students who have competent, knowledgeable teachers just need to repeat their successful classroom strategies to again succeed in the exams. However, those students who have a teacher with a noticeably idiosyncratic understanding of the topic, especially one that is problematic or erroneous, using the material learnt in class that brought high grades with that teacher can be dangerous in the final exams because this problematic or erroneous material is likely to be noticed and penalised. In this circumstance, the strategies that brought success with one teacher in one examination system will need to be changed to succeed in another system. One of the keys to the success of my students is their versatility. They win consistently, not because they perform in the same fashion all the time but because they can produce different answers on the same topics for different examiners and examination systems. Thoughtful systematic preparation is required to bring about these very achievable feats of scholastic virtuosity. Firstly, students need to carefully prepare their topics to achieve a solid understanding by using several quality sources, beginning with the prescribed textbooks but also using additional insightful texts, and, perhaps, the expertise of a private tutor. This material becomes your master notes. Meanwhile, you need to simultaneously gather another set of notes by recording as much as you can of your teacher’s lessons in class. This material becomes your supplementary notes. For many internally assessed assignments, you would use your master notes supplemented by your class notes. However, if you believe that the sophisticated material in your master notes may not be appreciated by your teacher, and may even be penalised if the teacher’s understanding of the topic is particularly idiosyncratic and they are inclined to prefer to see their opinions reflected back in their students’ work, then you shift to predominantly using your supplementary (class) notes, perhaps complementing them, from time to time, with relevant material from your master notes if you believe it will profitably enhance your answer. After impressing your class teacher in the manner he likes to be impressed, for the external double assessment at the end-of-the-year exams, you drop the supplementary (class) notes and rely on your master notes to produce another winning performance. 43


The scholastic triumphs of some of my most successful students have been because, when writing on the same topic, they produced one answer for their class teacher and later a different one for the externally assessed final exam. The former being crafted to reflect the idiosyncratic understanding of their class teacher, and the latter being intended to maximise reward for merit. This versatility was the decisive factor in their success across both assessment scenarios. When faced with a teacher who just doesn’t ‘get it’, I advise my students to not complain, but just diligently employ a different strategy. For example, several of my year 12 English students had to study Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, which presents a left-wing antiAmerican critique of the US government’s foreign policy, especially the covert operations of the CIA in South-East Asia during the Cold War. To prepare them, we closely examined the novel and, while doing so, I taught them about communism, capitalism, imperialism, neo-imperialism, the Cold War, the CIA and covert operations, the emergence of the post-colonial Third World, the Vietnam War, and the relevant concepts of realpolitik and utilitarianism. In addition, we looked at the nature of war correspondence and journalistic ethics, the protests against US involvement in Vietnam, the counter-culture, existentialism, pacifism, the relevant notion of political commitment, the use of political allegory, the text’s commentary on the problems and paradoxes of romantic relationships, as well as the background of the author, among many other things. Many teachers are impressed when my students have incorporated this kind of material into sophisticated answers, but not all of them. One teacher, who was one of the school’s senior English teachers and its year 12 coordinator, dogmatically insisted that The Quiet American was an oriental love story, and that was that. Yes, the novel has a romantic sub-theme, which my students and I examined both for what it says about the nature of love and as a political allegory, but it is only a sub-theme. The book is primarily political in its content and objectives. Even the love story contributes to that. However, this teacher was not interested in any of the political content, most of which, I suspect, she probably did not detect. More importantly, she refused to entertain any other point of view. It makes perfect sense 44


for students who encounter this kind of teacher to tell them what they want to hear, score high grades, and move on to the next challenge, which is exactly what my students do in these circumstances. For my student who had this teacher, Greene’s novel was an oriental love story, but for the externally assessed final exam, he argued that it was primarily a critique of US foreign policy in Indochina during the Cold War. Many of my students have had spectacular success in externally assessed exams by presenting sophisticated material that was initially not appreciated by their class teacher. One of the reasons why merit is more likely to be rewarded with external double assessment is that the context changes in which the ideas in the student’s paper are assessed. Although the unseen external examiners are drawn from the pool of teachers, some of whom may be those who insist that their students’ work reflect the understanding of the topic taught in class, many of them seem to modify their expectations under the changed circumstances of this different assessment system. While the assessments of the most narrow-minded teachers can be overridden by the safety mechanisms of the second examiner or third (chief) examiner, other teachers who are narrow-minded in class are more likely to reward answers different to their own concept of the right answer when serving as an external assessor. This welcome shift in attitude is probably because when they encounter different approaches from students whom they do not know and did not teach, they assume that the teacher who taught these students taught them differently, and they are inclined to respect the differing approaches of fellow teachers. However, if they had encountered these different perspectives while assessing assignments from the students in their class, it would have been interpreted as mistaken or disrespectful and penalised. Some of my students, who appreciate the need for game playing to achieve ‘As’ but crave the opportunity to be rewarded primarily for merit, relish the opportunity provided by the external double assessment system used in their final exams as an opportunity to be more sincere in their answers, which they can do as long as they stay within the parameters of the prevailing curriculum bias of political correctness. 45


Internal double assessment Some schools have a system of internal double assessment, where the papers from one teacher’s class are first assessed by that teacher then sent to another who cross-marks them. This scenario seems, at face value, to be a worthy attempt to create a fairer and more scrupulous system, like that produced by external double assessment. In practice, there are variations between schools regarding the rigour with which this system is applied, and these differences can produce significantly different assessment scenarios that require different strategies to effectively deal with them. However, in most (but not all) circumstances, I have found that internal double assessment usually produces results that are virtually no different to assessment by a single examiner, the class teacher, with this probably being the consequence of the way this assessment system is applied. As you will recall, I advise students to produce answers that are tuned into the expectations of their class teacher (who is their examiner) in accordance with the psychological profile that they compiled at the beginning of the academic year for this purpose. I advise my students to reflect their teacher’s bias, values and understanding of the topic. I advise them to do this even if, indeed especially if, the teacher’s understanding of the topic is flawed, marginally or significantly, which is the worst case scenario, and my student is effectively submitting a somewhat incorrect answer in order to be rewarded by this teacher. Nevertheless, some of my students who face this worst case scenario can be understandably concerned by the idea of internal double assessment, suggesting to me that if they write their teacher’s idiosyncratic or erroneous answer, which is of course assumed by their class teacher to be the right answer, they risk being caught and penalised by the second examiner. However, the likelihood of this presenting a problem depends on the rigour with which this assessment system is applied. I have observed that with astounding regularity, the presence of a second assessor appears to validate the class teacher’s original assessments of his students’ papers, even though we know that different teachers’ assessments of the same paper can potentially vary widely. This pattern is usually so predictable that I instruct most of my students in schools that use the system of internal double assessment 46


to proceed with their strategies to achieve ‘As’ as if their paper was graded by their class teacher alone. When you are selecting your strategy for success, it is more advantageous to act upon what is probable rather than merely possible. However, if you can also acknowledge the possible along with the probable, you may strengthen your strategy. Consequently, if a student is particularly concerned because his teacher’s understanding of the topic is so disturbingly erroneous, I advise the student to still reflect their class teacher’s understanding of the topic in their answer but modify it to a point where the most potentially troublesome elements are left out or are less pronounced. Nevertheless, the pattern of results often produced by internal double assessment, which usually resembles what would happen with assessment by a class teacher alone, does not happen with external double assessment. There is a striking contrast. At first taken by surprise by this phenomenon, I was initially sceptical as to whether a second assessment really happened when it is organised internally in schools. Perhaps it was a bluff. It would be easy to fake. I suspect this happens on at least some occasions. The internal double assessment system can potentially double a teacher’s workload in precisely the responsibility that many teachers find most burdensome. Moreover, they would also know that the grading system is not as dependent on the second assessment as it is on the first, so even if they closely scrutinised the papers submitted by their own class, they would know that the world would continue to turn if they paid far less attention to the second assessment of the papers from another teacher’s class. After all, the papers had already been graded by another professional. Another reason for this pattern of results could be that the first assessment by the class teacher, if known to the second assessor, prejudices their subsequent assessment, to have the effect of anchoring their judgment to be at, or very close to, the grade already provided. If the first assessment is a high grade, the second assessor finds himself encouraged to see the paper in positive terms as well, which would not have happened if the first assessor’s judgment was unknown to the second assessor. Another possible reason for this phenomenon also stems from the fact that the system of internal double assessment 47


is done inside the school so the teachers involved know each other. These teachers are peers, fellow professionals. They would probably be as reluctant to interfere in the way another teacher handles their class as they would want that teacher to interfere with their work. Mutual respect and a reluctance to trespass may make teachers hesitant to radically disagree with or attempt to override the judgment of a peer. If they consistently notice the presence in these papers of different material to that taught in their own class, they may more respectfully attribute this to the different perspective of the other teacher who taught these students rather than to the shortcomings of the students. In a number of schools the internal double assessment system is organised more rigorously so the second examiner does not know the assessment of the previous examiner, yet papers that cater to the idiosyncratic understanding of the class teacher still tend to be highly rewarded. I believe this is due to the traditional practice in the internal double assessment system that the highest of the two assessments becomes the grade that is awarded, so the class teacher’s assessment, which is under these circumstances the most likely of the two to be the highest, effectively cancels out the other assessment. I suspect this simple reason to be the prevalent factor that most often compromises the degree of additional scrutiny that most students expect this crossmarking to produce. Only in the schools that ensure that the class teacher is not one of the two internal examiners does the internal double assessment system produce the more scrupulous circumstances that come closer to resembling those of external double assessment. Of course, in this very different situation, the strategy of reflecting the idiosyncratic understanding of the class teacher would be counterproductive and should not be used. Instead, adopt a strategy more suited to succeed in a system of external double assessment. It is crucial that you find out the relevant details of the examination system in your school so you can determine the appropriate strategy to succeed.

Assessment systems for Honours, Masters or Doctoral theses Those students who complete an Honours, Masters or Doctoral thesis will encounter yet another examination system, a notoriously scrupulous 48


one that is also potentially the fairest a student can receive at university or anywhere else in the education system. A thesis is submitted in multiple copies; one copy is stored in the departmental or faculty library, while two copies are sent to the examiners. For an Honours thesis, the two examiners are usually from the same university department as the student, only sometimes being from another university, while for a Masters or Doctoral thesis, the examiners have to be from other universities to that of the student. If the assessments of the two examiners are perceived as too far apart, a third examiner can be consulted. What is unique about this system of assessment is that the examiners are selected by the student’s supervisor, who chooses them according to their expertise and perceived lack of prejudicial bias. Moreover, the student has the right to veto the choice of an examiner whom the student perceives to be insufficiently expert or biased and potentially unfair. These concerns are, of course, some of the major potential problems involving assessment that can affect students everywhere at all levels in the education system yet, for the assessment of theses, these are the only occasions when the potential for a lack of competence or bias to compromise the accuracy or fairness of a grade is sufficiently officially acknowledged. More importantly, safety mechanisms are included in the system to protect students from unfair treatment and to maximise the opportunity for assessment to be primarily based on merit. Rather than you having to tune into the bias of an examiner and shape the content of your work accordingly, examiners can be selected who are tuned into you. For some students, this is profoundly liberating. However, students should not take it for granted that fair and accurate assessment is guaranteed. Some supervisors, despite their best intentions, can make mistakes in their selections. To ensure against this, students will need to compile psychological profiles of potential examiners by looking up and checking their publications in the university library and by asking other academics about them to determine their appropriateness, and students must not be afraid to use their veto if necessary. That is why you have it.

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Lobbying for higher grades Many students do not realise that if you have received an unfairly low grade for an essay, all is not lost. It is possible to lobby for higher grades. At university, more so than at school, it is possible to lobby for a reassessment of an unjustly graded paper if you are confident you have a reasonable case for a second assessment. At school, lobbying for a reassessment is more difficult but not impossible. Despite this, it is much more possible to lobby to position yourself for a favourable assessment on your next assignment, which can be granted as a form of compensation. For some of you, this will be wonderful news. Since it is possible to lobby for higher grades, you do not have to settle for less than you deserve. Many students are unaware of the opportunity to lobby so they accept an unjust grade as a regrettable fact of university life. I was originally one of them. Then I realised towards the end of my undergraduate course that this did not have to be the case. I tactfully and respectfully lobbied my professor for one of my final essays to be reassessed. He agreed, and consequently I received a higher grade. You will discover that a surprising number of lecturers are happy to reassess submitted work or to organise another examiner to provide a second opinion. However, bear in mind that they are more likely to go out of their way for students whom they regard as deserving, whom they know to be hard-working and ambitious, just like they were when they were students. Many lecturers have a genuine interest in fairness and a reluctance to upset the progress of a capable student. They may quietly recognise that the assessment process can produce errors and welcome the reassessment of your paper as an opportunity to correct one of them. Lobbying for higher grades can be done at school, but it is more difficult. Although there are exceptions, many teachers tend to be more authoritarian in their attitude to their students than lecturers generally tend to be, so a higher degree of tact is required when dealing with them. If you believe that you received a grade that was less than you deserved, it is crucial that you avoid a confrontation that will only make the situation worse. Wait until you are calm and no longer 50


upset or angry. This is because your manner and choice of words will be crucial to your success. Do not confront your teacher by saying something like the following: ‘Why did you give me such a low grade?’ This form of words will only force them to think of justifications for their previous negative opinion. Even if they realise they were unfair, to avoid losing face they are unlikely to admit it when challenged in this confrontational manner. They are not accountable to anyone for the grades they award, so they know they can get away with giving you any excuse they think of at that moment, no matter how trivial or irrelevant it may seem, which is precisely what they are inclined to do to end this awkward uncomfortable confrontational situation. These encounters usually only leave the student frustrated and the teacher resentful about being challenged over his decision, with this soured relationship potentially having additional negative repercussions for the student in the future. Instead, there is a much smarter approach. Ask the teacher something like the following: ‘What did you like about my essay that I can build constructively upon in the future?’ This form of words will force them to think about the merits of your work and have positive thoughts about you. It is more likely to bring out the benevolent side of their nature. Your choice of language and polite respectful tone will be the key to your success. Your words must be calculated to subtly remind them of the virtues of your work, which will in turn encourage them to think quietly to themselves that their original negative assessment may have been hasty. Do not expect the teacher to declare these thoughts openly. In fact, it is better for you that they do not. You need to give the teacher the opportunity to change his mind without appearing to lose face. What you want is the teacher to respond by coming up with several positive things to say about your essay, which means you have advantageously positioned him for you to politely suggest that in the light of these positive aspects, the essay may be worth a little more. This approach will substantially improve your chances of receiving a positive reassessment. However, even if you do not achieve this, you will find that you have probably positioned yourself to receive favourable treatment with your next essay as a form of compensation. Many teachers prefer the latter response, secretly 51


fearing that if they grant a reassessment to one student, they may all seek reassessments. However, if they grant a concerned student a better grade on their next assignment, they feel they have helped this deserving student while avoiding establishing a precedent for allowing everyone a reassessment. In this manner, you can profit from the teacher’s autonomy and lack of accountability instead of suffering from it. The teacher did not have to answer to anyone for his original decision, nor does he have to if he changes his mind. Aware of this, you can apply some subtle psychology to make sure that this prerogative works in your favour.

Breaking out of a categorisation created by the teacher’s prejudice Sometimes a lower than deserved grade has little or nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the student’s essay. Some teachers ‘pigeon hole’ students, classifying them, for example, as a ‘B’ student at the outset of the school year then continually award them ‘Bs’ regardless of improvements in the quality of their work. When I discover that one of my students is in this unfortunate situation, changing it becomes my priority because any improvement in merit is pointless in an environment where it will not be rewarded. This problem is not uncommon. Every year, I find that I need to show several students how to break out of what they initially believed was an inescapable trap. Furthermore, the study skill that I am about to share with you is so powerful that it does more than fix the situation. It reverses it, replacing an unfavourable prejudicial classification with a favourable one. Through this study skill, you are effectively following the empowering principle we learnt in Volume 1 of making your enemies your friends and your weaknesses your strengths. Here is an example of how it worked for one of my students and how it can work for you if you find yourself in a similar situation. My student was a bright, capable year 12 student who wanted to qualify to study Information Technology at university, a field in which he had a noticeable talent. Like some students are inclined to do, he had misbehaved in previous years and acquired a bad reputation among 52


the teaching staff. However, upon entering year 12, he had a new attitude. He was highly motivated and determined to succeed. From the outset, he buckled down to a disciplined study routine and hired a private tutor, myself, to help him in English, the subject that worried him most because he feared it could potentially lower his university entrance score and jeopardise his chances of achieving his dream. My student was intelligent and highly motivated, so the standard of his work improved quickly. His grades went up impressively in his subjects where the assessment process was more objective, such as in Mathematics. However, despite similar improvements in the quality of his work in English, where the assessment process is subjective, his initial grades were ‘Bs’, which was only marginally above what he had achieved in previous years. My student was puzzled and understandably worried. He felt he had been cut off at the pass and, in a sense, he was right. However, I understood what had happened and what we needed to do to transform the situation to, in effect, reopen the pass. My student believed that motivation and intelligence were all that it takes to succeed. I explained to him that, generally, he is right, but they will not be enough to prevail in a prejudicial environment, which had to be transformed so his motivation and intelligence could bring him the high grades he currently deserved. To determine our strategy, we analysed the dynamics of his classroom and his relationship with his teacher. His teacher was very authoritarian and ruthlessly unappreciative of students whose views differed from his own. He also played favourites, favouring a couple of capable students along with several boys who were the school’s sports stars. My student was not an athlete. Although he was a capable student, he was not seen that way by his teacher. In addition, my student had been taught by this teacher before, during one of the years when he had shown less interest in his studies, and the teacher’s impression of my student had formed then. It remained the same despite the improved quality of my student’s work and his diligence in class. However, it was crucial that my student join the ranks of this teacher’s favoured few. This was our objective. As the situation stood, this teacher constituted a formidable obstacle to my student’s success, one that could potentially prevent him from 53


achieving his dream. It was essential that my student transform his teacher from an obstacle into an agent of his success. I taught him how to do it. I instructed my student to make an appointment with his teacher where he could talk to him privately, one to one. I gave him a formula of words to say with all the sincere concern and respectfulness he could muster: I am in a difficult situation and I need your help. I am studying hard this year because I need a high score to qualify for [Information Technology], which is my dream. It’s a challenge, but I know that if I work hard I have a chance, but I need help and you are the only person who can help me succeed. My grade in [English] will be crucial. At the moment, I am receiving ‘Bs’. Can you please tell me what I need to do to improve from ‘Bs’ to achieve ‘As’? In addition, I told my student to listen carefully to the teacher’s instructions and thank him appreciatively. Then, as soon as he is out of the teacher’s sight, to write them down so he can later follow them to the letter. (By the way, by changing the words in the square brackets you can, of course, use this formula to deal with similar situations involving other subjects.) Although it is part of the strategy to put this advice to good use, the primary purpose of this strategy is to exert psychological influence rather than to learn study skills. What we needed to induce was an instruction, any instruction. The content of the teacher’s instruction is incidental, what matters is that you receive instructions on how to succeed from him. Remember, the objective is to transform the teacher into an agent of your success. The setting for the meeting is important. It must be reasonably quiet so there are few distractions so the teacher can focus on you. Meanwhile, the form of words that you use is crucial. I have crafted the above formula of words to induce the appropriate psychological responses in the teacher that we desire. It was devised in the understanding that many words have an emotional dimension to their meaning. To understand certain words, the audience to some degree relives the emotions associated with those words. In a very real sense, the audience feels these words to comprehend them. 54


Therefore, by using some words and avoiding others, you can craft your language to generate the emotional responses in your audience that are conducive to persuasion. Following this principle, our first purpose for this form of words was to transform the teacher’s feelings towards you so they are benevolent and caring, largely because you have singled yourself out in their eyes as someone who values and needs them. This notion is irresistibly flattering and endearing. It is related to the second purpose for this form of words, to link your teacher’s sense of self-esteem to your success, which of course, your teacher, as your examiner, is in the ideal position of authority to facilitate. Words like ‘dream’, ‘challenge’, ‘chance’ ‘improve’, ‘achieve’ and ‘succeed’ were chosen to generate the appropriately positive feelings while the key phrases of ‘I need your help’ and ‘you are the only person who can help me’ are intended to make the teacher feel valued and needed as a rescuer and to link the teacher’s corresponding positive feelings to his relationship with you and to the notion of your success. Remember, the teacher interprets the course, teaches the course, and assesses the course, so whatever recipe for success he gives you can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. He merely needs to see that you have followed his instructions to reward you, so he can believe in himself as a professional who gives sound advice that can turn around a student’s situation. What we are doing is deliberately capitalising upon the teacher’s ego and sense of professionalism or vocation. We are also capitalising upon his autonomy and lack of accountability rather than becoming a victim of them, which was previously the case. After that meeting with his teacher, my student experienced a revolutionary transformation in their relationship. His teacher took a special interest in him. After each assignment was handed out, he privately gave my student clear instructions on exactly how he wanted it completed. He even chose the topic for my student’s oral presentation and told him precisely what he wanted him to cover. My student followed his teacher’s instructions to the letter, even though the teacher’s understanding of some of the literature being studied was a little awry. It was evident that this teacher’s sense of self-esteem had become linked to the success of my student, which was exactly 55


what we wanted. It seemed like the teacher was reliving his scholastic endeavours through my student, only this time the results would be better. The teacher could see to that. As you can imagine, high results followed. My student’s grades shot up to ‘A+’ for all the work assessed by that teacher. My student was very pleased by these results, and they contributed to his achievement of his dream of qualifying to study Information Technology at university. A potential disaster had been averted, but there was another pleasing dimension to this happy ending. Meanwhile, that year his teacher achieved a comforting sense of job satisfaction. Consequently, everyone benefitted from this strategy. When applying this strategy, you need to acknowledge that a significant dimension of the problem of being trapped in the ‘B’ box by the prejudicial thinking of a teacher is that the real nature of this problem is imperceptible to the teacher, who would be confident that he is awarding the grade to the student that he deserves. Furthermore, in the teacher’s mind the student’s work improved after he gave the student additional instructions, not before. Only the student and I were aware of what had really happened, that the student’s work had improved before then but this improvement was not justly recognised. If you tried to reasonably explain the truth of the situation, the teacher would probably not believe you and your attempt could poison this crucial teacher-student relationship. Rather than challenge the teacher’s concept of himself as a competent professional, it is better to make him feel he is using his professional skills to rescue you from a predicament. The teacher does not need to know that this predicament was created by his prejudicial thinking. Just do what you have to do to get your ‘A’ and move on. In that way, you will both be happy. When I developed this study skill to address this future-threatening problem, which the afflicted students and their concerned parents believed was insoluble, I was initially surprised by the degree to which it works. It can be awesome to watch. Of all the study skills that I have developed, this one often produces the most profound gratitude from those who have used it.

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Transforming a hostile teacher into an ally A similar but worse form of prejudice than being trapped in the ‘B’ box happens when a teacher becomes hostile towards a student, awarding lower than deserved grades as an expression of antagonism. Understandably, the students in this grim situation, and their parents, become very concerned. Typically, their response is to endure. Sometimes the worried parents attempt to move the unfortunate student from one class to another. Unfortunately, these approaches often make the situation worse. Although most teachers would be reluctant to admit it, deep down they share an ‘us versus them’ attitude towards students, so when confronted by a complaining student (or his parents) they close ranks around the besieged fellow teacher. Too often the request to transfer to another class is rejected by a school principal, who usually recommends that the two conflicting parties resolve their differences, which in effect leaves the stigmatised student at the mercy of an even more resentful teacher. Moreover, if the student is transferred to another class, staffroom gossip can ensure that the student’s ‘bad reputation’ follows, and the new teacher-student relationship can be tainted before the student first steps into the new classroom in the hope of a fresh start. After considerable frustration and anguish, some parents eventually see no other solution but to send their child to another school. Although this can help, I have a far easier and more effective solution. What works to save students trapped in the ‘B’ box also works to save the victims of hostile teachers. It is far more constructive to make your enemies your friends and your weaknesses your strengths. The first step towards the positive transformation of the situation is to accept responsibility for it even though you may not be at fault. This can be difficult for some students, because of their understandable feelings of righteous anger over an injustice. Unfortunately, these feelings can only make the situation worse. However, if you accept responsibility for the situation you have given yourself the authority and responsibility to change it, and this attitude is truly empowering. Remember, your objective is to win at school, not to win the argument. It will help you to appreciate this strategy if you try to comprehend 57


the situation from the teacher’s perspective. I am sure you can recall occasions when you legitimately lost an argument but initially felt resentful rather than grateful for being corrected. Consequently, you will be able to imagine how the teacher can feel when challenged. Furthermore, when people in authority lose an argument their resentment can be magnified because they also fear that their muchvalued authority is threatened. You need to bear in mind that even those who seem to be the most confident of teachers secretly fear losing control of the class, and petty incidents of student misbehaviour can aggravate that fear. Consequently, you would have noticed that teachers often overreact to apparently minor breaches of discipline in ways that are disproportionate to the ‘crime’. Furthermore, they can consciously or unconsciously use the grading system to penalise those who make their workday more difficult or to punish errant students or pressure them to get back into line. When dealing with those in authority over you, like a teacher, if you win an argument it usually only makes the situation worse, because the teacher is at liberty to later uncompromisingly reassert their authority or take their revenge at the first opportunity when they assess your work. Consequently, you need to apologise even if the teacher was in the wrong. This is not a capitulation. It is a strategy. In fact, this strategy works better if you are apologising and the teacher knows deep down that he was at fault. The teacher will feel a curious combination of emotions, the satisfaction of victory and of seeing their perceived superior status confirmed by an apparently humbled subordinate, yet he may also secretly feel a pang of guilt. By apologising, you have deftly removed the source of their antagonism and cleared the way for the restructuring of the relationship. Take note, there can be no progress until this antagonism is removed. In addition, because they are victorious but know deep down that they do not morally deserve to be, they are more likely to be merciful to ease their conscience. In this fashion, you have cleverly set them up for the next step of the strategy, to allow them to indulge in a fantasy common to many in their vocation of reforming a wayward youth. Meanwhile, if you were in the wrong, by apologising you would have shown them that you can behave honourably and deserve rehabilitation, thereby setting them up to indulge in another 58


satisfying fantasy, that of rehabilitating a redeemed sinner. The next stage of the strategy involves adopting a persona that teachers like to reward, that of the keen, diligent, capable student or the ‘chip off the old block’, so they can see your improvement in behaviour and feel satisfyingly responsible for the positive change. Furthermore, your changed behaviour would have also removed the apparent threat to their authority in the classroom, easing their concern. In addition, be friendly and exhibit goodwill. It is almost impossible to harbour a grudge against someone who is friendly and exhibits goodwill. It also encourages them to think that, on reflection, the student was not as bad as originally thought. This positions the teacher for the final stage of the strategy, to transform him into an agent of your success. Just as we do when a student is trapped in the ‘B’ box due to the teacher’s prejudicial attitude, the student needs to make an appointment to see their teacher where they can talk privately. At that meeting, the student uses a variation of the form of words we noted earlier: I am in a difficult situation and I need your help. I am addressing my initial problems, thanks to you, and I am studying hard this year because I need a high score to qualify for [Commerce/Law], which is my dream. It’s a challenge, but I know that if I work hard I have a chance, but I need help and you are the only person who can help me succeed. My grade in [Legal Studies] will be crucial. At the moment, I am receiving ‘Bs’. Can you please tell me what I need to do to improve from ‘Bs’ to achieve ‘As’? Listen carefully to the teacher’s instructions and thank him appreciatively. Then, as soon you are out of the teacher’s sight, write them down so you can later follow them to the letter. After this meeting, your checkered past, rather than work against you, should work in your favour. Instead of being just another student in a long line of faces, you have become a tangibly real individual with real problems that require solutions that seem to be tantalisingly just at hand. You have become an intriguing drama in a real-life soap opera that deserves the happy ending that your teacher is in the position of authority to provide. From being the teacher’s enemy, you have become the teacher’s personal project, 59


the person whom they want most to see succeed so they can regard themselves as someone who can make a profound positive difference in the life of a formerly troubled young person. If you follow the teacher’s instructions on how to do well, high grades should follow. At this moment, it will be time for congratulations because you have won. Not only have you escaped a perilous situation, you have replaced it with an advantageous one. Now that is a much better position in which to be. It is worth noting that these practical and effective solutions stemmed from a constructive attitude. When you encounter an adverse circumstance, you need to ask yourself – what can I learn from this experience and how can I turn this situation around? This begins the process of moving from setbacks to steps forward, which is an attitude from which you can benefit all your life.

Handling educators’ ticks, comments and corrections Many schools have a system where students are expected to submit drafts of their essays to their teachers, who are usually their principal examiners, for comment; a process that if used astutely can invite your examiner to direct you to do exactly what will impress them most in the final assessment. The ticks, comments and other markings made by the examiner on drafts or submitted work can provide a wealth of invaluable information, much more than many students assume, to help you determine the most effective strategies to capitalise on the nature of the assessment process. From these clues, you can tailor your work to ensure that it is crafted to press all the right psychological buttons in your examiner to produce the highest rewards, only you need to know how to most profitably interpret these clues. Most students interpret these ticks and comments literally, as statements that indicate when their work is correct or in error. They see these markings principally in terms of what they can tell the student about himself. This approach can yield some very helpful information but there is much more to be found that is often overlooked. Few students go the step further and interpret this information psychologically, for what it can tell you 60


about your examiner. I encourage my students to interpret the ticks on their corrected work as if they are indicators of the emotional state of their examiner. It is as if they are beeps on the graph of a heart monitoring machine that patients can be hooked up to in hospitals, with more dramatic movements on the graph indicating greater excitement, and so on. This is because assessment is not a purely rational process; emotions are involved and these emotions often provide the most reliable indication of where the greatest rewards in grades are found. Ticks are almost always made when the examiner is experiencing an emotional sensation. Small precisely drawn ticks usually indicate moderate approval. Larger, more swiftly drawn ticks with longer tails usually indicate greater excitement, and double ticks indicate even greater excitement. What you can often notice, if you observe carefully, is that the most enthusiastic ticks are usually for material that reflects the teacher’s own ideas, understanding of the topic, preferred ideology and values more so than for material that is merely correct. On these occasions, it is not uncommon for teachers to provide additional comments (in handwriting that can provide an additional indication of their excitement) such as ‘brilliant’, ‘well done’ or ‘excellent’. In these circumstances, these comments can tell you much about how the teacher sees himself. For example, if a teacher enthusiastically wrote ‘brilliant’ beside a restatement of his own ideas in a student’s essay, you know that he is unlikely to appreciate a different perspective on the topic. You can use the pattern of ticks to verify whether you are on target with your calculations to capitalise on your teacher’s bias or understanding of the topic. The ticks at various points in your essay will often indicate whether the material is generating the emotional response in your examiner that was intended. Fewer ticks, the flatter the emotional response, more ticks, the greater the excitement. Negative markings can also be interpreted in the same fashion as a measure of the examiner’s negative emotional reactions, with crosses or crossings out being made either more forcefully or less forcefully. The most forcefully expressed negative responses are usually found where students, mistakenly or inadvertently, crossed a teacher’s bias or 61


understanding of the topic, while the negative markings for material that is merely incorrect are usually less pronounced. By observing this data, it is possible to determine the precise point while reading your essay when the teacher decided to award you an ‘A’. This understanding can later be used to enable you to repeat this winning performance with this teacher. Meanwhile, material that generated unwelcome negative responses can be identified so students can avoid repeating mistakes. More advantageous than ticks, is when your teacher has responded to your draft with such excited enthusiasm that they have rewritten some of it or written additional paragraphs that he wants to be included. This situation is different to when a teacher responsibly rewrites some faulty material because the student has done something wrong. This rewriting is the result of the student having done something right. It is the result of your work being so perfectly in tune with your teacher’s ideas, beliefs and values that his creativity has been stimulated. In effect, he has taken the bait and run with it. For students in this situation, this is the equivalent of being handed an ‘A’ on a silver platter. If you incorporate your teacher’s contribution into your essay, when he eventually assesses it he will see himself reflected in your work, so he will, in effect, be assessing himself, and you can expect him to reward himself most favourably indeed. However, if the teacher’s creative suggestions are inane, the student faces a dilemma. To not include them would do more than forfeit the easiest of ‘As’, it would compromise the teacher’s sense of self-esteem, since much more has become involved in this situation than simply an assessment of the student’s work. Rejection would be regarded by the teacher as ungrateful and insulting, making him feel as if his creativity had not been appreciated. The teacher is highly likely to respond bitterly and penalise a student with disproportionate severity. In this situation, the student appears to have a choice, to include the teacher’s creative suggestions that will compromise the quality of the work but probably result in an ‘A’, or preserve the quality of the essay, forfeiting an ‘A’ and incurring an undeserved penalty in grades. It seems that you will have to decide whether your prime objective is to receive high grades or to produce high-quality work, this being a particularly difficult occasion when they are incompatible objectives. Fortunately, there is 62


a simple solution at hand. The dilemma can be resolved by producing two finished versions of the essay, a high-quality version that says what you originally intended to say, which you can show to your family and friends, and a compromised version that includes the teacher’s creative suggestions, which is solely for assessment. In this fashion, not only will you receive your ‘A’ and preserve your integrity, you will have the additional satisfaction of having done something very kind for a person who desires validation. This situation, arguably more than any other, should remind you that your examiner is human, possessing attributes and frailties that it is in your interest to understand. To understand why a number of teachers are stimulated creatively by some examples of their students’ work, you need to appreciate the concept of the fantasy self. Most people go through each day dealing with the objective realities of their existence, most of which are mundane, yet they also harbour deep inside them fantasies about more ideal or exciting or fulfilling existences. If you observe your teachers carefully, you will notice that a surprising number of them are, in terms of their relevant fantasies, frustrated writers or artists or musicians or politicians, etc., who see themselves as having happened to have fallen into the profession of teaching. With some teachers, these sentiments are very noticeable, while with others they are kept private and secret, and only revealed inadvertently. Teaching represents an opportunity for them to give some minor expression to their fantasy self while earning the respectable income that sustains their existence. While his day-to-day reality may be that of being, for example, an English teacher, his fantasy self may be that of being, for example, an acclaimed writer. Of course, a few of these individuals do progress from teaching to careers as writers, artists, musicians, parliamentarians etc., with their examples helping to sustain the imagined viability of the fantasy self for the many others who do not. The notion of the fantasy self helps to explain why a text like Frank McCourt’s best selling autobiography, Angela’s Ashes, which is an entertaining book of modest literary or historical value, could be hurriedly added to the set texts for study in many year 12 classrooms so soon after its publication. It is a collection of sometimes amusing anecdotes that tell the story of one man’s triumph over adversity as he 63


rose from extreme poverty in Ireland to ‘make it’ by becoming, of all things, a high school English teacher in the United States. This notion is already extremely validating for teachers, telling them that they are OK and that their life is on track, but there is an even more enticing dimension to the McCourt legend. After a long career, McCourt retired then wrote Angela’s Ashes, thereby proving that during those long years of teaching he did have a best-selling book in him after all. He made the fantasy a reality. While tutoring students, I noticed how the teachers who taught this text tended to idolise McCourt or, more precisely, they idolised what McCourt represented, and in doing so, they revealed much about themselves. If your objective is to receive the highest grades, it is extremely advantageous to determine then capitalise on the fantasy self of your teacher. Film producers and publishers make billions of dollars each year by exploiting the fantasy self of the members of their mass audiences, and you can do no better than follow their example when dealing with your audience, your examiner. If you can take your teachers’ minds off the mundane reality of their existence and give them a few exquisite moments of feeling that they could one day be, for example, an acclaimed writer, teachers will reward your work not so much for its intrinsic merit but for giving them that delightfully uplifting feeling of having their fantasy self indulged. In addition to including your teacher’s creative contributions in your essay, there are many other profitable ways to indulge your teacher’s concept of their fantasy self, if you use your imagination. For example, one of my year 12 English students who was studying Angela’s Ashes, at my encouragement, went to hear the author Frank McCourt speak while he was on a world tour promoting the sequel. When my student let his teacher know of his plans, she was delighted, although she expressed her regret that she too would like to attend but she had other commitments. At McCourt’s lecture, my student made copious notes, and then he typed them up and presented them to his teacher as a gift. She was overjoyed. She hung on every word as my student recounted to her how the evening went. My student received an ‘A+’ for his essay on Angela’s Ashes, although I suspect that this grade had already been decided by the teacher before my student put 64


pen to paper. There may be other dimensions to the fantasy self of the teacher that reveal themselves in other ways than in creative suggestions for essays. Many teachers in a wide range of subjects are keen to, in their words, ‘make a difference’. A surprising number of them are members of (mostly left-wing) political parties or pressure groups, and many would see their activism and teaching as compatible. Even if they are not members of political groups, they can be keen to make sure that the tiny patch of the world under their control, their class, supports the beliefs that they presume to constitute progress, which for most teachers at this time in history involves the politically correct agenda, including environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, pacifism, Marxism and gay rights. If you share your teacher’s beliefs, it is in your interests to let your teacher know. If you do not share their beliefs, it is reassuring to know that the easiest people to deceive are those who want to be deceived, or, more precisely, there are those who so desperately want to believe something positive and efficacious about themselves that they welcome a false reinforcement of this belief more readily than the truth. Let them think what it pleases them to think, and reap the rewards. My student who went to a lecture by the author of Angela’s Ashes did not like the book, but he knew his teacher did, and he benefitted greatly from giving her the impression that he liked it as much as she did. Especially with the more politically-minded of teachers, a few choice words expressing political solidarity (such as the environmentalist slogan ‘Think global, act local’) will go a long way in your favour by suggesting that you are like-minded and on side, giving your teacher the heartwarming and fulfilling impression that they have indeed made a difference. These fantasy selves are precious to individuals. If challenged they can be ferociously protected but when humoured this is usually enthusiastically appreciated. We have noted that it can be perilous to avoid a teacher’s creative suggestions if you want high grades from that teacher. Similarly, it usually pays to acknowledge the teachers’ criticisms and corrections because to not do so can compromise their sense of intellectual authority and antagonise them. Even if the teacher seems to be in error, perhaps by recommending a change that is grammatically 65


incorrect, it can be more profitable to humour the teacher than to try to explain to him why he is mistaken. Adopt the strategy of producing two final versions of the essay, one written the way you prefer and another intended only for assessment by that teacher. Academics, on the other hand, are usually far less threatened by students who politely offer corrections to their corrections, often appreciating this advice as an opportunity to learn because they do not interpret it as a threat to their authority. Paradoxically, there are other times when it is necessary to ignore a teacher’s corrections if you want to receive high grades. With some teachers, their critical comments are judicious, well informed, and an invaluable way to learn and improve the quality of your work. But with others, this is not the case. I am sure that you have observed, just as I have, that some teachers seem to make corrections for the sake of making corrections. It seems as if this activity has more to do with making them feel like someone who is in authority than it has to do with improving the quality of students’ work. Those teachers who are inclined to correct in this fashion can sometimes produce suggestions that are so inane that if they were incorporated into the student’s essay they would severely compromise its quality. Ironically, if the student followed the teacher’s instructions and submitted the ‘corrected’ final draft, the same teacher is likely to penalise this essay for the very faults that his corrections introduced, which is a heartbreaking concept. Whether to acknowledge or ignore the teacher’s corrections is a difficult question, one that can be the source of considerable anxiety for students. On most occasions, it is beneficial to acknowledge teachers’ corrections by making appropriate changes to your work. Their corrections should be followed if they are worthy, or if you believe that the teacher put sufficient thought or investment of their self-esteem into them to notice if you did not acknowledge them, or if you suspect the teacher would again notice the uncorrected material to again perceive it as a ‘mistake’. When you make these crucial judgments, you need to bear in mind how your teacher would probably have encountered your work. From your perspective, yours is the only essay in the world at that moment and the teacher’s corrections to your essay loom large, as if they were royal edicts. However, from 66


your teacher’s perspective, your essay may have been one among 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 or more essays to be assessed, all of which involved making hundreds of corrections. Therefore, the few corrections on a particular student’s draft that appear so intimidating to that student represent only a few among the hundreds of corrections made by that teacher on dozens of students’ drafts, with most of these corrections probably made quickly and in the less alert state of consciousness that I describe as grading on autopilot, which means that the corrections are unlikely to be vividly remembered. If more students realise this, they would feel less intimidated by those inane corrections that threaten to damage the quality of their work, to compromise both its integrity and its likelihood to be rewarded with a high grade. When this lesson was learnt by those of my students who found themselves in this potentially unsettling predicament, much anxiety was avoided while this threat to their success was averted, as was the case with one of my year 12 English students who, to her surprise, found herself in this situation when producing an essay for her creative writing portfolio. I had began helping my student by teaching her the importance of choosing a topic that appeals to her examiner (her teacher) when pursuing high grades. To make this point, I told her the story (outlined in Volume 1) of a former student of mine who had drafted a humorous and insightful essay about what you can learn about humanity while shopping at supermarkets. It was an excellent piece of writing that deserved an ‘A’ yet because it was off target with the values of this student’s teacher, she refused to grade it, which forced my resilient student to draft a new essay on a different topic more in tune with her teacher’s values in order to achieve an ‘A’, which she did. My current student not only appreciated the message to be learnt from the experience of my former student, she became inspired by her essay topic, believing that an insightfully funny piece on supermarkets would be in tune with the values of her teacher. My student and I brainstormed on the topic, and she came up with many interesting and amusing ideas. When she presented her proposal for her essay to her teacher for approval, as she was required to do, it was enthusiastically received by this teacher, just as my student expected. The project was off to an encouraging start. 67


My student enjoyed working on the draft of her essay, and her hard work seemed to be paying off. When my student submitted her first draft for approval, which she was required to do, her teacher’s response was even more enthusiastic than before, making many ticks and very few corrections. Everything appeared to be on track for my student to receive her well-deserved ‘A’. Then my student’s teacher asked her class to submit their second draft for inspection. My student, having already done so well, regarded this as a formality in her case, expecting renewed approval since nothing substantial about her essay had changed except that it had been painstakingly refined to the point where it was ready for submission for final assessment. My student was justifiably proud of what she had achieved, and she had already entertained her family and friends by reading her material aloud to them. She was surprised by what happened next, and so was I. The second draft came back covered in her teacher’s correctional red ink. Although I did not count them, to our astonishment the teacher seemed to have made about 30 to 40 corrections. If my student followed them, the result would have virtually been a different essay. However, what upset my student most was that if she did acknowledge these corrections, the essay would be substantially worse. My student felt she was caught in a trap. If she acted upon her teacher’s corrections, she would damage the quality of her work, but if she did not act, she risked being penalised for not doing so. I looked closely at the teacher’s corrections. Frankly, they were bizarre. Apart from one legitimate suggestion to replace one word with a better choice, the other corrections were inane. The teacher seemed to have failed to tune into the purpose of the student’s essay and fired off comments for the sake of making comments, very few of which seemed to support the essay’s contention. Some instructions were contradictory, calling for my student to be more concise, then a few sentences later calling for her to elaborate. The teacher also suggested many changes that did not need to be made or that produced grammatical errors. As I read and reread this teacher’s comments, I realised that if my student followed these instructions she risked being penalised for the very mistakes that her teacher’s corrections would have introduced. To determine what advice I would give my student, I needed 68


more information. I asked my student to tell me what had happened recently in class. Apparently, the teacher, keen for her students to do well, had called in the drafts of all three of her English classes for review, and all of her students had come away with drafts covered in correctional red ink, just as my student’s essay had. I realised that in these circumstances it was highly unlikely that the teacher would specifically remember any of these corrections, having treated over 60 papers in the same fashion during what was for the teacher a Herculean effort that had been made with the best intentions. It was regrettable that the quality of the teacher’s corrections was so poor. I explained the situation to my student and advised her to ignore all but one of her teacher’s corrections. Initially astonished by such unorthodox advice, my student followed my instructions. Her essay would be submitted for final assessment virtually unchanged. But that was not all. There was another important element to my instructions. I was aware that this teacher had put much effort into making these corrections. While she was unlikely to remember each correction she had made, she would remember her effort. I told my student to find a brief moment when she could quickly relay to her teacher the following grateful acknowledgement: ‘Thank you for your advice’, while taking care to avoid a conversation that could pressure her to discuss anything specific. The meaning of the words in this acknowledgement were deliberately vague. They said nothing precise about what my student had actually done yet they allowed the teacher to imagine that they meant that my student had followed all her corrections, even though she had not. So, when the teacher read my student’s final draft, she would assume that it had been improved by her instructions. My student submitted her essay, and her reward for ignoring all but one of her teacher’s corrections was better than an ‘A+’. It was a perfect score, 100%. My student, like many students, had initially not realised that students have a choice when dealing with the corrections their teachers make to their drafts. Sometimes it is opportune to follow their teacher’s advice and sometimes it is best to ignore it while cleverly allowing the teacher to form the impression that you have followed their advice, which is the option that worked so well for my student in this case. This student’s success is a reminder that the study skills 69


in this book are about enabling you to effectively handle any teacher you encounter. With these skills, it matters little whether the teacher is capable or incapable. You still succeed.

Handling educators’ egos While following this discussion of assessment, you may have sensed that an important theme underlying significant dimensions of what happens during the assessment process and what is necessary for you to do to succeed has been the following fundamental principle: Teachers must be able to assume ownership of your success. Apart from their regular pay cheque, what they value in their career is the sense of validation at seeing the students they taught appreciate what they said and then use it to do well. If the teachers assess the students whom they teach, they, of course, have much greater control over influencing what is for them a very satisfying outcome. People like to impart knowledge and advice and to see that knowledge and advice appreciated and acted upon, and teaching is a profession that provides great opportunity to satisfy this human yearning. With this in mind, it could be argued that even for the most altruistic teachers, their teaching has a great deal to do with satisfying themselves, although their students often stand to gain something from what these teachers do in class. You too may have noticed what I have frequently observed, that there is a fundamentally important selfish dimension to the motivation to participate in altruistic vocations (or voluntary work or charitable enterprises), which includes the satisfying feeling that the person derives from this activity, the apparent confirmation for that individual that they are a good person who has done something good for others. This feeling derived from these activities can be so important to some people that it becomes incorporated into their sense of identity and worth. This yearning for validation is both a strength and a vulnerability. Those who satisfy it for these people can find themselves very well rewarded. For those students who do this for their teacher this can be a significant factor that influences the awarding of a high grade, which can sometimes be more decisive than the intrinsic merits of the 70


work. Students have much to gain from making their educators feel valued and effective. However, you also need to be aware that if the circumstances that satisfy this yearning are challenged or undermined, they can be ferociously defended, and the penalties for students in grades can be severe. Having become aware of this early in my experience as a private tutor, I adopted the policy of advising my students at the outset of our lessons that, despite my involvement, their teachers must be allowed to assume ownership of their students’ success. In line with this necessity, I instruct them to take copious notes in class so they have the material at hand to use in their essays to satisfy teachers who need to see their ideas or understanding of the topic reflected in their students’ work. I also advise them not to let their teacher know they have a private tutor. In that way, as the student’s performance improves, the teacher can happily perceive it to be the consequence of their efforts in class and therefore take pleasure in rewarding the improved quality of the student’s essays. In addition, this vitally important tactic protects the teacher from the emotional pain of learning that their student has a private tutor, and thereby protects the student from the severe consequences of that pain, the awarding of unjustly low grades. By talking about the teachers’ emotional pain, I am not referring to legitimate concerns about the authenticity of students’ work. That is something else entirely, although it can be used to rationalise the teacher’s behaviour in this regard, which I suspect usually has other causes. This appeared to be evident in the experience of one of my year 12 English students. When I teach a student about a novel or film, as I cover its themes I explain to them the relevant underlying philosophical concepts that influenced the creation of this text, along with the appropriate scholarly terminology, so my students are equipped to reason in a scholarly manner using an impressive scholarly vocabulary. Not only does this knowledge have considerable intrinsic educational value, it also dramatically boosts the morale and motivation of the students as they soon find themselves beginning to reason in a manner that is more like academics, compared to what they were used to doing. My student had to study a novel that was profoundly influenced by feminist 71


and Marxist theory, so I had taught my student about the concepts of patriarchy, domestic politics, social stratification, class struggle, etc., and her vocabulary inevitably improved as these initially new words became her words as she became sufficiently knowledgeable to use them appropriately. Later, when my student was examined on the novel by answering an essay question under classroom test conditions, she left the room confident that she had performed well. A few days later, to her surprise and unable to guess the reason, she was earnestly summoned by her English teacher for a private consultation. Her teacher’s mood was grim, and my student immediately became concerned and on guard. What does this word mean? Her teacher sternly inquired while pointing at my student’s test paper. My student politely provided the correct answer. What does this word mean? Her teacher sternly continued. Again, my student politely provided the correct answer. This process continued until my student had correctly defined all the words asked of her. Then the teacher declared angrily, ‘You did not learn these words in class. Where did you get them? Do you have a tutor?’ Scared, my student confessed to having a tutor. This was followed by forcing the distressed student to write and sign a statutory declaration acknowledging this confession. Hang on a minute. Did you notice what I noticed? Here was an English teacher punishing a student for having an improved vocabulary, which she had originally used under classroom test conditions and could later correctly use again when interrogated in such an aggressive manner. Isn’t an improved vocabulary what an English teacher should applaud? As I have stated previously, it is often the case that the most apparently absurd and extreme comments by teachers are the most revealing as to the nature of what really goes on in teachers’ minds during assessment. In this case, the tenor of the teacher’s emotional response was significantly disproportionate to the supposed cause, which is usually a clue that there are other underlying causes for this behaviour. It was as if my student had been caught ‘seeing someone else’, two-timing. This teacher’s behaviour had more in common with a victim of infidelity. It seemed that this teacher so desperately craved the validation of seeing her ideas or knowledge of the topic reflected 72


in her students’ essays that she was hostile to the possibility that a student could learn from someone else. In addition, it is also possible that my student’s improved and sophisticated vocabulary brought to the surface the teacher’s suppressed doubts and fears about her adequacy. Suddenly, the teacher had found herself outperformed and accountable, with an outsider addressing her deficiencies. The teacher’s emotional pain, expressed as anger, was profound and very genuine. The underlying cause of this teacher’s behaviour was also revealed by another comment she made to my student after she had forced her to sign a confession. She told my student that if she needed any extra help in the future, she could come to her. This offer was not an act of generosity but rather an attempt to fend off the outsider and recreate the quarantined circumstances that satisfied the teacher’s yearning for validation. This comment also provided the clue as to how I would rescue my distressed student from a perilously hostile assessment environment. Indeed, this environment was extremely perilous and extremely hostile, and not a moment could be wasted in transforming the situation if my student was to receive fair assessment. Two heartbreaking previous similar experiences attested to this. With the first student of mine to become a victim of this unfortunate situation, I was initially not aware that my student’s teacher had discovered the involvement of a private tutor. My student’s mother, who was very proud of her daughter due to her rapid improvement in grades, and very pleased with her decision to hire a private tutor, shared this news with the teacher at the mid-year parent-teacher interview, assuming that the teacher would be impressed at this evidence of the family’s dedication to the pursuit of scholastic excellence. Unaware of this inopportune revelation, from the middle of the school year I noticed something strange. Although the quality of my student’s work continued to improve, the grades she received from this teacher went down, gradually at first and then dramatically. Initially I found the situation as baffling as it was serious. I tried helping my student to improve the merit of her work even further as well as to more astutely tune into her teacher’s bias in the content of her essays. However, the situation worsened. Soon my student would be failing. It seemed as if the conventional assessment 73


scenario had been reversed. The better the student’s work became the lower the grade awarded, rather than the other way around. Concerned, I discussed the situation with my student’s family. When the mother mentioned, in passing, that she had told this teacher that her daughter had a private tutor I suddenly exclaimed, ‘That’s it!’ Now that we knew the cause, we could apply a remedy. On my instructions, my student told her teacher that she no longer had a tutor, and immediately after this, her grades shot up to where they deserved to be, yet the quality of my student’s work remained what it had been. Shortly afterwards, another of my students, hoping to impress her teacher with evidence of her dedication to achieving excellence, told her she had a private tutor and exactly the same depressing pattern was repeated. Again, the situation was rectified immediately after the teacher was told that the student was no longer seeing a private tutor. In each of those examples it was as if the teacher was trying to drive the private tutor away by awarding the student low grades. In this situation, any efforts by me to improve the quality of my student’s work were counterproductive, being perceived as evidence of the continued presence of an unwelcome source of knowledge. Sadly, both of these students had suffered several unjustly low grades before I developed a solution. Luckily, with this current student, I had heard about the problem early and I was ready with the antidote. Depressingly aware of the immanent severe consequences in assessment that threatened my student, I was determined she would not experience what had happened to her two unfortunate predecessors. The situation was dire. The teacher had stigmatised my student by psychologically associating her with painful fears and insecurities. Our first task was therefore to change this association so that my student could be associated in the teacher’s mind with her much yearned for feelings of competence and adequacy. If we acted swiftly, we could nip this problem in the bud. I instructed my student to seek extra help from her teacher at the first opportunity. This would rebuild the damage to the teacher’s sense of worth and associate my student with the return of the validating feelings she desired. I instructed my student to do this three times. For the third occasion, I told my student to tell her teacher that she no longer had a private tutor because she did not need 74


one. This would give her teacher the thrill of victory and the relief that the threat to her status as an educator was removed. My student followed my instructions and transformed the situation, suffering no further losses in terms of grades. Of course, I continued to tutor my student, but now her teacher happily believed she was responsible for my student’s success, which was always my intention. Meanwhile, my student remained understandably tactfully cautious about using her growing vocabulary in work to be assessed by that teacher. It should be noted that the problems associated with teachers losing the belief that they are responsible for their students’ success, by discovering that a student has a private tutor, are primarily associated with humanities subjects, where the assessment is subjective and therefore a matter of the teacher’s opinion. It is far less of a problem with teachers of Mathematics because the students’ work is assessed objectively, so a right answer on a test paper has to be rewarded regardless of whether the student’s knowledge came from outside or inside the classroom. Even if the feelings of the Mathematics teacher are hurt, he is not able to express that pain through inflicting unjustly low grades. In addition, the problem does not seem to occur with academics, who are generally much more self-assured than most teachers, and who traditionally encourage their students to read or consult widely, often taking pride in a capable student who shows the initiative to meet with other experts (provided they are not rivals) or in a struggling student who demonstrates his determination to overcome his problems by seeking additional assistance. The notion that most teachers are likely to interpret the presence of a private tutor as a disconcerting vote of no confidence by a student, rather than a commendable step in the pursuit of excellence, is not something that teachers are likely to admit publicly. When asked, most teachers will politely reply that private tutoring can have benefits. If they appear to mean this, they are probably thinking of hypothetical students in other teachers’ classrooms, not their own, or of desperate students requiring substantial remedial assistance to pass rather than those who are pursuing excellence. However, bear in mind that people can say almost anything, so it is usually their actions that are most revealing as to what their true underlying feelings are. Expect teachers 75


to say what they believe to be the respectable answer. Meanwhile, the actions that I described of teachers in the privacy of their classrooms are probably more revealing. Consequently, it pays to adhere to the following dictum: Do not follow teachers’ advice according to what they say about their attitude to assessment, rather observe their behaviour and learn what to do from what they actually respond to. With any system, including the educational system, there is the official version of how it works and then there is how it really works, the latter being the knowledge that you need most to succeed in the system.

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CHAPTER 3 MAKING EXAMS AN EASIER OPTION

Your knowledge of how assessment really works will be extremely advantageous for successfully completing exams, which, of course, can be challenging, intrinsically and because of what is usually at stake, a student’s progress through to the next level of the education system or to graduation. Effective exam technique is therefore essential since it will furnish you with the decisive ability to overcome and profit from these challenges. Although demanding, the acquisition of an effective exam technique is very achievable. It will draw on much of the knowledge and skills that you have acquired from this volume and from Volume 1, including a positive transformative principle from which you have already profited considerably, that of making your enemies your friends and your weaknesses your strengths. Many students consciously or unconsciously regard their exam technique as a weakness and they may even see exams as a kind of enemy, an attitude that makes exams prime candidates for the application of this principle. Think how much more reassuring your experiences in the education system will be if you instead see exams as an opportunity to perform to achieve what you want in the education system. Exams will always present challenges, sometimes formidable ones, but they will be challenges that you will know how to face and capitalise upon to progress successfully from one level to the next. Because so much can depend on exams, this is ample reason to make them your friends and this involves making exam technique one of your strengths.

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The right attitude This positive transformation begins by appreciating that exams, which are completed at a designated venue and time under test conditions, are in several respects an easier option than assignments that are completed at home by a due date. This is because traditionally the expectations of examiners regarding exam essays are less exacting than for assigned essays. Although both exam essays and assigned essays require students to present well-expressed answers that are considered to be worthy of reward, in several respects exam essays are not assessed according to such stringent standards. This largely stems from the circumstances in which exam essays are produced. Completed under test conditions, without research materials and working against the clock, students are not expected to provide precise detailed documentation in footnotes and a bibliography. Nor are they usually expected to provide examiners with as much evidence of the extensive wide reading that would be necessary for assigned essays to be highly rewarded. In addition, exam essays are often expected to be much shorter and more focused than many assigned essays, providing answers that are less ambitious or elaborate. This potentially makes essay writing for exams easier. Moreover, short-answer and multiple-choice questions are even more focused and straightforward, making them much less demanding than essays for assignments (or exams). Upon realising this, many of you should find this somewhat reassuring. With exams being conducted under test conditions, students do not know the questions in advance and they have limited time to complete their answers. Consequently, they have to rely on their expertise, including their powers of understanding and their ability to recall information, to enable them to interpret questions and formulate answers on the spot. There are no opportunities for the extensive revision of an answer, or for having the draft checked by a learned third party, or for resorting to various texts for additional information (unless it is an open-book exam and even then the resources allowed into the exam room are limited). However, if a student is skilled at exam technique, the additional demands arising out of test conditions can be seen as favourably balanced against the benefits that also arise 78


from them. By comparison to assigned essays, the answers required for exam essays take less time to prepare beforehand and to execute under test conditions. If students are skilled at exam technique, those who may have had a disappointing start to the year, perhaps due to illness or some other distraction, can capitalise on this. These students can put in a determined effort to produce a strong performance at the end of the year to possibly reduce or eliminate any adverse effects from earlier patchy performances. The greater the percentage of grades allocated to the final exam result over assignments done throughout the year, the greater the possibility of rescuing yourself from an otherwise disappointing year via a strong exam performance. In this context, exams can be a saviour. This possibility should also be reassuring. In addition, final year or university entrance exams are often assessed according to the system of external double assessment, which we noted in Chapter 2 as potentially the fairest assessment you can receive in the education system, other than that reserved for theses. If the system of external double assessment is relevant to your circumstances, then this may also be somewhat reassuring since there is more opportunity to be rewarded for merit, provided that students’ answers are compatible with the prevailing ideological bias within the curriculum. On the other hand, if you are to be assessed by your class teacher or tutor, which is the case for most exams at school or university, then you know that for these exams you can confidently apply the Method, which will enable you to successfully capitalise on the strengths and weaknesses of examiners who are well known to you. By tuning into either the overarching ideological bias in the curriculum (if you are externally assessed) or into the idiosyncrasies and bias of your teacher or tutor (if you are internally assessed) you can gain a competitive advantage regardless of whether you are dealing with seen (internal) or unseen (external) examiners. Whatever the assessment system, you are able to use exams to capitalise upon ideological bias. This should also be reassuring. Many students astutely appreciate that their completion of assignments provides educational opportunities to develop and practise knowledge and skills that will later be valuable in their careers and other dimensions of their life. However, the substantial educational 79


and practical benefits to be derived from the experience of exams are often overlooked. Firstly, the preparation for exams represents opportunities to thoroughly learn the subject matter of the course. Secondly, and importantly, the experiences of doing exams have much to offer students as opportunities to develop the skills to perform well at decisive moments of someone else’s choosing. In this sense, exams represent opportunities to learn to think and act like the most powerful and effective people, the movers and shakers, the businessmen, politicians, generals, athletes, entertainers and others who have to balance important short-, medium- and long-term objectives as well as to perform at their best at particular decisive moments. We can all learn much from successful people and the qualities they possess that make them successful. Fortunately, many of these formidable qualities can be cultivated by doing exams. When I attended junior high school, like most students, I felt daunted when faced with my first season of exams. However, when I reflected on my predicament I found inspiration in Napoleon’s intrepid military campaign strategy. He conducted his campaign manoeuvres to climax with a great battle. Rather than avoid a decisive conflict, he made sure his strategy and logistics gave him everything at his disposal he needed to win. His efforts usually meant that he fought battles with the odds in his favour. I used this military metaphor to motivate me to face this and many other exam seasons that I encountered throughout high school and university. It assisted me greatly. According to this metaphor, each exam season was a military campaign while each exam was a battle in that campaign. I made sure I did what I could to ensure that the odds were in my favour as much as possible on every occasion that I needed to perform. Motivational metaphors such as this are very helpful. You may choose another motivational metaphor if you wish, such as that of an Olympic athlete facing a series of decisive competitions or of a political leader in an election campaign who has to perform in several decisive speeches and debates. You will, in life, face many great battles or competitions, or have to deliver numerous important performances, so you will need to know how to organise to prevail. Doing exams can help you to learn how to deliver when you need to deliver. 80


This appreciation of the value of instructive and inspirational metaphors, as well as the preceding realistic appraisal of the potential advantages of exams, stems from an understanding of the benefits to be derived from having a constructive positive attitude, which is accompanied by a correspondingly positive internal dialogue. This contributes greatly to doing well when facing any challenge, including exams. Too many students perceive exams mainly in terms of what could go wrong when they would be better served to think about them primarily in terms of what can go right. It is sensible and profitable to think about risk, but your purpose should be to determine what you can do to minimise it. Your internal dialogue needs to be constructive, focused on what you need to do to win. In this context, some anxiety about exams is beneficial if it motivates students to learn and apply the effective exam techniques that minimise risk and maximise effectiveness. Interestingly, the acquisition of an effective exam technique does much to engender a constructive positive attitude, while a constructive positive attitude does much to encourage the acquisition and application of an effective exam technique. Each of these important elements reinforces or justifies the other. This is because if your exam technique is effective, the acquisition of a positive attitude to facing exams will have foundation in a realistic selfassessment, and this will make any negative thoughts seem less credible so they are likely to be fleeting, if experienced at all. In addition, as your positive attitude and use of an effective exam technique brings you success, each positive experience will reinforce your positive attitude so you become increasingly more formidable with each exam and exam season that you overcome. If you are as yet a little unsure of your ability to generate a positive ‘can do’ attitude that feels realistically credible, instead use a more modest but still very positive and determined ‘can do better’ or ‘can do the best I can’ attitude until your situation improves. Positive selftalk needs to be realistically credible to be motivationally effective. Be positive but also be honest to yourself. If being positive in your attitude does not perfectly match your appreciation of reality, then you will need to do what you can to positively change your reality until it does match. Positive self-talk that tells students they can achieve without 81


sufficient knowledge or skill is delusional. It is counter-productive and it should be avoided. Positive self-talk that tells students to acquire the knowledge and skills that they need to win can be decisive. Be realistically optimistic but do not underestimate your potential either. It is possible to achieve dramatic improvement, and even exceed what you previously thought was your potential, if you both want to win and are willing to do what it takes to win. In this context, you may derive inspiration from other students, current or former, who had the right attitude then did what was necessary and consequently achieved. It is likely that you have known several impressive individuals whose examples may inspire you along the lines of – if they can do it, I can do it. This discussion of the importance of a constructive positive attitude is leading to a recognition of what can be the most powerful underlying factor of all in the success of an individual, which is vitally important when completing exams or any other demanding endeavour. It is the motivator that can more than any other drive us to exceed what could have been our limitations. It is the possession of a dream. This is because the fire that will drive your engine more powerfully than anything else is your dream, this being your thoughts about your ultimate objective, the original reason behind your involvement in the education system. It might be to gain access to a desirable career that gives expression to your talents. It might be to achieve the glory that comes with high grades, or the status that accompanies educational qualifications, or to acquire knowledge that can make you wealthy. It might be to enable you to achieve a more enlightened and fulfilling existence. It might be to lay the foundations for a comfortable, civilised life or to dynamically make your mark on the world. Alternatively, you might be simply seeking to test your ability, to challenge yourself to see if you can do it, just for the heck of it. Whatever your objective, you need to have this notion constantly with you to inspire you to do what is necessary, and to at times reassuringly remind you why everything you are doing, including the sacrifices you are making, will ultimately be worth it. A dream can be your greatest asset, so much so that it is virtually indispensable. If you do not yet have one, acquire one. Your dream does not have to be grand. It only needs to be 82


yours. You may share your dream openly or keep it privately in the world of your thoughts. Curiously, your dream or goal does not have to be realistic, and you may even change it. What matters most is that you have a dream or goal and that it means something significant to you. When reflecting on your personal history, compare the difference in your motivation for tasks that were close to your heart and those that were not. If a challenge means a great deal to you, you will be more likely to do what it takes to succeed, whether it involves tasks that are pleasant or unpleasant, convenient or inconvenient. The dream that motivates you and propels you forward can be appreciated as the reason behind the reason for your success. Having recognised the value of having a goal, it is now appropriate that we turn to acquiring the effective exam technique through which you can achieve it.

Effective exam technique: Long-term preparation Effective exam technique involves several phases of planning and preparation to lay the foundation for the final phase, the performance, with each preceding phase making the following one more effective. In addition, each phase steadily increases in intensity, to become very intense in the weeks immediately before the exam season and even more intense during the exam season when it is essential to be focused exclusively on the task at hand.

Planning As mentioned earlier, exams require students to perform at moments of someone else’s choosing. The students’ objective is therefore to be ready. Disconcerting pre-exam stress usually comes from a perception of not being ready. This problem need not arise. Fortunately, students usually have ample warning when exams are scheduled. If the precise dates are yet to be revealed, the time of year can be determined in advance from course guide books or by asking your educators. Long-term preparation can commence at the beginning of the academic year, or earlier. Firstly, it involves gathering all the relevant 83


information that you need to astutely plan your campaign. You will need to consult course guide books, school or university web sites, exam papers from previous years, examiners’ reports (if available), your educators and, if possible, other students who have completed the course so you can determine what is required of you and when. This will enable you to ascertain when the exam season is scheduled and the dates of each exam (as soon as they become available) so you can begin thinking about your preparations and the most fruitful allocation of your time. You will also need to determine the formats for each exam in each subject, noting whether they involve essays, short-answer or multiple-choice questions, pure or applied mathematical calculations, or foreign language translations or compositions, etc. This will allow you to determine at the outset of the academic year the various skills and knowledge that you will need to develop or acquire. You will also need to determine the allocation of grades awarded for each part of the exams so that you can be prepared to perform especially well in those parts awarded the most grades. In addition, you will need to establish a clear sense of the official assessment standards so you know the qualities your answers need to reflect to be more likely to receive the highest reward. In the context of gathering this vital information, if you have successfully established the kind of student persona that educators prefer to reward, such as that of the keen, diligent, capable student or of the ‘chip off the old block’, you will be better positioned to tactfully request some valuable tips from your examiners as to what kind of questions may be on the exam. For example, you should be aware of the possibility that some lecturers in tutorials that had a high rate of absenteeism can be prone to reward the students who attended regularly with some exclusive and opportune advice. However, to give yourself an additional competitive advantage, this knowledge of the exam formats and official assessment standards should be used in combination with a more streetwise awareness of the unofficial standards and other realities about assessment (detailed in Chapter 2 of this volume and in Chapter 2 of Volume 1), which can significantly affect how your exam paper is assessed. In this context, you will need to determine the assessment system by which the exam 84


papers will be graded, such as internal assessment, internal double assessment or external double assessment. For answers that are assessed subjectively, which is the case in most arts and humanities subjects, different assessment systems can produce different assessment outcomes for the same answers. Nevertheless, you can profit substantially from these circumstances by astutely factoring this awareness into your preparations and performance so you can succeed in any of these assessment scenarios. The achievement of this crucial awareness involves gathering the information to create psychological profiles of your examiners and to determine the predominant ideological bias of the curriculum. As outlined in Chapter 2 of Volume 1, these psychological profiles are made under seven categories: ideology, values, ethics, interests, preferred forms of language, character and persona. This will enable you to prepare your exam study notes to accommodate these idiosyncrasies and biases so you can capitalise on them so that everything you include in your answers in the exams is cleverly calculated to have maximum appeal to your examiners and therefore pay a dividend in grades. It also means that you can cleverly avoid presenting answers that may run counter to these idiosyncrasies and biases and unjustly incur a penalty in grades. If you are to be assessed by examiners whom you know, such as your class teachers or tutors, this material will allow you to astutely tune into their strengths and weaknesses to confidently capitalise on them instead of becoming a victim of them. If you are assessed externally by unseen examiners, your knowledge of the ideological bias of the curriculum will enable you to exploit the most likely bias of these unseen examiners as readily as you can exploit the bias of your class teacher or tutor. At this time in history, the ideological bias that is more likely to be encountered in most arts or humanities subjects is political correctness, while in most economics or business subjects it is economic rationalism. Meanwhile, for those exam papers that are predominantly assessed objectively, as is the case in mathematics subjects and many of the topics covered in the sciences, you will need to focus on acquiring the merit that is likely to be rewarded. The vital psychological and ideological information, which significantly affects how all students are assessed whether they choose to acknowledge 85


it or not, is too often overlooked. However, if you factor this data into your preparations you can dramatically increase your chances of accommodating them and of consequently being rewarded the highest grades. To succeed in exams, you need to prepare with the clearest possible understanding of the realities regarding what is expected of you. Coinciding with this information gathering is a continual process of self-assessment regarding your strengths and weaknesses. Your purpose is to determine how you can capitalise on your strengths and compensate for or eradicate any weaknesses. This process needs to commence early, with the planning phase, and it continues through the preparation phases, continually informing and shaping this preparatory process. This self-assessment will influence what resources you will gather, the skills you will develop and the knowledge you will acquire and cultivate. For example, if you have a weakness in performing mathematical calculations, you may need to allocate much greater time to preparing for exams in subjects or topics that require them, such as for Mathematics or Accounting, or for the statistical units in Economics, Sociology or Psychology. This process of self-assessment will allow you to determine whether you need to seek some assistance from a clever classmate or to hire a private tutor until these problems are addressed. As well as noticing difficulties involving specific aspects of the course you are doing, this self-assessment may reveal that you need to address what seem to be mundane or minor problems, like messy handwriting, which if left unattended could alienate examiners and compromise the exam results in a range of subjects. Meanwhile, as well as these minor problems, too many students allow significant problems in essential study skills that are crucial for most subjects, such as in expression or essay writing technique, to linger unaddressed for many years, which means these students carry the consequent costs in grades for these many years. It is sensible to address these problems as soon as possible, the earlier the better, because the sooner these problems are rectified and replaced with effective skills, the more time you will have to practise becoming masterful in using them and to enjoy the consequent benefits in improved grades. By becoming aware of your problems early you can address them early, 86


acquiring the skills or gathering the resources that will enable you to deal with them well before the important exam season commences. These valuable resources could include additional insightful textbooks that you find easier to understand or more enlightening than the compulsory textbooks. It could also include a network of people who can help you to address the problems that could hamper your progress. This network may encompass other teachers, lecturers or tutors who taught you in previous years as well as clever classmates or former students who can provide you with well-informed advice. For the important exams in the gateway years, which allow you to progress from school to university or from undergraduate to postgraduate study, the long-term preparation should ideally begin in preceding years. For example, exams undertaken during the less important years can be treated as opportunities to test yourself working against the clock, to fine-tune your skills so you perform at your peak in the exams that matter most. In a similar sense, less important mid-year exams can be used to practise and refine your skills for the more important final exams. Some schools even stage practice exams for this purpose. Take advantage of these opportunities. However, when approaching a practice exam, your emphasis should be on the word ‘practice’ rather than ‘exam’. Practice exams are rarely awarded grades that contribute to the final result. Use them to improve your performance but take care to prevent them from distracting you from your all-important preparations for the graded final exams that matter. If your school does not provide the training opportunity of practice exams, then use the next best thing, class tests. Use them to practise your performance to determine what you are good at and what you need to improve to perform well when you eventually do the exams. Planning your study campaign involves acquiring a precise sense of what you need to do and when you need to do it. This process will produce a comprehensive list of the assessed tasks that you have to complete and the dates when they are required. It will also determine a list of topics that will be covered by assignments or exam questions or both. There will be some topics that are solely covered in assignments, some that are initially covered in assignments and later covered again in the exams, and some topics that are covered solely in 87


the exams. For example, you may determine that you have to answer questions in assignments or exams on a total of twenty topics, of which sixteen will be covered in the exams with eight of these covered solely in the exams. By plotting the due dates for assignments and for the commencement of the exams on a calendar (or in your diary), you can determine how the due dates for the assignments are spaced. This may reveal that the assignments to be done throughout the year are scheduled to all be completed two weeks before the exam season commences at the end of the year, leaving only a two-week period that is clear of assignment work, which will be insufficient time to produce the study notes on the eight additional topics that are required by the exam season. Alerted to this potential problem, you can scrutinise your calendar to determine when you will have spaces between assignment work to prepare these exam study notes in advance. Alternatively, you can endeavour to complete your assignments early to leave much more time at the end of the year to prepare the study notes for the exams. This foresight can ensure that you are equipped to perform at your peak on every occasion when it is necessary. In addition, this planning also involves determining the dates and times of each exam during the exam season so you can incorporate this knowledge into your long- and short-term preparations. For example, if you find that you have some subjects bunched closely together on the exam program, thereby minimising the time available to prepare for them at that time, you can compensate for this by completing your preparations for these subjects before the exam season commences. Meanwhile, for those subjects that have exams that are spread comfortably apart, with several days or more between them, students would know in advance that they will have this additional time during the exam season to complete the polishing and perfecting of their study notes. With this foresight, you can organise the preparation of your study notes to compensate as best as you can for any limitations in the timetabling, so that even if some subjects are bunched together on the program, everything will be ready when it needs to be. The planning and execution of your study campaign also involves breaking down the pursuit of your objective into digestible tasks. As you deal with each topic in a subject, you will 88


need to break it down into a number of tasks, which are in turn broken down into smaller tasks. This will determine what can be achieved in a fortnight, in a week, and ultimately in each night’s study session. For example, when preparing study notes for an exam topic, you may determine that this will require research from three textbooks. You estimate that the most important textbook will take two nights to cover and the others one night each. In addition, you will require two nights to synthesise the material from all three sources in to an integrated, coherent, comprehensive set of notes. This means that you will need six days or, more precisely, six study sessions to complete the task. Consequently, by scrutinising the dates when your assignments are due, you can determine that you can comfortably prepare these study notes in between the completion of the last assignment and the commencement of the next. Time is one of your most valuable resources, so allocate it wisely. This involves prioritising, allocating time between short-, medium- and long-term demands. This requires qualities of ruthless decision-making and rigorous self-discipline that, if you do not have them already, need to be cultivated. The importance of this should not be underestimated. It can be decisive. It can determine the difference between those who pass or do well, or between those who do well and those who do very well. It often constitutes the difference between those who say they want to achieve a goal and those who actually achieve it. It involves being able to say ‘yes’ to what will help you succeed and to say ‘no’ to much of what will not. Moreover, it should be recognised that establishing and maintaining this attitude can be very challenging indeed. It is very difficult to remain studying at your work station while your family is relaxed, talking and laughing in front of the television in a room nearby. Difficult though it is, forfeiting many of these simple pleasures just has to be done. However, you should bear in mind that you can reward yourself later by watching television and enjoying the company of others after your scheduled study for that evening is completed. Moreover, these simple pleasures are usually far more satisfying when they are rationed and therefore not taken for granted, and you will enjoy them more richly when your conscience is clear since you have 89


done the right thing and completed your studies. Keep in mind that it is very much the case that your self-disciplined choice to study, when you would rather do something else, will decide how well you do in the exam just as much as the boxes you choose in the multiple-choice questions on the exam paper. The battle to succeed in an exam is won or lost largely before the exam commences. Furthermore, this prioritising with its ruthless decision-making and rigorous self-discipline becomes increasingly difficult the older you become and the more day-to-day responsibilities that you acquire that can encroach on study time. It is so easy to become caught up in the world of the immediate, the pressing yet comparatively minor concerns that initially appear important and to require your immediate attention. Regrettably, these immediate minor concerns can cumulatively prevent individuals from finding sufficient time to work towards their muchdesired long-term objective, such as a university degree. Some of these immediate yet minor concerns may be related to your education and others may not. For those minor (and sometimes major) demands on your time that are not related to your education, you may need to reorganise your life so that you have sufficient time to pursue your studies. Otherwise, you may need to postpone your studies until your lifestyle can be reorganised to pursue them with the necessary degree of commitment. The decisions to facilitate study will involve sacrifices, and some of them will be difficult. In these circumstances, you may need to reassure yourself with the notion that the successful people are often those who are willing to make the sacrifices that other people are not willing to make. When prioritising between tasks that relate specifically to your course, which involve decisions of what you do, when to do it, and how much effort to put into it, you should give priority to what will produce the grades that contribute to your final result. Much of this type of decision-making is relatively straightforward. For example, any weekly reading for tutorials that could distract you from working on assessed assignments or preparing for exams should be given a low priority in your allocation of time. In addition, you may have to prioritise between tasks that you are good at and enjoy and those 90


that you are not good at but are vital to your success. Generally, your weaknesses require more attention than your strengths, so more time and effort will have to be allocated to what needs attention, regardless of how disconcerting this may feel. These prioritising decisions become more difficult when you have to balance your allocation of time between two or more demanding tasks that are both of significant value regarding the final result, with one demand having to be completed in the short-term and the other in the long-term. In this regard, attending to the important short-term demand of completing, for example, an assessed assignment should sensibly take precedence. However, you should bear in mind that long-term demands, like exam preparation, eventually become short-term or immediate demands. If they are not attended to sooner, then inevitably they will later force themselves upon you. So, during the year, you must do what you can whenever you can to attend to the long-term demands so when they eventually present themselves as short-term demands you will have them under control. This means that after students complete an assignment, they need to avoid falling into the trap of sidelining their studies to engage in an extensive period of recreation until the next assignment is announced and they feel obliged to commence work on it. Unfortunately, this behaviour pattern forfeits the opportunity to make the most of valuable time that could have been productively used to prepare vital study notes for the end-of-year exams. Similarly, the term or semester breaks can be treated as holidays or as precious opportunities to get ahead in assignment work or to prepare study notes for the exam season. Although it is vitally important in regards to maintaining your motivation to periodically reward yourself for each completed task with some well-deserved rest and recreation, it is also vitally important to exercise the self-discipline to contain the duration of this rest and recreation so that you maintain the schedule that is necessary to allow you to be ready to do everything you need to do when you need to do it. For example, if you plan to take some time off to enjoy a special event with family or friends, prepare for it in advance by extending your study sessions beforehand so your schedule does not suffer a setback. In a very real sense, the real holidays do not commence until 91


the last assignment is submitted and the last exam is completed. These important decisions between the demands of the present and the future often require a capacity for delayed gratification. This is the ability to forego pursuing immediate concerns that deliver immediate but minor emotional payoffs and rewards, to instead give preference to pursuing longer-term objectives that deliver little or nothing in the short-term but eventually deliver major emotional payoffs and rewards. If you can exercise the capacity for delayed gratification, it is much more likely that your recreation during the end-of-year holidays will be far sweeter, because you would have achieved a great deal and therefore have much more to celebrate.

Preparing study notes It is important to allocate sufficient time to a study routine. This may be two, three, four or even more hours a night for study, working approximately until that allocated time has transpired and then finishing for the evening. University students usually have lecture and tutorial timetables that amount to fewer contact hours with their educational institution than high school students have, so they can devote many more hours to study, such as 30, 40 or even 50 or more hours a week. How many hours a week should you devote to study? The answer is whatever is necessary to produce the desired results. If your study routine is working, maintain it, if not, change it. If you are studying two hours a night and not producing the results that you want, then allocate additional study time until you are completing the tasks on schedule and receiving the grades you desire. In making your decision as to your allocation of study time, it may help you to think of the following principle: Hard work works. It produces results. If you look at the qualities of successful people, you will almost always find that the capacity for hard work contributed significantly to their achievements. The demands of exam preparation often require additional hours to be added to a study routine, especially approaching and during the exam season. A disciplined study routine is very effective for producing steady progress towards the completion of most tasks, including assignments 92


and exam preparation. Moments of inspiration are helpful as motivation to study, but they are too infrequent to rely on to produce steady progress. That is why a disciplined study routine is necessary, because it enables you to progress regardless of whether you are in the mood to study or not. Some study sessions will be a delight while others will be a tedious grind; some will be astonishingly productive while others will produce comparatively little progress. Keep working anyway. If you are feeling stale, persevere. If you are tired, then rest, and resume when your energy and capacity for concentration is sufficiently replenished to continue. If you are unproductive while doing one task, then change to another. You will notice that a shift in tasks can often be surprisingly revitalising, allowing you to tap into reserves of energy that you did not realise you had. If you are utterly exhausted, then rest and resume the next day when you are fresh and more productive. If you are on a roll, and what you are doing is extremely productive, then run with it, perhaps extending your hours in that study session to take advantage of this opportunity to perform at your best. In addition, as well as thinking about study in terms of a routine, there will inevitably be occasions when you need to regard your study time more in terms of completing vitally important tasks rather than set hours, especially if you have to keep to a demanding schedule. This task-oriented approach is often necessary when preparing for exams because, as we noted earlier, they require students to be ready to perform at a time of someone else’s choosing. On occasions, you may need to have something completed that night or fall precariously behind schedule. This means working until the task is done by allocating whatever time it takes to finish it. That night, you may need to work later than usual or, better still, you can rise very early the next morning to complete it before school or university commences, when you are fresh and more productive. We recently noted the value of the principle: Hard work works. It produces results. To it, we can add another: Smart work works better. It produces better results more economically. If you combine these two qualities, of working hard and of working smart, you will become truly formidable. While successful people can usually be seen to have the capacity to work hard, the most successful people, 93


these being those who manage to achieve twice as much or more in a lifetime than most others, usually also have the capacity to work smart. If you use your imagination, you can come up with smart ways to efficiently make the most of your study time. For example, there are opportunities to save time in preparing study notes for the exams on topics that are also covered by assigned essays. Completed essays, although helpful for study purposes, are usually too specific in their focus to substitute for the kind of comprehensive study notes that will prepare students to successfully respond to any potential exam question on the topic. In addition, keep in mind the likelihood that if examiners permit students to do exam questions on topics that were already covered in assigned essays, they are likely to draft an exam question that covers a different aspect of the topic to that covered in the assigned essay. Nevertheless, by being aware in advance that a topic will be covered in both an assigned essay and in the exam, when researching your assigned essay you can take care to gather additional material to produce more comprehensive notes than what would be required for producing an assigned essay alone. This will enable you to initially use these notes to produce the assigned essay and then later to prepare for an exam response to an unseen question that could be about any aspect of the topic. In this fashion, by doing a little extra work, you can effectively kill two birds with one stone, efficiently making the best use of your limited time. To do well in exams you need quality study notes. You cannot get an ‘A+’ in an exam by studying from ‘C+’ notes. This means that you should make your study notes as good as they need to be to get the job done and achieve the high results you desire. When preparing your study notes, your aim is to become expert. This is because the more expertise you have, the easier exams become. Do not be concerned. This requirement is not as daunting as it may initially seem. Think about when you have been asked a specific question on a subject about which you are familiar, such as regarding a dimension of what life is like at your school or an aspect of how to play your favourite sport. When you responded, you probably did not feel the need to recall swathes of memorised material or to say all that you knew about the subject or to bluff to cover a lack of knowledge, 94


which are the potential faults in exam performance of those who are inexpert. Instead, you responded specifically and authoritatively to the question, providing precisely what was asked of you, which is what you are expected to do in an exam. It follows that if having expertise makes you likely to provide the kind of answers to questions that are rewarded the most in exams, while facilitating the avoidance of some of the errors that can significantly compromise exam performances, then it makes sense to use your exam preparation to become expert. How do you know when you are sufficiently expert? If you feel confident that you know the topic well enough to teach it to a friend, then you are probably sufficiently expert to succeed handsomely in an exam on that material. Now that you have become alerted to the positive impact of having expertise, if you reflect upon past class tests or exams when you did well, it will probably become apparent that you exhibited this quality. Exam preparation, to some degree, can be seen as an accelerated process of extending the expertise that you have already effectively demonstrated in some dimensions of your life to others. The quality study notes that engender the expertise that makes quality exam performances more likely are usually derived from quality sources. Your first step is to find and identify the most insightful and informative source or sources on the relevant topic. You then subject the most valuable source or sources to thorough systematic notetaking, while the less valuable sources are used to derive additional material that may complement the notes from the most helpful sources. You then synthesise these separate sets of notes so they tell one story. The resulting study notes should be clearly spaced and labelled with subheadings, written legibly on one side of the paper only, and organised so that the last paragraph on a page does not flow onto the next page, so that each point made in the study notes can be seen clearly, to be appreciated and reflected upon in your field of vision without having to awkwardly turn a page. This form of presentation will make the material more easily comprehensible. This ease of comprehension also requires you to have written clearly in full easily understandable sentences rather than in half-sentences in point form. These sentences should also avoid any acronyms, abbreviations, 95


shorthand graphic signs or anything else that can compromise the clarity of comprehension and an enjoyable ease of reading when you later study the material. Your study notes need to be able to make a positive impression on you, just like an informatively good book can. If you sought a book to enlighten you on a topic and found one that consisted of a confusing array of half sentences, arrows and other scribbled jottings, etc., you would feel that it was not up to the task and seek another. In a similar sense, your study notes need to be able to deliver what is required of them. Although some of the subject matter in your course may be complex, your study notes should not be. To your benefit, this process of producing quality study notes will make you an expert as an unavoidable but very welcome byproduct of your efforts. In addition, if your study notes are easy to understand and enjoyable to read then they are likely to make a more profound impact on your memory and confidence when you later study them, which will in turn add to that feeling of expertise that is required to maximise the quality of your exam performance. When producing your quality study notes, the manner in which you handle the notes taken in classes, lectures or tutorials will depend on the quality of the material provided by the teachers, lecturers or tutors, as well as on the system of assessment for the exam papers. If your class teacher, lecturer or tutor was competent and provided valuable material during lessons, you should incorporate these notes into the synthesised study notes. However, if your class teacher, lecturer or tutor was less than competent but will be your examiner, in addition to compiling a quality set of study notes to facilitate your expertise, you will need to organise an auxiliary set of study notes based on the notes taken in class to provide you with additional material for the specific purpose of pleasing this examiner by including it in your answers. On the other hand, if these less than competent teachers, lecturers or tutors are not your examiners, the material derived from their lessons, which you previously cleverly used to score high grades in assignments assessed by them, will be detrimental to your goal of achieving high grades in the externally assessed final exams. This material has served its purpose. Consequently, it should be filed away so it cannot compromise your exam performance. 96


As well as being sufficiently versatile to deal effectively with different assessment systems, your quality study notes should also be perceptive and comprehensive. They should be perceptive by going to the heart of the meaning of the topic, and comprehensive so they cover every aspect of the topic likely to be examined. Especially with university subjects, this will often mean that the study notes need to include a summary sense of the academic debate relevant to this field of inquiry. If your study notes have these qualities, this should equip you to effectively deal with any question that could be asked. However, in addition to having these characteristics, the study notes need to fulfill a practical requirement. They need to be of an appropriate length to be able to be studied effectively in whatever proportion of the 24-hour period before the exam that is available. For example, if you face an exam that involves writing three essays on separate topics, and the study notes for the three topics are collectively so lengthy that it would be impossible to study them the day before the exam, then they need to be edited so they can be digested in that period. If a tight exam program leaves you with less time to study your notes than the day before, such as only the night before or, if two exams are programmed for the same day, only a mere half a day or half a night before, then the study notes have to be tailored more radically to cope with this inescapable practical requirement. While most of the study notes that you prepare will probably be of an appropriate length to be effectively studied the day before the exam, if they are too long, it is often best to schedule your editing of them for the weeks immediately prior to the exam season. This is because the editing process, in addition to its practical purposes, can serve as a form of revision to enrich your expertise at a time when it is most advantageous to do so.

Preparing for Mathematics To do well in exams requiring mathematical calculations or the application of formulas to solve problems, such as in subjects like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Accounting, as well as for some units in subjects like Sociology, Economics, or Philosophy, requires a sound understanding of the concepts behind the formulas and techniques as 97


well as extensive practice in applying them. Your preparations should involve seeking out the clearest explanatory texts that not only make the formulas and techniques completely comprehensible but also allow you to learn the background and reasons for the formulas – how and why they were derived and for what purposes. This additional knowledge deepens your conceptual command of the subject, thereby contributing to creating the expertise that improves confidence and exam performance. In addition, the formulas are far easier to learn and apply when they mean something tangible. The mind can learn, recall and apply abstract ideas but it craves meaning or relevance, so if you provide it with meaning or relevance you will find that it is able to learn and command more ideas and more complex ideas. To practise mathematical problems, you need to arm yourself with additional relevant textbooks and many past exam papers, so you can do as many applications of the formulas or techniques that you can find. Ideally, these textbooks and copies of past exam papers should also provide the answers to the problems and clearly display the calculations used to reach them. It will also help if you access the examiners’ reports for past exams so you can identify the difficulties experienced by previous students and, being forewarned, take the necessary steps to avoid them. This range of instructive material will enable you to effectively work your way through a problem if you experience any difficulties while practising. Do the exercises again and again until you are so thoroughly acquainted with the formulas and techniques that they have become second nature to you. Your purpose is to reach the stage when you feel that you can competently handle any possible problem and nothing about the topic can surprise you. Furthermore, this practice will steadily add to the speed in which you can complete your calculations. This will mean that you can competently perform all that will be asked of you in the time allotted to complete the exam paper. When looking at past exam papers, in addition to practising the problems in them, it helps to scrutinise them for patterns, noting what the exam papers had in common or how they differed. These patterns may allow you to make cautious predictions about the kinds of exercises to be included on the forthcoming exam. However, you 98


need to bear in mind that there is always the chance for surprises. This is most likely to happen in the more difficult parts of the paper that are intended to distinguish the best performing students from the very good students. For those highly competitive students who have already achieved an impressive degree of competence in their calculations but who are seeking an additional edge, it can also help to acquaint yourself with the exercises in old textbooks with which your examiners would be familiar from their school or university days. It is not unusual for examiners to plunder old textbooks for problems to set in exams. If you are familiar with this material, you will be at an advantage. Similarly, it can help to acquaint yourself with information in the guidebooks, journals and bulletins intended for your educators about the latest trends in teaching subjects like Mathematics. This espionage will enable you to determine the knowledge that your educators are expected to have in order to teach you, which will provide you with valuable clues as to what you need to know to do exceptionally well in an exam on the subject.

Preparing for foreign languages The preparation for doing well in exams on foreign languages is similar to that for mathematics, in that it involves a great deal of practice. The study of foreign languages is approached on several complementary fronts that collectively enable you to recognise, comprehend and use the language. This involves a combination of two contrasting approaches to learning. The first approach involves studying in a systematic and analytical fashion, while the second approach involves what amounts to an immersion in the language and its corresponding culture, a process that contributes to the acquisition of practical knowledge and skill through experience. Because the foreign language has to be understood technically, it is necessary to use clearly expressed textbooks to become thoroughly acquainted with the rules of grammar, such as the formulas for conjugating verbs etc., to enable you to manoeuvre competently through the modes of expression that you may be expected to comprehend or use. In addition, this process should be complemented by producing lists of vocabulary for various topics, 99


which should include, along with many standard or grammatically formal terms and expressions, a range of idiomatic and even some colloquial words and phrases to enrich and enliven your expression to make it appear contemporary. This process is considerably aided by making yourself reasonably well acquainted with the culture, history and current events of the nations that use that language, a research process that brings the language to life to make it more meaningful and therefore more comprehensible. Not only does this knowledge make the slow process of acquiring technical competence and an expansive vocabulary seem worthwhile, it can increase your chance of guessing the meaning of any unfamiliar words and expressions used in an exam that may take you by surprise, despite the thoroughness of your preparations, because you can comprehend the context in which they were used. In addition to reading and writing, there are also the listening and speaking dimensions of the foreign language to consider. The achievement of competence in listening-comprehension and in the pronunciation of the accent involves practice and experience, which can only be built up steadily over time by hearing the language often and by speaking it as much as possible, ideally by interacting with fluent speakers. In addition to compiling study notes that cover the grammar usage and vocabulary that is relevant to the various topics to be covered in the exam, the preparation requires extensive repetitive practice to make the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation become second nature. This involves translating passages in the relevant textbooks again and again until you no longer need to check dictionaries or vocabulary lists. It also involves repeatedly composing passages of writing on the same topic so that you become thoroughly competent at using the relevant words and phrases. If you have become aware of several words and phrases that your examiner prefers or finds particularly impressive, then make sure that you become sufficiently familiar with them to use them appropriately. To do well in oral exams, you need to practise pronouncing and interacting in that language until you have achieved a relaxed and confident manner when listening or speaking. While a broad knowledge of a foreign language is helpful for doing an exam on it, to achieve the highest results you need to prepare 100


specifically for the requirements of that exam. You need to appreciate that while the learning of a foreign language is wide-ranging in its scope and scale, the learning done for a foreign language course is far more specific, while the learning done in preparation for a foreign language exam has to be even more specific. It is therefore necessary to be thoroughly acquainted with the exam format and the nature of past exam papers so you can tailor your efforts to successfully do precisely what will be asked of you in the manner in which it will be best appreciated. When preparing for exams in foreign languages or any other subject it helps to acknowledge the following maxim: A great deal of effort usually goes into producing what appears to be an effortless performance, just as years of hard work usually go into producing what appears to be an overnight success.

Short-term preparation: Six, four, or two weeks prior to the exam season At about six, four or two weeks before the commencement of the exam season, which is usually a period when the course work is winding down or concluded and your remaining assignments are nearing completion or have been completed, you begin your more intense and focused short-term preparations for the impending exams. If you have performed consistently well that year in assignment work and in the preparation of study notes, you will soon appreciate that this steady string of accomplishments has set up a positive productive momentum for the conclusion of the preparatory process for the exams, which will involve completing and then fine-tuning your study notes as well as refining your skills to consolidate your expertise. On the other hand, for those students whose preparations by this stage are worryingly incomplete, or who have experienced some setbacks and disappointments during the year, the weeks prior to the exam season provide a timely invaluable opportunity to turn the situation around by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. By rising to the challenge, no matter 101


the odds, if you put in a determined final effort you can often surprise yourself at how significantly you can improve in such a short period and how well you can do as a consequence. This is the time to give full reign to your hunger for success. A defeatist attitude can be a worse obstacle than patchy preparations up to this point. When the course work concludes, this intermediate period or lull before the exams is an extraordinary time in the school or academic calendar that can be seized as an extraordinary opportunity to become, through your focused determination, a time of extraordinary accomplishment. If the exams are likely to be demanding and require students to measure up, then that is what you need to do. While a hunger for success is the ideal emotion to drive you forward at this stage, curiously, a more negative emotion, such as the worry or fear of falling short of your objective, is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you harness this emotion to motivate you to do whatever you can to succeed. If your long-term preparations have been effective, your experience of any negative emotions at this stage is likely to be minimal or nonexistent. However, if you still have much to do to prepare, and you are consequently experiencing negative emotions like worry or fear, then make them work for you rather than against you by subordinating them to your campaign. For example, these negative feelings can be treated as a wake-up call, to alert you to the overwhelming need to do what is necessary to transform the situation. Interestingly, you will notice that if you listen to this wake-up call and rise to the challenge, you can measure the success of your efforts by a corresponding reduction in these negative feelings. If you feel any fear, do not be afraid of it, make it work for you. It makes sense that if you are not relaxed about the exams, which is typically the case with most students, then do not relax, instead swing decisively into action.

Clearing the decks To maximise your opportunity for success, these crucial weeks before the exam season commences need to be freed as much as possible from any potential distractions so that they can be solely devoted to preparations. This is a process that I describe as ‘clearing the decks’. 102


Firstly, to ensure that the preparatory study will be uninterrupted, it is essential that any lingering unfinished assignment work is completed as soon as possible. In addition to this, your personal life needs to be temporarily reorganised, which usually involves the postponement or cancellation of any extracurricular commitments to family, friends or clubs that could distract you from the task at hand. This is not a time for living something approximating a balanced life. Instead, it needs to be a period of intense focused commitment, prioritising one task (the exams) to the exclusion of all others, a process that may not be easy. Keep in mind that despite the toughness of these decisions, they can be crucial. The campaign can be won or lost at this point. You should prepare with a diligent attitude that will ensure that when you later look back on this phase of your campaign you will have a clear conscience, because there was nothing more you could have done or done better. In addition to the absence of distracting secondary commitments or appointments, ideally you also need to create a study environment that can provide uninterrupted stability and tranquility. Fortunately, most family members and friends can be very understanding and cooperative in these circumstances. They will later deserve your profound gratitude because they would have made a significant contribution to your progress. However, if circumstances beyond your control have given you something less than a stable and tranquil study environment, then it is essential that you do what you can to compartmentalise and contain this distraction so that it does not encroach on too much of your precious time until after the exam season. Rather than completely surrender to debilitating emotions, it is helpful to think or act productively to deal with the potentially encroaching problem and to relegate this thought and action to times that you had not allocated for study. This feat of psychological fortitude can be extremely challenging. In some of the more unfortunate circumstances, this is arguably the most difficult challenge that anyone can face, but despite this, you need to keep trying. Be reassured that this compartmentalisation of your thoughts, although very difficult, is not impossible, although it can require heroic self-discipline and effort to minimise the costs to your study campaign. If you can valiantly 103


maintain a straight course through the storm, you will have all the more reason to be proud when you eventually come through it. If you persevere, you may find that in the process, you have acquired an additional psychological skill that makes you more formidable. Furthermore, you may reassuringly discover that many crises that you once thought could derail your campaign can be prevented from doing so. You can often surprise yourself at how well you can perform in adverse circumstances if you apply the will and determination that is required. Even if your circumstances are less than ideal for sustained study, if you grit your teeth and rise to the challenge you can prevail, and with every crisis that you face and overcome you will progressively become stronger and more unshakeable. In addition, if facing a distracting crisis during your exam preparations, it will help your cause to brief your educators and examiners about your predicament so that they can become sympathetically involved and take your problems into account when assessing your exam papers. Formal applications for special consideration should be lodged just in case the results are borderline, so the examiners have a justification to assess you more favourably. However, beware that special consideration can be unreliable and may fall short of producing the desired outcome. Usually, examiners award some extra grades in an attempt to produce a result for the exam paper that is consistent with the student’s past performances, so a student with a track record of achievement is better positioned to receive a more favourable consideration if the exam result is uncharacteristically lower than what the examiners would have expected. Students may not be able to rely on special consideration to achieve their objectives if they need a result that is higher than their average grades in assignments that year. While applications for special consideration can be helpful, they should be seen by students as something to complement rather than replace the hard work and self-discipline that is necessary to achieve one’s objectives in adverse circumstances. To maximise your chances of success, keep working as diligently as you can, virtually as if the application for special consideration had not been made.

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Further preparations When you commence your short-term preparations for the exams, you need to again comprehensively reflect upon your strengths and weaknesses and how well positioned you are to face the impending challenges. This will allow you to prepare a study schedule to enable you to maximise your productive use of the available time to do what it takes to be as ready as you can be when the exam season commences. However, if you determine that you need more time than you have available, then you may have to act decisively to give yourself more time. Generally, it is not advisable to skip classes, lectures or tutorials but if you are desperate for the additional time needed to make vitally important preparations then it may be necessary. In these circumstances, the benefits to your study campaign from the additional preparations done at home may significantly outweigh any costs of missing the classes. What pays in grades should always take priority. While university students can take additional time off lectures and tutorials virtually at will, school students may require the cooperation of their parents, for example in writing the necessary parental excuse notes to the school authorities to cover for your absence. These actions can add more precious full days to your study time when previously you only had evenings available. In addition to the assistance of your family, others in your support network can be drawn on to help you to prepare study notes in limited time. In such emergencies, students can swap or share copies of study notes or essays relevant to the exam topics with friends to enable each other to prepare much more effectively than if each of you were left to your own devices. For example, if the course was poorly scheduled by your educators and the class was left with insufficient time after the assignments were completed to prepare properly for the exams, then this trading of notes may be a life saver. When seeking to trade study notes, if you have the impressive products of a year’s hard work at hand and a track record of having shown goodwill towards others, then this will be of great assistance. This is because if your study notes and relevant essays are of a high quality, then the more capable students may be more willing to swap copies of their high-quality notes 105


for yours. Meanwhile, the more generous you are or have been with friends in need, due to the law of reciprocity, the more likely others are inclined to be generous to you in your hour of need. Displays of goodwill often generate goodwill in others. Meanwhile, your capacity for hard work and quality work will tend to attract similarly inclined people to you, which may be advantageous if you need a helping hand from competent people. Nevertheless, if you have traded to acquire study notes, it is important that you do not just file them away until you need to study them the day before the exam. It is important that you make these acquired study notes your own by reworking the material to suit you, so they reflect your ways of organising ideas and expressing yourself. For example, you may summarise some points or elaborate on others by adding further explanation or additional research material. In this fashion, you will produce study notes that are more suited to your tastes and needs and, as a bonus, develop a degree of expertise from them that will increase your ability to later perform well using this knowledge. When pressed for time in their preparations, some students contemplate cutting corners regarding the quality of their study notes. If students perceive that they have no other option, it is crucial that this corner cutting be minimal, perhaps involving deriving notes from one high-quality textbook rather than several. Only if these compromises are minor can students remain in the running for a high grade. As we noted earlier, you cannot get an ‘A+’ in an exam by studying from ‘C+’ notes. When students cut corners, they increase the risk of cutting grades, becoming precariously dependent on the hope that the exam questions will not be too demanding. The more corners that are cut, the more that this worrying risk becomes a certainty and the more likely lower grades become. Once the quality of the study notes drops too far, serious problems in exam performance inevitably follow, and the farther the quality of the study notes fall, the more serious these shortfalls in performance become. Of course, without any notes to study from, a student cannot complete the exam at all. However, the cutting of corners regarding the quality of the study notes should be treated as study for survival, intended to produce a pass. It is not the 106


kind of study that can achieve high grades. To a significant degree, your performance in the exam will only be as good as your study notes can facilitate, so the better your study notes are, the better your performance is likely to be. If you want to succeed, you do not compromise what is important. More than at any other time during the year, time allocation during this more intense period of short-term preparation needs to be predominantly task oriented so you can maintain the schedule that you have determined will enable you to be ready when you need to be. For example, if you have to produce study notes from five chapters in five days, then on each of those days you do not stop working until that designated chapter has been completed, even if the notes for one of those chapters take longer to produce than the time you usually allocate for an evening’s study. In general, the amount of time that you allocate for study during this intense period of preparation is maximised. This intense preparation in the weeks preceding and during the exam season is sometimes referred to as cramming. As we have noted earlier, this intense study can be the most productive period of the academic year. However, to my continued astonishment, some teachers advise students not to cram. I have always found this advice bizarre. It is the equivalent of telling students not to try their best when their best is required of them. When I was a high school student, I had the insight to ignore this preposterous advice and instead exercise my common sense and rise to face the challenges that the exams presented. So did virtually every other student I observed who did well in exams. I strongly suggest that you do the same. If these teachers’ criticism of cramming means that disciplined systematic long-term preparations are extremely valuable, then they are correct on that point, as we have already acknowledged. This is especially true regarding subjects like Mathematics or foreign languages that require the steady building of knowledge and skills over time. However, this does not discount the fact that this long-term preparation can be most effectively capitalised upon by engaging in intense study in the weeks before and during the exam season. Meanwhile, for those students who have found themselves to have fallen precariously behind to be less well prepared than they would have preferred, then intense study or cramming 107


represents their only option for success. You can imagine that if two students of equivalent ability fell behind schedule in their preparations before the exams, and upon realising this, one decided to cram while the other did not change his study routine. It would be expected that the student who crammed during the final weeks is far more likely to do better. Cramming is not a mistake. It is to be commended as evidence of one’s ability to rise to the challenge. It is an expression of the effort that often brings the higher grades than would have been otherwise. As a private tutor, I have encouraged many students to rise to the challenge posed by the exams by putting in an intense effort in the weeks before the exam season. Consequently, I often share with these dedicated students their delight as they dramatically and rapidly improve to reach a stage of confident and capable readiness that contributed directly to their subsequent success. The question is not whether or not to cram, but rather how to cram effectively, which involves disciplined systematic study. This disciplined systematic study includes the strategy of preparing study notes for the topics that you need and can use, and no more. For example, if you have an exam in a subject like History, which requires you to answer three essay questions, each on different topics, then you prepare study notes on three topics and no more. Do not try to prepare a fourth topic in an attempt to have a topic ‘in reserve’, as some wellintentioned teachers recommend, just in case you are not happy with one of the questions on the exam. Although, at first this may sound like sensible advice, on closer reflection it reveals itself to be something far less. The additional time and effort necessary to prepare study notes for an extra topic would be better spent on improving the quality of the study notes on the three topics that are essential, to make these study notes of such a high standard that they can enable you to answer any possible question that you can be asked. If these study notes are sufficiently perceptive and comprehensive then you are unlikely to be fazed by any exam question, although of course there would be some questions that you would find more appealing than others. Besides, if your study notes on the three required topics are sufficiently perceptive and comprehensive then the preparation of a fourth (reserve) topic is unnecessary. In addition, the short-term memory can only hold a 108


certain amount of information, so if you study an inessential fourth topic, you are reducing the space available for information that would be better used to carry more knowledge about the topics that are required. Prepare the few topics that you require as well as you can, rather than prepare many topics less perfectly. However, in a subject like Politics, where the exam includes a section of short-answer questions covering the entire course, which is followed by two essay questions on specific topics, then the preparation for the short-answer questions will inevitably furnish you with additional options regarding the choice of essays, without constituting a cost to you through a misallocation of time and effort. Nevertheless, you will probably find that if you prepared the two topics for those essays sufficiently well, you will have no need to resort to doing a question on another topic. Another short-coming of this well-intentioned but counterproductive reserve topic strategy is motivational. The reserve topic strategy is reminiscent of a person who has improved their diet and lost weight but keeps their old clothes in larger sizes just in case they revert to their bad eating habits. This attitude, sadly, makes defeat more likely. If you take away that soft place to fall, then you force yourself to galvanise your efforts to prevail. Sometimes it is very wise to have a plan B, but at other times, it is counter-productive. Motivationally, it is more profitable to prepare to win than to prepare to come second.

Perfecting study notes and skills For those students who have engaged in a steady process of long-term preparation, then the weeks prior to the exam season are spent finetuning their study notes and practising and perfecting their skills so that they are ready to perform at their peak. This process may involve, if it has not been done already, synthesising different sets of notes from different sources on the same topic so they tell one story. It may also involve editing the notes for a subject, so they can be effectively studied in the time available before that exam, for either the day, half a day, night, or half a night before. On the other hand, it may involve enriching the quality of your study notes with additional valuable information that you hope will be rewarded by examiners. 109


Perfecting study notes Most students would be aware that when preparing study notes to produce essay responses for exam questions in a subject like English, they are expected to support many of the points they make in their arguments with primary evidence or quotations drawn from the relevant novel, play, poem or film being examined. In response to this requirement, some students extract a long list of quotations, which is intended to serve as a supplement to their study notes on the themes or meaning of the text. They will later try to learn these quotations out of context, attempting to memorise this list virtually as if it is a long abstract poem. Not only is this process extremely difficult, it is counter-productive. Instead, students should incorporate these additional quotations into the relevant sections of their study notes so they provide additional support to the analytical points already made in the notes. While doing so, students should make the extra effort to fully explain what each quotation means and illustrates rather than leave these quotations sitting perplexingly unexplained and isolated on the page. This incorporative and explanatory process should also be followed when adding illustrative examples drawn from current events to the study notes for subjects like Politics, International Relations, Economics or Legal Studies. This process of incorporation will give this added material a vitally important informative context. This means that these quotations or examples from current events will have greater meaning for you, thereby increasing your understanding and adding to your expertise. Consequently, they will make more of an impression on your memory and therefore be more likely to become readily available to you as usable knowledge when you later need them. This is because they would have become fully integrated into your understanding of the analytical points in your study notes, probably avoiding the need to later engage in an additional process of memorisation. As a result, it is likely that if you know an analytical point, you will also automatically know the illustrative quotations or examples that accompany it. Here is how this principle works. Imagine that you have to learn the following number: 1914191819391945. Although this would be difficult, it is possible, 110


but it would require considerable effort. Instead, imagine how much easier it would be to learn the following four numbers derived from that original number: 1914, 1918, 1939, and 1945. These numbers are the dates of the beginning or end of the two most significant wars of the twentieth century. By comparison, little or no effort is required to learn these numbers because your knowledge of them is integral to their context and meaning. If you are familiar with those wars, you are likely to know or be able to easily learn and then recall those dates. The attempt by some students to memorise a long list of quotations from a novel is roughly equivalent to trying to learn that long meaningless number that was constructed from running those four dates together. Students should primarily seek understanding rather than memorisation. This is because understanding facilitates and enhances memorisation. Understanding also equips you to respond to specific exam questions with the flexibility and precision of an expert, which is our aim. A reliance on memorisation, on the other hand, tends to program students to retrieve the material in the order in which they memorised it, making students vulnerable to the risk of producing what appear to be stock, generalised or catch-all exam responses, forfeiting the focus and relevance required to produce the most highly rewarded answers. In addition, excessive attention to memorisation tends to distort the perception of students regarding what is rewarded in exams, often without them realising it, leading them to mistakenly believe that they will be rewarded mainly for what they have memorised rather than for the perceptiveness of their answers. Consequently, I recommend that this awareness of the value of achieving understanding rather than memorisation influence you throughout the preparation and perfection of your study notes. Memorisation can be helpful and it does have a minor role to play. However, this is during the final stage of the preparations immediately before the exams.

Practising skills In addition to perfecting your study notes, you also need to perfect your performance skills. This requires practice. Some students have such faith in the positive transformative power of practice that they do not consider that it can sometimes be detrimental unless it is done 111


properly. For example, if practice is done extensively before the study notes are completed or perfected, this can run the risk of programming a student to perform at the level of these incomplete or imperfect notes. For practice to be most beneficial, it needs to pass through successive stages to avoid the risk of becoming counter-productive. Ideally, practice should commence after the study notes are completed or perfected for that topic, so you are using this practice to train yourself to perform at your best with the best material. The practising begins with a patient, thorough, constructive form of practice, which can later be followed by a more vigorous practising against the clock. This initial stage allows you to calmly and patiently apply the knowledge in your study notes to the formulation of high-quality answers to set questions, often derived from past exam papers. At this stage, practice involves trying to produce the best performance possible, which involves refining your skills through trial and error and learning to make optimum use of your resources of knowledge in whatever time it takes to do so. For those students concerned about the pace of their performance, keep in mind that at this stage in your preparations, the material in your study notes is unlikely to be fully known and at your finger tips, and you may not yet be in tune with its most profitable modes of application. This will inevitably slow your performance. Do not worry, this situation is understandable and a necessary stage through which you need to pass. Be patient. With this initial practice, it is important that you take the care to become acquainted with using this material at a measured pace that is conducive to thorough learning and the acquisition of mastery. If you rush, you will only hamper your capacity to improve your command over this material. Interestingly, this initial thoroughness involved in producing your best performance lays the foundation for later swifter performances as a result of your increased command over the subject matter. When you sense that you are achieving mastery, then you can test yourself against the clock to fine-tune the rhythm and pace of your performance so that you can comfortably complete the exam paper in the time provided. Again, I warn you to beware that if you attempt practising against the clock too soon, before you have achieved a command over the material, you risk programming yourself to perform 112


at your second best, according to the limitations and mistakes of these early performances, thereby forfeiting the opportunity to achieve full mastery over the high-quality material in the study notes. Under the adrenaline-charged pressure of exam conditions, the mind tends to fall back on the most drilled or rehearsed response, so students need to make sure that their most effective performance is their most rehearsed. In addition, some students can become so concerned about the need to swiftly produce answers within a limited time during an exam that they can unfortunately neglect to focus on the need to produce the highquality answers that are likely to be rewarded best. To be fully effective, you should aim for the practice to increase both the quality and the pace of the performance, and if you practise following the procedure that I have outlined, speed need not be at the expense of quality. When practising writing essays, you should also keep in mind that it is highly likely that you will perform much faster during the exam due to the impact of adrenaline and the fact that you have studied the material the day before so it is at your finger tips without you having to pause too long to reflect or recall. Once you have improved to reach an optimum performance, you can practise a couple more times to confirm that this is your new standard. If one of these practice sessions turns out to be below your best, then return to the thorough form of practice until mastery returns. Then when your highest standard is again achieved, practise several more times to use this drill to ensure that a consistent performance at your highest standard becomes second nature. With this achieved, you can confidently move on to practise the next task. Remember that when practising, you need to determine whether you intend to improve the quality of the performance, or the speed of the performance, or to consolidate the standard of the performance, and then adopt the appropriate form of practice to achieve your objective.

Practising essay writing We noted earlier that subjects involving mathematical calculations or communication in foreign languages involve a great deal of practice. So, during the weeks immediately prior to the exams, students studying these subjects will find themselves predominantly engaged in practising. 113


In addition, practice is also helpful for subjects involving essay writing. Ideally, when preparing for exams featuring essays, you should prepare yourself to answer any of the three types of essay questions that you can be asked (which I initially outlined in Volume 1). This will enable you to reach a stage of confidence so that no question can intimidate you. The first type of essay questions are intelligent questions conceived by intelligent educators that seem to go to the heart of the topic or issue or debate, or relate directly to the key theme of the text being studied; or they focus on a clearly identifiable aspect of a topic or issue or debate, or on a sub-theme of a text. For students who have produced high-quality study notes that are both perceptive and comprehensive, questions of this type will appear to be a give-away. They are therefore the ideal type of essay question with which to start your practising because they invite students to become more acquainted with expressing answers that go to the heart of the meaning of the text or topic. The second type of essay questions are those that are consciously designed to be different to last year’s question on the same topic, or different to the other questions on a list of options. They can seem like sensible questions that have been given a deliberate twist, or like ones that deliberately focus on a less obvious aspect of the topic. Consequently, this type of question can sometimes initially appear novel and throw students a little off balance until calm reflection reveals that these questions are relevant to the main or other significant concerns of the topic, only they focus on less obvious dimensions or look at the topic from a different angle. With this type of question, students need to bring the focus of the question back onto the relevant theme or dimension of the topic, then discuss this theme or dimension of the topic in terms of what is asked in the question. It is beneficial to practise this type of question so you can confidently handle those that are less than ideal. Once you can deal with them, then you can progress to practising the third type of question, which is even more challenging. The third type of essay questions are those that are written by educators who either do not know their subject well or how to intelligently phrase a question. This type should not to be 114


confused with questions that deliberately include statements that are incorrect to stimulate students to offer a correction in their answer. Instead, these questions are noticeably more strange. At their worst, they appear to be irrational or their relevance to the major or minor concerns of the topic is tenuous at best. When doing exams, this type of question is best avoided by selecting another option, but sometimes there may be no choice, so it helps to practise dealing with them. Nevertheless, for those students who are well prepared and who have become sufficiently expert, questions of this type are well within your grasp. These questions, more than any other, test the mettle of students and the quality of their study notes. In an exam, this type of question is most likely to disorientate many of the less prepared and less expert students. They are likely to be intimidated, responding to the question with a bout of insecure, panicky self-criticism, which would probably proceed along the following lines: ‘I thought I had prepared so well, yet they still managed to come up with a question that I did not expect’. Intimidated, they often reorientate their thinking on the spot, to produce an answer that takes the novel or curious direction implied by the question in a manner that contravenes their previous, and probably sound, thinking on the topic. By contrast, those students who are sufficiently well prepared and confident in their expertise would respond quite differently. With a world-weary cynicism bolstered by an unflinching confidence in their expertise, they would simply recognise that the educator who composed the question was off target and, although a more intelligent question would have been preferred, they would understand that handling this question will simply involve applying the appropriate technique. These confident well-prepared students would approach the situation according to the following reassuring principle. Do not let the question intimidate you. Instead, you should intimidate the question. To effectively deal with this type of question in a scholarly fashion, you should recontextualise the demands of the question in the manner that an expert would. You redefine or reorientate the question to position yourself to interpret the specific demands of the question in the context of a more relevant theme or argument or issue or dimension of the topic. In the introduction to your essay, you would 115


tactfully justify your approach by stating something like the following: Although the author does touch upon the point [referred to in the question] several times in his novel, his principal concern was in expressing [his main theme] and he only touched upon this point in this context. This essay shall examine this point in the context of [this main theme] because it is in this context that this point can be best appreciated. It will help if you adopt a polite, respectful tone as you redefine the question, to avoid any chance of offending your examiner or making them feel that you have strayed from the topic, which you have not done. You then respond to the redefined or reorientated question, taking care that as you discuss the relevant theme or dimension of the topic that you highlighted in your introduction, you specifically address the points demanded by the question. This technique is very effective in almost all circumstances involving this type of question, being especially effective in externally assessed exams where the (unseen) examiners will usually be very impressed by this confident form of response. However, when the exam is internally assessed and you suspect that your teacher, who is the examiner, is just as likely to be as intimidated and misled by an off-target question as the less than well-prepared and less knowledgeable students, then in this circumstance, you will have no choice but to resort to your auxiliary notes (which cover the teacher’s opinions) to imitate what would be this teacher’s (flawed) understanding of the question. When doing this, it is important to not let this experience be disconcerting, just focus on getting the job done, getting your ‘A’, and getting out of there. Practice provides very helpful training for dealing with this potentially disorienting third type of question. In addition, the more examples of the different types of essay questions that you practise, the more confident you will become. When training my students to be ready to face an exam that features essay questions, we practise doing a couple of complete essays to fine-tune the student’s skill in fully expressing an answer. However, for the most part, we abbreviate the practice of doing essay responses to only providing introductions and 116


plans. This is in the understanding that once you have brainstormed and planned how you will present your argument and evidence, and then written the introduction that includes your contention, defines the key terms and provides an outline of the argument to follow, then you have effectively addressed the question. This abbreviated style of practising enables students to experience responding to many more essay questions than would otherwise be possible, so instead of practising two or three questions, students can practise answering ten or twenty in a relatively short period. When sufficiently practised, students reassuringly discover, to their delight, that high-quality, highly rewarded essay responses are potentially achievable with any type of question. Moreover, these students also discover that the process of categorising essay questions, as either intelligent and on target, as a question with a twist, or as poorly conceived and off target, is itself empowering and an additional boost to their confidence. However, much depends on the quality of the student’s study notes and their corresponding degree of expertise. If students are sufficiently expert, which is the intention of exam preparations, they can avoid being intimidated and answer any essay question impressively. When you have determined that you can effectively handle all three types of essay questions, you will be thoroughly prepared and ready to go into the exam room quietly confident that it will be almost impossible for an essay question to faze you. Even if a question is difficult, think how much more difficult it will be for those students who have not prepared as well as you have done, and how much the quality of your answer will shine in comparison.

Practising short-answer questions As well as practising essay responses, you may also find it helpful to fine-tune your skills at completing short-answer questions. Shortanswer questions are another way of testing a student’s knowledge and skills. In general, if a student has achieved a sufficient degree of expertise while producing quality study notes, they are positioned to do well in this form of examination. However, practice can improve 117


your performance with short-answer questions by helping you to focus your thinking to grasp the essence of each aspect of a topic that is being questioned, and it can also help you to effectively express yourself fully yet succinctly. These qualities can greatly enhance your ability to consistently receive the highest allocation of grade points for each answer. Exams involving short-answer questions are particularly advantageous to students doing humanities subjects that are otherwise examined by essay questions. This is because most examiners in these subjects are traditionally reluctant to award full marks to even the best essay responses. However, this predisposition is fortunately often absent from the assessment of short-answer questions, so the achievement of a perfect score is enticingly possible. Answering short-answer questions can be more demanding than many students assume, requiring sufficient focus and discipline to ensure that they win the full allocation of grade points. When responding to short-answer questions, some students fall into the trap of giving too much attention to the word ‘short’ rather than ‘answer’, producing responses that are compromised by being too brief or poorly expressed. Meanwhile, some other students fall into the trap of attempting to produce detailed or elaborate responses that are more akin to an essay, only to find that they have neither the space nor time to adequately complete their answer. Short-answer responses require disciplined focus regarding the conceptualisation of an answer, and then precision in expression when presenting it. To obtain the full allocation of grade points for a response, a short-answer needs to be direct and succinct, yet at the same time sufficiently thorough. It is a balancing act. In addition, when presenting the necessary supporting evidence or illustrative examples for a short-answer, students need to be precise rather than detailed or elaborate. Furthermore, to maximise the positive impact of your answer on the examiner, it also needs to be expressed grammatically in full sentences rather than incompletely in abbreviated points or phrases. Here is an example of an effective response to a short-answer question worth two points, derived from a year 12 Politics exam: Question: What does the term, ‘backbench member’ mean in Australian politics? 118


Answer: The term backbench member, or ‘backbencher’, refers to a member of the parliament who does not have a ministerial appointment or perform the role of an opposition spokesman in an area of ministerial responsibility. According to convention, because the front row of seating in the parliamentary chamber is reserved for the ministers and opposition spokesmen, the backbenchers occupy the rear seating, hence the literal terminology. Clues as to the degree of thoroughness required for a short-answer question can be found in the grade points allocated to it, with two point questions, like the one above, usually requiring more concise answers than, for example, eight point questions. Meanwhile, the corresponding space that is provided in the answer booklet is another clue as to how concise or comprehensive the answer needs to be. Generally, examiners provide only a couple of lines for students to answer the more straightforward one or two grade point questions, while more space, perhaps a third or half a page or more, can be provided for six, eight or ten grade point questions where more analysis is expected. When assessing the demands of a short-answer question, students can bear in mind that it is traditional for examiners to allocate grade points to a question roughly according to how many points or pieces of information they require in a student’s answer. For example, an answer to a question worth two grade points that presents two pertinent points or pieces of information would probably be awarded the full allocation of grade points for that question, while a question worth six grade points would usually require six points to be made in the answer to receive the full allocation grade points. However, while the allocation of grade points to a question is a guide as to what is required in an answer, it is only an approximate one, and it should be exercised with the discretion of common sense. For example, if there are three interrelated dimensions (or points) to an answer that is allocated only two grade points, do not stop your answer short after you have made your second point. Instead, finish expressing your answer properly, regardless of the grade point allocation. Just as when responding to essay questions, when responding to short-answer questions students need to pay close attention to 119


determining precisely what is asked. Basic questions, often for one or two grade points, usually ask students to ‘name’, ‘define’, ‘list’ or ‘identify’ something. These questions usually require concise factual responses. More challenging questions, often worth more grade points, usually ask students to ‘describe’, ‘discuss’, ‘explain’, ‘outline’, ‘account for’, ‘justify’ or ‘evaluate’ something. This requires the provision of some analysis, sometimes ‘with examples’. Depending on precisely what is asked, this could involve an assessment of the pros and cons or the strengths and weaknesses of something, the clarification of a complex idea, the presentation of a pertinent revealing comparison or contrast, the sketch of the nature of a debate or controversy, an appreciation of varying perspectives, the presentation of the reasons for something having happened, the establishment of a hypothetical case as to why something is likely to happen, or an insightful summarisation of the main factors involved in something. Although these questions may appear at first glance to require students to conceptualise answers on the spot, if you have thoroughly prepared, there will often be little or no need to engage in any new conceptual thinking or evaluation during the exam. It would have been done previously, when researching and compiling your study notes. During the exam, you would simply need to recall and fashion this information to precisely fit the requirements of the question. Meanwhile, if taken a little by surprise by a question, and you find that you do have to conceptualise or evaluate something on the spot, this process is also relatively straightforward, being a matter of drawing on your relevant expertise on the topic to determine then fashion the most appropriate answer. In this circumstance, sometimes it may help to spend a few moments brainstorming to clarify your thoughts before you commit them to the examination booklet. In addition, while grade points are often allocated according to the length of the answer required, they can also be allocated according to the examiner’s concept of the difficulty of the question, with more grade points being allocated to questions that deal with more complex or analytical subject matter. With these questions, students usually initially win some grade points for covering the basic aspects of the topic and then win the additional allocation of grade points when they also deal with 120


its more complex dimensions. In addition, with the more challenging questions, students may increase their chances of winning those extra grade points if they impress the examiner by providing interesting relevant examples to support their analysis. However, when completing short-answer questions, students need to keep in mind that the bias of the examiners remains just as significant in the assessment of these questions as with essay questions. Generally, if the exam paper is internally assessed by your class teacher, the teacher as examiner usually likes to see their own ideas and the examples taught in class represented in their students’ answers. If students seek to provide additional, interesting alternate examples to support their answers, then ideally they should be presented to complement the teacher’s material rather than displace it. If you have come up with something new and interesting, then present it in a tactful way that impresses the teacher by appearing to have benefitted from their lessons rather than surpassed them. To do otherwise risks being perceived as unappreciative of the teacher’s wisdom or effort. However, with external assessment involving (unseen) examiners, they are far more likely to be pleasantly surprised and appreciative of any interesting or novel examples used by students to support their arguments. Since they did not teach the students whom they are assessing, their egos are less likely to be offended if they encounter examples in the students’ answers that they did not teach to their classes. It follows that you may need to tailor your practising of short-answer questions to enable you to tailor your performance in the exam to suit the circumstances of your assessment. In general, when practising short-answer questions from past exam papers, keep in mind that examiners, particularly in high school, often feel obliged to avoid repeating questions that appeared in recent years. If one dimension of a topic was covered by a question on last year’s paper, it is likely that another aspect will be covered on this year’s paper. If you have thoroughly prepared your study notes by using quality sources, and reflected carefully on the material as you compiled your notes, you should be well equipped with the necessary information to deal with any exam question. In addition, this scholarly material has other benefits. As well as providing you with much of 121


the knowledge to establish your expertise, it can perform another role by providing instructive demonstrations on how to express yourself effectively when answering short-answer questions. Many students who may be a little perplexed at the prospect of doing short-answer questions may not realise that there are valuable instructive examples all around them that they can emulate. Students will find many well-written definitions in authoritative reference books, such as in specialist subject dictionaries and encyclopedias or in the glossaries of textbooks. In addition, instructively well-written examples of, for example, the ‘evaluation’ or ‘explanation’ of various phenomena can be found in quality textbooks, either in the text of the relevant chapter or in those helpful highlighted boxes that stand apart from the main text and succinctly explain an aspect of a topic. You can scrutinise these passages to determine how the author clearly conceptualised the subject matter and then succinctly expressed himself, and then you can imitate it. There are great opportunities for educating yourself by emulating the work of proficient people.

Practising multiple-choice questions Multiple-choice questions are similar to short-answer questions except that students do not have to write their answer but rather select what they perceive to be the most correct option from a range of alternatives presented by the examiner, choosing either ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, or ‘d’. Many students prefer this form of examination, especially those with poor skills in expression, because they do not have to write. The others appreciate the odds. Those students who do not know the answer to a question have the opportunity to gamble on their choice, with a one-in-four chance of choosing the correct answer, which are better odds than for most games in a casino. Because there is a chance factor involved, a poorly prepared student can, due to luck, pass or do much better than expected. To capitalise on this chance factor with multiplechoice questions, it can pay for students to attempt every question, even those questions that they do not know. Meanwhile, while on the topic of chance, it should be noted that it is also the case that it can be beneficial for students to attempt every short-answer question, including any that 122


they do not know, on the chance that they may say something that is worth at least one out of the allocated grade points. However, students must be wary that the examiners who devise the multiple-choice questions are fully aware of the advantage that students can gain due to the chance factor. Consequently, many examiners are tempted to devise some deliberately tricky questions, for example by producing options designed to initially appear almost identical or equally correct. Fortunately, when faced with such a challenge, there are clever methods students can employ to tip the odds back in their favour. Put simply, multiple-choice questions are not necessarily as easy as some students assume since they test one’s ability to reason logically. However, if students practise doing multiple-choice questions with an effective logical method, they can capitalise on the benefits of this type of examination by avoiding the potential problems. Interestingly, the presentation of options, a factor that most students favour regarding this type of examination, is the source of most of the potential problems involved in undertaking this type of examination. This is because the presentation of options, any options, including false options, can sometimes be cognitively disorientating, serving to prejudice, distort or corrupt an individual’s reasoning process by anchoring them to a line of thought that they may not have otherwise expected or pursued. This confusion can be heightened when presented with several similar options. Sometimes this can leave a student staring bewildered at a couple of apparently correct options that are difficult to distinguish, a dilemma that eventually results in a choice that is not much better than a guess. To avoid the confusing irrationality of the anchoring effect produced by the presence of disorientating options, you should initially attempt to answer a multiple-choice question as if it is a short-answer question. When you read the question, do not look at the optional answers. You may even cover them up. This will allow you to respond to the question directly, on the basis of your knowledge or your capacity to reason with that knowledge. With an answer in mind, you may then look at the options to choose the one that matches what your knowledge or reasoning told you was the right answer. Depending on your level of expertise, this approach should produce accurate answers for most of the multiple-choice questions. 123


However, if some questions remain unanswered, you employ a second line of attack, the process of logical elimination. This involves focusing individually on the merits of each option, testing it logically, progressing one by one, successively eliminating each option until you are left with the answer that is most likely to be correct. Nevertheless, despite the advantages of this two-stage method, there is another factor that you may sometimes have to consider when selecting your answer. Occasionally, multiple-choice questions are poorly composed by an examiner. This usually produces two options that are both logically pertinent, although perhaps for different reasons, possibly including reasons that the examiner may have mistakenly not considered. Unlike when responding to an essay or shortanswer question, with multiple-choice questions you usually have no opportunity to justify your choice of an answer. This means that if faced with such a dilemma, you need to resolve it as best you can by trying to conceptualise the topic and question as you believe your examiner would, perhaps by drawing on your psychological profile of the examiner or your knowledge of the bias of the curriculum. In this fashion, you may bring additional wisdom into play that can increase your chances of making the choice that is most likely to be rewarded. By practising this logical approach to completing multiple-choice questions, you can train yourself to become comfortable with a method that will steer you clear of the potential pitfalls involved in this type of examination to instead ensure that you maximise the benefits.

Preparing for open book exams In an open book exam, students are allowed to bring a designated textbook or dictionary into the exam room. Many students see this policy as a bonus, since it reduces their concern that the expression of an answer may be frustrated by the chance forgetting of a minor fact. This is certainly a benefit. However, open book exams also have potential pitfalls that need to be sensibly avoided if these benefits are capitalised upon. The temptation for students preparing for an open book exam is to complacently expect to rely too heavily on their designated textbook. Consequently, they can take less time to perfect their study notes in the weeks before the exam or make less of an 124


effort to learn them thoroughly the day before, in the belief that there will be an opportunity during the exam to leaf through the textbook to draw on its material. Unfortunately, any research conducted during the exam can often prove to be disastrously slow, preventing students from completing the exam paper. Besides, if the examiners are content to allow students to bring a particular textbook into the exam, it is likely that they will be more interested in rewarding the most analytically insightful and best expressed answers that demonstrate a depth and breadth of knowledge that goes beyond that textbook. Consequently, those students who intend to rely heavily on the contents of the designated textbook could be at a disadvantage. To avoid these pitfalls that can cost students heavily in grades, it makes sense to prepare for an open book exam virtually as if it were not open book, so that you can perform effectively without the designated textbook. Instead, treat the designated textbook as a safety net, as there to catch you just in case some fact slipped your mind. Furthermore, when preparing for an open book exam it is important to check with your examiners regarding their policy on the annotation of the designated textbook. Generally, examiners in high schools tend to confiscate copies of the designated textbook that have been enriched by notes in the margins and on otherwise blank pages, while examiners at university tend to be fairly relaxed about students having added extra notes. If your examiner is tolerant of annotation, then you should take the opportunity during the weeks before the exam to discreetly add whatever notes you feel may be of assistance, to strengthen your safety net. However, when doing this you should keep in mind that the more opportunities that the examiners provide to students to rely less on their short-term memory, the more they are likely to expect from students in terms of the quality of their analysis and argument. Remember that in an open book exam, the better that you are able to perform without needing the designated textbook, the better you will be able to perform with it present.

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Exam options to be avoided For some of the more creative tasks that are examined, in subjects like English, English Literature, Drama, Fine Art or Music, students may be asked to perform in a small group, even though they will be assessed individually and awarded a separate grade that contributes to their final result. However, if asked to perform in a group and there is an option to perform individually, I strongly recommend that you take that option, because assessment as a member of a group carries additional risk for those students who seek the highest grades. Despite the often well-intentioned, sincere but naïve reassurances from teachers that you will be objectively assessed as an individual, it is impossible for the overall quality of the group, or of the performances of other members of that group, to not influence the examiner’s assessment of a particular individual in that group to some degree. When teachers adamantly claim otherwise, it probably means that they are unaware of the degree to which this context affects their assessment of individuals. If a poorly performing classmate compromises the standard of the performance of the group, the examiner virtually cannot help seeing everyone in the group as somewhat compromised. Although it is possible to perform well and be seen to perform well in an under-performing group, you would have noticed that, for example, an actor’s excellent performance in a bad film can earn praise, but it is often unlikely to be appreciated as favourably by critics as an excellent performance in an excellent film. An excellent actor in a bad film is usually complimented for having potential but an excellent actor in an excellent film is hailed as a star. Similarly, you would have also observed that the actors who won Academy awards for the best actor were usually in excellent films rather than bad ones. As a performer in a group, you can be responsible for the quality of your performance but your ability to influence the quality of the performances of the others in the group, who create the context that influences how well you will be assessed, is limited. This wild card factor takes too much out of your control that affects your grade, which is a bad strategy for those who seek the highest results. However, if you have no option but to perform as a member of a group, then make sure that you become a member of a group comprised of the most capable students, so their 126


ability will establish a favourable context for the appreciation of your ability. Remember, successful people succeed more often than others do because they seek to minimise risk.

Planning for the allocation of time during each exam By the time you are involved with your short-term preparations, in the weeks prior to the exam season, you should have become thoroughly acquainted with the format of each exam, including their duration, the tasks involved and the grades allocated to them. With this information at hand, you can plan how you will allocate your time during each exam. When making these vitally important tactical decisions, you have two factors to consider. Firstly, and most importantly, there is the allocation of grades for each of the tasks (their value) and secondly, your perception of their difficulty. It makes sense to allocate more time during the exam to the more valuable tasks that earn the most grades so you can maximise your performance in the areas that will be best rewarded. Although this should be the principal criterion influencing your decisions, it also makes sense to consider allocating more time to tasks that you find more demanding because they would require additional attention to bring your performance up to an impressive standard. However, with many exams, their formats will limit the choices of students regarding time allocation so their decisions will be straightforward. For example, many exams in humanities subjects at high school and university involve producing three essays in three hours, where each essay is worth equivalent grades. In exams like these, it makes sense to allocate an hour to complete each essay. With other exam formats, the more demanding tasks are usually worth more grades, so the two criteria by which you allocate your time will often complement each other rather than conflict. Therefore, decisions to allocate more time to the more demanding tasks usually means that you are simultaneously sensibly allocating more time to the tasks that are worth more grades. For example, in exams for subjects like Economics, you may decide to allocate less time to the less demanding multiple-choice section of the exam that is worth less in grades, to 127


correspondingly devote more time to the more demanding shortanswer section that is worth more in grades. However, your criteria for time allocation may clash on occasions when a demanding section of an exam happens to be allocated fewer grades than other relatively straightforward sections. In this circumstance, a compromise or balance has to be carefully determined. This usually involves subtracting a little time from the less demanding task or tasks and allocating this time to the more demanding task or tasks. When doing this, you need to take care to ensure that this delicate process adds just enough precious minutes to make the more demanding task or tasks more achievable without compromising the time required to maximise the benefits in grades to be earned from the less demanding but better rewarded task or tasks. These decisions are usually so finely balanced that it could be counter-productive to spend an additional minute in the exam over what you have fastidiously allocated to a demanding but less valuable task, so strict discipline will be required during the exam to make this plan successful. This type of time allocation decision may need to be made for an exam in a subject like English, when a demanding clear thinking section of the exam is allocated less grades than the sections requiring essays on the texts that were studied. Your final preparations for the exams, involving the perfection of your study notes and practice to improve your performance at various tasks, should be done in the light of your plan regarding the most effective allocation of exam time. For example, you should prepare study notes that would enable you to produce more extensive essay responses to capitalise on exam formats that allow students an hour to produce an essay. Meanwhile, you may also seek to improve your expertise and skill in areas of an exam that you perceive as more demanding, so you can complete the relevant section in a more advantageous time frame with less chance of compromising your performance in other sections of the exam.

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Familiarising yourself with the venue First-rate exam preparations and expertise on a subject can be undermined at the last minute by a late arrival at an exam venue, which can leave a student flustered and disoriented, and therefore less able to perform at their very best. To avoid this unfortunate circumstance, if you are not familiar with the venue and the major and alternate transport routes, then take the time to do so during this period before the exam season commences. On the day of the exam, this will allow you to organise to leave home to arrive comfortably early, so you can relax and tune into your environment before the exam commences. In addition, it will also give you ample time to accommodate any unforeseen setbacks on the journey, so you can still successfully arrive on time and ready to perform.

Preparation during the exam season The strenuous preparations in the weeks before the exam season are intended to proficiently set you up to make the most of the final and most intense phase of the preparations, which swings into action the day before the first exam is scheduled. The day before an exam is the most precious study time of all, and every usable waking hour of it should be valued. At this stage, the study notes for the first exam should be ready, and the study notes for the other subjects that are examined later should be either ready or almost completed. All of the study during the day before an exam should be totally devoted to the exam (or exams) scheduled for the following day. These final preparations are intense, involving increased focus and effort to make the most productive use of the 24-hour period before the exam commences. This is a time frame determined by the necessity of maximising your use of the limited capacity of the short-term memory, which tends to lose information rapidly after 24 hours (unless the process is reinforced by subsequent repetition). This stage in the preparations requires total devotion to the task at hand. It requires turning the power on your learning dial up to full. The most effective way to learn material for essays, short129


answer or multiple-choice questions is to summarise your study notes. This involves reducing them to mostly key lines, phrases, half sentences and lists in point form. As you would remember, although this process is detrimental to the production of quality study notes, it is extremely effective at this stage in the preparations as a means of learning the material in your notes. The process of carefully reading then summarising the material makes it stick in your mind far more effectively than if you simply read or repeatedly reread the material. Summarising serves to increase your sense of engagement with the material, allowing the physical experience of reworking it into another concise set of notes to produce a more forceful impression on your memory. This summarising also slows the process of going through the material to a pace that is more conducive to thorough comprehension and masterful learning. It also invites you to focus on the most important material and to strengthen your appreciation of the analytical connections between key ideas. This process of preparing for the exam will remind you of the material that you already knew, make the material that you knew imperfectly known better, and allow you to effectively learn the material that you did not know very well. It transforms the information in your study notes into cognitively accessible and therefore usable knowledge. This dramatically reduces the chance of being unable to remember important material during the exam, which is far more likely to happen if a student only reads rather than summarises their study notes. During the exam season, students often find themselves emotionally experiencing what could be called a state of emergency, that enlivened, slightly anxious feeling that accompanies the application of the focused effort required to address a crisis and overcome the threat to your survival. This is normal and natural, and generally not something about which to worry. However, if you have produced quality study notes, as I have advised you to do, then as you quietly study them at your work station by making your summaries, you may notice an unexpectedly pleasurable feeling come over you. Despite the pressure you are under because of the importance of the task at hand and what is at stake, you may find yourself actually enjoying this intense learning. I can remember how surprised I was when this first happened to me, when 130


I was preparing for one of the first exams that I ever attempted, year 9 Australian History. As I sat at my desk I thought, could this really be happening? It felt like a ‘guilty pleasure’. Was this sinful? According to folklore, the study for exams is reputed to be agony, yet here I was enjoying this intense and thorough engagement with interesting subject matter. It was like experiencing the calm in the eye of the storm. The next day, to my surprise, since I was so inexperienced and had no idea what to expect, I performed very well in the exam. As I gained more experience doing exams, I noticed a pattern. If the study notes for the subject were of a high quality, studying for the exam the day before would be, despite some stresses and strains, quite enjoyable, and when this guilty pleasure was experienced, a good performance and high grades for the exam usually followed. I concluded that this enjoyment both confirmed and enhanced the effectiveness of the learning process. Firstly, it can result from everything seeming to fall very nicely into place. This, of course, depends on the quality of the study notes and their capacity to make the learning easy, arguably far easier than it may have been in the past, and this feeling of competence is pleasurable. In addition, well-organised, well-written study notes, especially those covering interesting subject matter, will be quite engaging to study, stimulating your imagination and enhancing your interest. Fortunately, the pleasurable feeling that accompanies this study usually indicates that you are learning more effectively, because when you enjoy what you are doing, you learn better. This suggests that it is important that you take the extra effort to produce the kind of high-quality study notes that can produce this guilty pleasure when studying them. The production of summaries is an extremely effective way of learning material, and it constitutes the greater part of the learning process the day before an exam. However, a final stage is required if you wish to bolster this recently acquired wisdom. After producing a concise summary of a topic, you memorise and recall. This serves to reinforce these recent additions to your short-term memory. You begin by looking at the first point in your summary and then testing your knowledge of it by trying to recall the information associated with that point. It should trigger your memory and invite the 131


information that you recently learnt to come quickly to mind. If you are not satisfied with your degree of knowledge, you can recheck the relevant section of your study notes. When you are satisfied that you know the information associated with a point, you move on to the next. In addition, if you feel that it is necessary to provide some additional reinforcement to your ability to recall your knowledge, you may deliberately memorise some of the key terms or a sequence of headings or a check list that can serve as triggers to remind you of various aspects of your knowledge on the topic. The mind is systematic in the way it prefers to store information, so each piece of knowledge derived from your study notes will tend to be linked to other relevant and associated pieces of knowledge. Therefore, by knowing a list of evocative headings, you can reassuringly remind yourself of the rest of your knowledge on a topic. For example, by memorising the list of names of the French comptrollers-general who were unsuccessful in avoiding the fiscal crisis that contributed to the collapse of the Ancien Régime, as well as learning a few key dates and several other reminders of key events, you would be able to recall much of the material that explains the crisis that contributed to the political origins of the French Revolution. When you can confidently use your summary to comfortably recall the information for a topic, then you can move on to studying the next topic, and then the next, until you are completed and therefore ready for the exam. The study undertaken to prepare the day before an exam in Mathematics or a foreign language is more like a final rehearsal or like checking through an inventory of skills that have been acquired previously. Much will depend on the quality of the study notes and the depth and breadth of the practice undertaken in preceding months and weeks. The study the day before involves a systematic process of making sure that you are competent in all the areas in which you need to be. In Mathematics, it involves checking your knowledge of the formulas and again testing your skill in their application by redoing what you determine to be the most instructive practice examples. In foreign languages, it involves checking or practising to make sure that you know the necessary grammar and vocabulary. This will either confirm your knowledge, or alert you to the need to relearn certain 132


words or expressions. This study would also involve further practice to ensure that you can competently use the kinds of words, phrases and expressions that you may include in your foreign language essay. It is important that you repeatedly check and rehearse until you feel so competent that further study seems unnecessary. When you reach this point, you are ready for the exam. On the day before an exam, when you have summarised and then tested your capacity to recall the information in all the topics that you need to know, or checked and rehearsed the skills that you need to apply, then you have completed your preparations. This is a very satisfying feeling. You will feel relieved but also a tingly sense of readiness and anticipation. It will be time to rest and get a good night’s sleep to revitalise for the next day’s challenge. This is the ideal situation in which to be. However, if students find that their preparations appear to be taking a little longer than they anticipated, they should keep calm, because a superb performance in the exam is still very possible under these circumstances. For those students who find that on the night before the exam that they are exhausted and it is getting late, and they still have some important material yet to cover, it is best not to study late into the night. When the mind is exhausted, it is far less receptive or productive, so much so that this extra effort will be of limited value and it may even be counter-productive. Instead, it is far more effective to rise early the following morning and resume your study when you are fresh. Keep calm, and keep a level head because the situation is salvageable. It is not nearly as worrisome as many students suspect. Furthermore, if that night you feel anxious and cannot sleep, try lying very still to soothingly calm your body to allow yourself to rest, which is the next best form of rejuvenation to a good night’s sleep. Early the following morning, you should swing decisively into action to complete the necessary study, just in time. When ready, you can relax and revitalise for an hour or so before you leave home. On the other hand, if you remain a little concerned, you may find it helpful, or reassuring, to continue studying your summaries virtually up until the last minute, putting them away just before you enter the exam room. Surprisingly, you will find that this approach will not tire you out because, due to the enlivening effect of adrenaline 133


once the exam commences, you will miraculously find new reserves of energy. If you follow the instructions in this book on how to prepare for exams, you will find that you will be knowledgeable, skilled and ready to face the challenge of the exam precisely when you need to be. Problems during your preparations will be far less likely to occur, but if they do, above all maintain your positive confident attitude, keep a level head and think constructively about how to rectify the situation. As a result, you will be more than pleasantly surprised at how well you will do.

Exam performance Due to your preparation and training, you should be primed to perform at your peak on the day of the exam. When you are politely ushered into the exam room by the supervising staff to take your seat, it is, at last, the time when you can put your knowledge and skills into action. This time it is not a rehearsal. This time your performance can deliver you the results that you desire. Although it is very much the case that the campaign to win your ‘A’ is largely won or lost before the exam commences, it is also the case that you will still need to be ready to ‘think on your feet’, to respond effectively to the challenges of the moment that present themselves, in the same dexterous fashion as a great general, champion athlete or any other formidable competitor. Brimming with anticipation, yet tingling with a touch of uncertainty, your first task is to use the designated ‘reading time’ to scrutinise the exam paper to make sure that you complete each section of the exam precisely as instructed. Charged with adrenaline-fuelled excitement, everything may feel sped up, and you may experience a touch of impatience, especially if your initial glance at the questions reveals them to be advantageous. Nevertheless, your first important task is to read the instructions on the exam paper very carefully to ensure that you proceed through it precisely as you are directed, taking care to note the sections or questions that are designated as allowing students to write on ‘either’ one topic ‘or’ another. Some excellent performances can be to no avail if they are misdirected due to a misinterpretation of 134


the instructions. So use this reading time to determine precisely what is required to successfully complete the exam. Secondly, you can use the reading time to select the essay questions that you wish to complete from the list of options. If you have prepared thoroughly for the exam, virtually all of the questions on the topics in which you have specialised will appear to be answerable. However, some of the questions will appear to be so in tune with your expertise that they may seem like a give-away. Pick the options that you find most inspiring. If you have short-answer or multiple-choice sections in the exam, glance through the questions to make yourself more acquainted with them before you attempt them. Finally, if the exam asks you to analyse a passage or document, use the reading time to go through it, to give yourself a head start by becoming acquainted with it before you commence writing. In addition, if you have a number of different tasks to complete, use the reading time to select the order in which you will do them. If you have to analyse a passage or document that you scrutinised during your reading time, it may be opportune to start with this section of the exam to capitalise on your recently acquired acquaintance with this material. Furthermore, some tasks, such as multiple-choice or shortanswer questions, can help you to warm up, so if you do them first you will be in top gear when you attempt the tasks that are worth more grades, such as essays. Alternatively, if the exam requires you to write several essays, you may decide to do your favourite essay question first, so that your morale is boosted by a good performance. This means that you can complete the rest of the exam paper feeling as if you are at your peek in regards to your performance and inspiration. When it is time to begin writing, your first responsibility is to clearly label all the answer booklets with your name and exam number so that their identity cannot be misinterpreted by your examiners. Then you commence the exam properly, following your predetermined schedule that allocated specific blocks of time to be spent on each task. Although time is of the essence, do not rush. Instead, work at a steady productive pace that will allow you to perform at your best. If you are well briefed and well trained, as I have instructed you to become, this steady pace should happen to be fairly brisk without you 135


having to deliberately make it so. When writing essay responses in an exam, the formula we learnt in Volume 1 for masterful essay writing will provide you with a simple procedure to follow that will enable you to use your knowledge to produce high-quality answers: • First, you address the question that you have been given by underlining and then clarifying the key terms that you may have to define and/or address in your answer. In this regard, do not be surprised if you end up underlining and clarifying most of the question. In addition, this process can also involve breaking the question up logically into digestible parts that may in turn form parts of the essay. You may also notice that while engaged in this process, it is not unusual to have an answer, or parts of an answer, quickly come inspirationally to mind. This answer may be a sense of agreement or disagreement, in full or in part, with the implications of the question. If this happens, quickly note down these valuable ideas, which later may be used to form the basis of your contention. This process of addressing the question ensures that your response will be focused precisely on what is required, so your argument can then proceed from this solid basis. You should beware that many examiners are prone to quite severely penalise the transgression of appearing to have wandered from the question. Curiously, this tendency among examiners often produces punishments that seem to be more severe than the transgressing student deserved, with great swaths of grades falling at the stroke of the examiner’s red pen. Whether applied proportionately or disproportionately, this tendency among examiners represents a good reason to ensure that you answer precisely what is asked. In addition, to avoid being unfairly mistakenly perceived as straying from the question, which can happen, you need to make sure that you use terminology from the question in your introduction and throughout your essay to keep alerting your examiners to the fact that you are focused on the question, thereby denying them any opportunity to make unfair deductions. This attention to the requirements of the question is, by the way, equally necessary in regards to short-answer and multiple-choice questions, although the wording in many of these questions will usually appear to be more straightforward than for essay 136


questions. In addition, when addressing the question, you should primarily relate it to the key analytical themes or meanings of the text or topic about which the question inquires. This involves asking yourself which analytical themes or meanings of the text or topic (dealt with in your study notes) the question is asking you to cover. If you conceptualise the question in this analytically thematic and meaningful fashion, your answer will automatically have the analytical depth that examiners admire. This means that your answer will avoid the conceptual shortfalls that are typical of the lower scoring essays produced by students who, unfortunately, are not sure what they are doing and what is required of them intellectually. What too many students tend to do when they look at an essay question is scan through their memory of the content of a text or topic to try to recall all the relevant things that they know, then they string them together in the hope that this will suffice as an essay. What often results is an essay that lacks the sufficient analytical depth to be highly rewarded. Fortunately, by following the guidance in this book, you will not have that problem. • Next, you brainstorm to gather the information that you need to formulate and support an answer. If you have prepared well for the exam, in the manner that I advised, this process will involve an enthusiastic outpouring of the relevant information from your knowledge, which is recorded quickly and succinctly in brief reminder points on the spare page that you have designated for this purpose, perhaps by removing the centre pages from the stapled exam booklet to serve as a brainstorming and planning sheet. In addition, this brainstorming may also involve some moments of careful reflection and contemplation to clarify your ideas on the issue at hand. When you have developed a contention that can be supported by reason and evidence, you are approaching the ‘take off ’ point for your essay, which means that you can stop gathering information. When brainstorming, sometimes the most pertinent point to be used in your argument, which usually belongs at the front of your essay, can be the last thing that you recall. Consequently, it is very important that you go through this brainstorming process before 137


you start writing so you can compose a logically well-structured and coherent answer. By brainstorming, you avoid the pitfall that some unfortunate students fall into of producing a meandering ‘stream of consciousness essay’, where the student begins the essay with the first point that they think of, which leads to another point, and then another, and then another, until the student runs out of ideas and concludes the essay. This meandering stream of consciousness often falls short of conveying to the examiner, at the outset of the essay, that the student has a command over the topic and knows exactly where the essay is going and precisely what it will demonstrate. This puts the examiner into a more critical frame of mind, and penalties in grades inevitably follow. By brainstorming, you can instead channel this stream of consciousness into a productive process where the ideas it produces can be organised and put to their most beneficial use. Consequently, you will be able to produce a controlled, well-structured piece of writing that puts the examiner into a positive frame of mind from the opening of the essay, orientating them towards awarding you high grades. This brainstorming should produce two types of material. Firstly, it will invite you to note the analytical points or themes that will be covered in your argument, and secondly you will list the evidence or examples that will be used to support these points. Interestingly, this brainstorming process can sometimes alert you to the fact that you know far more than you have time to include in your answer, giving you the opportunity to prune some of the supporting evidence, to perhaps choose to illustrate a point in your argument with one example instead of two, to ensure that you finish the essay on schedule. This brainstorming also gives you the option to be selective in what you include in the essay, so you can choose the best or most impressive information or examples from what you know to include in your answer. Meanwhile, some of those unfortunate students who did not brainstorm before they started writing could find themselves stuck with having stated at the beginning of the essay the first thing that they recalled, even though they subsequently thought of something better to say. Furthermore, as well as helping you write essays, this 138


brainstorming process can also help you to compose answers to the more demanding six, eight or ten point short-answer questions, by allowing you to quickly clarify your thoughts and judiciously determine your supporting evidence by jotting down then organising your points before you commit your answer to the examination booklet. • After brainstorming, you organise the relevant material into a coherent sequence or outline that will serve as your plan for writing the essay. It is important that you do not commence writing your essay until you know what you want to say and the sequence in which you intend to say it. Only when your contention and the sequence of points that you intend to make in your argument have been determined are you ready to write. When planning your essay, the order of the points that you intend to make should be logically coherent. Devising this sequence for an exam response usually involves commonsense. For example, it makes sense to outline a theory before you discuss its application. Most accounts of events are best explained chronologically, by starting at the beginning and systematically working through until the end. Most importantly, the points made in an argument are usually more effective when expressed from the most important to the least important point, since most examiners expect students to deal with the most important point first. If you instead choose a structure that builds from less important points to the most important point, it helps to forecast this structure in the introduction of the essay. This will reorientate the expectations of the examiners to prevent them from unfairly initially assuming that the student was unaware of the most important point, so they do not form a prejudicial opinion while examining the essay. The brainstorming and planning process is very important, since it determines the analytical foundation and content of a successful answer. Depending on the complexity of the question, your degree of knowledge on the topic and the rapidity in which you can recall it, this process should usually take about three to five minutes, perhaps up to ten minutes if the material is particularly difficult, requiring careful clarification and organisation before the essay can commence. Brainstorming and planning take time, but they ultimately save time in 139


the execution of the essay by providing the student with a very clear, easy to follow outline of what needs to be done that can be rapidly brought to fruition. • Having planned your essay, you write your introduction. The introduction is arguably the most important part of your answer, so make it clear and thorough in terms of its statement of your contention, its definition of the key terms and its outline of what is to follow, because this is the part of the essay that will receive the most attention from the examiners and shape their attitude to you and the rest of your work. The introduction should convey to the examiners, from the outset, that you have established a command over the topic, by indicating that you know precisely what is required by the question and where this essay is going with its argument. • With the introduction written, you execute the essay following your plan. At this stage, since you have developed a contention, gathered the relevant supporting information, organised it into a logical sequence, and outlined the presentation of this crucial information in your introduction, most of the difficult thinking has been done. Consequently, the writing of the rest of the essay and its conclusion should be a relatively straightforward, virtually automatic process. Your progress through to the conclusion should for the most part proceed like clockwork, with you diligently working with your head down, swiftly producing page after page after page until you are done. If you brainstormed and planned effectively, you are unlikely to have to pause and think while writing the body of the essay. Ideally, at this stage of the writing, you will probably feel as if you are being intensely carried along by the momentum of your performance. In regards to the length of your essay, your choice should be determined by the requirements of the question or your confidence in your ability at expression. Some questions require more information and analysis than others do, so understandably your answers should vary in length depending on the demands of the question. In addition, if you are confident with expression, you will be able to write four, 140


five or six pages in an hour, to produce a more elaborate answer than other students may manage in that time. This can be impressive for examiners. However, students should keep in mind that quality is a more important factor in determining grades than the length of an answer, so if you have difficulty expressing yourself, and labour at the task, it is best to diligently focus on producing a few impressively well-crafted pages that are of a high quality rather than attempt to produce a far lengthier piece that may be compromised by numerous little mistakes. • Finally, you edit to improve your expression or correct any mistakes as required. Finding a couple of minutes to edit your work at the end of writing an essay is very helpful. It will enable you to tidy any lapses in expression that may compromise the examiner’s positive impression of your argument. It may also allow you to enhance your expression to make it more eloquent in places where you had originally said what you said in the best way that you could at the time. This checking process is equally helpful in regards to improving the quality of the expression in responses to short-answer questions, or to double check the choices in the multiple-choice section. As well as reviewing your work after you have finished each section of the paper, if you complete the exam with a few minutes to spare, it helps to review your entire paper. If you finish the exam early, there are always positive things you can do to boost your result, such as checking your answers. Every minute should be constructively utilised.

Trouble-shooting during exams Sang-froid is a quality that is much admired by the military. It refers to one’s ability to maintain a level head while under fire. It is also a quality that is needed to do well in exams, especially if something appears to have gone wrong. It is very much the case that panic regarding a mistake is usually much more of a threat to the progress of a student than the mistake itself. Panic is a debilitating emotional response, which can and should be eliminated from one’s life as much as possible. Interestingly, panic is not caused by the adverse event 141


that appeared to instigate the panic. Instead, it is caused by the way an individual chooses or allows oneself to perceive and react to that event. When faced with the same stimuli, not everyone panics. This reassuringly means that panic is a behaviour that can be changed or avoided. Panic results when people think of the worst possible consequences of something, to therefore become alarmed in a fashion that is debilitating. The trick to avoiding panic is to direct yourself to think more constructively about the problem. The sound training that I have encouraged you to acquire can help considerably in this regard. It is almost always possible to either salvage a situation or to at least minimise or contain the damage, which means that the alarming circumstances may not be as bad as originally feared. When faced with a problem, you need to swing into action to transform the situation. So instead of becoming consumed by debilitating thoughts, you become energised by your calculations regarding what you can do to improve the situation. After some practice, this positive response to a challenge should become automatic. Some of history’s greatest victories were snatched from the brink of defeat. A level head in a time of crisis is one of your greatest assets. If you experience difficulty in an exam, above all, keep fighting. If you are determined to never give up, you give yourself the opportunity to prevail. For example, if you are working on your response to an essay question and you forget a fact or idea, do not panic. Instead, calmly try to reconstruct in your imagination the circumstances in which you last encountered it, while you were studying the day before. If this does not bring the idea to mind, then improvise. Do not let your progress be hampered. Above all, keep the essay going. If you forget the precise wording of a quotation from an English novel, you can instead paraphrase it, describing what the character said. This may not be what you planned to do to illustrate your point, but the examiners will probably be so impressed by the way you incorporated your (described) evidence into your analysis that they may not notice that you originally intended to use a quotation. Alternatively, if, for example, you were writing about the origins of the French Revolution and you unfortunately forgot the name of one of the comptrollers-general, 142


then you can rescue the situation by writing in a fashion that avoids any need to refer to him by name, by discussing the way in which the attempts at fiscal reform by the subsequent comptroller-general were ultimately no more successful than those of his predecessor. With this sleight of hand, the examiners may not notice the memory lapse, being instead preoccupied by the quality of your analysis, and even if they do notice the lapse, when dealt with in this confident manner they are more likely to tolerate it or make a minor deduction of grade points rather than penalise the essay severely. With this approach, if you do not completely escape penalty, you would minimise the damage. The mind tends to remember analytical themes and concepts better than particular facts or exact quotations. Fortunately, it is these analytical themes and concepts that are the most important elements of an answer, so use them to both impress the examiners and to disguise any lapses of memory regarding the occasional forgotten fact. The forgetting of a fact need not interrupt or significantly compromise a good performance, as long as you improvise. In an exam, you must be willing to do your best with whatever knowledge and skills you have at your disposal at that particular time. If you improvise when it is necessary to do so, you will often surprise yourself at how well you perform. If you are doing short-answer or multiple-choice questions, and one proves to be unexpectedly difficult, it can be wise to move on, to make the most of your precious time by answering the rest of the questions, returning to the troublesome one later. What can often happen is that the answer to that question may come to you subsequently while you are working on something else, allowing you to quickly go back to resolve the problem. Alternatively, after completing the other questions, you may find that your mind is warmed up and better able to successfully tackle that formerly difficult question. Although all questions are important when in the pursuit of the highest grades, more attention should be given to questions that are worth more grade points. Do not spend too much time wrestling with a troublesome two point question when the time could be better spent answering a more valuable eight point question. Furthermore, if you encounter a troublesome section of an exam, 143


which is worth less grades than another yet-to-be-attempted section, and it appears that this unexpectedly troublesome section is about to take up more time than you had allocated to complete it, then it is best to wrap your answer up quickly, because each additional minute spent on this section, which offers relatively little or no return in grades, is a minute lost doing another section where many more grades could be won in the same period of time. However, if you later finish another section of the exam quicker than you had planned, then you can use those extra minutes to return to that troublesome section of the exam, to have another attempt. Alternatively, you could cut your losses on that troublesome section, to instead add those precious minutes to the completion of another task that is more valuable in terms of its likelihood to yield grades. When doing an exam, you need to invest your time where it is most profitable in grades. This means that you firstly need to make sure you have profited from what you know and can do well before you deal with what is difficult and less likely to produce a worthwhile return. In addition, if you are three-quarters of the way through an essay and the time that you allocated to complete it is running out, then it may be best to finish it as quickly as possible, so you can move on to the next task. When wrapping up your essay, you may condense the remaining yet-to-be-written analytical points into one paragraph or make your remaining points with only the briefest reference to illustrative evidence. Of course, this circumstance is far from ideal, and hopefully, like other problems, it should happen infrequently or not at all. But if it does happen, finish the essay quickly to reduce the damage that this unfortunate planning error could cause to the rest of your performance in the exam. When pressed for time in this fashion, keep in mind that you can earn many more grade points by starting the next essay than by trying to squeeze a few more grade points out of the one that you are still doing. When doing exams, it is very important to produce highquality answers, but at the same time, it is necessary to avoid the temptation to engage in perfectionism. Perfectionism can be advantageous in some forums and disadvantageous in others. Perfectionism can often be very constructive when producing high144


quality assignments that can subsequently be highly rewarded. However, it can be counter-productive during an exam due to the disciplined requirements of working against the clock. The tendency towards perfectionism can be the undoing of some particularly talented students who become so carried away with the idea of producing a perfect answer that they are unwilling to make some necessary minor compromises on quality, leaving them unable to finish the exam in time. These students need to keep exam performances in perspective. Exams are a means to an end – high grades – not ends in themselves. After they are assessed, exam papers are neither kept by schools or universities nor handed back to the students, but rather disposed of, which is an instructively sobering thought. In terms of your school or university course, the value of exams is derived primarily from what they enable you to achieve – high grades. Therefore the kind of cleverness and skill employed in exam performances should be calculated to enable you to get the most out of exams in terms of grades, so you consequently get the most of what you want from the education system.

After the exams There is a time for work and a time for recreation. When you put your pen down on your final exam for the year, or better still, the final exam for school or university, it is no longer the time for work. Instead, it is a time of relief and for well-deserved recreation. This is your time. You have certainly earned it. If you have performed well in an exam, you can usually feel it, in your gut, because people tend to initially sense the possibility of success at a subconscious level before they appreciate it at a conscious level. Your tone of voice will be vibrant and buoyant, your disposition will be alert, and your manner enthusiastic and eager to talk about your experience. These are good signs. If you are uncertain about the result because it may be close, you will feel this in your gut too. However, this is not the time to worry about it. First, rest and recreation are what are required. Later, if you have to, you can plan your next move. If, during the exams, you experienced a major upset that was out 145


of your control, such as an illness, after the exams you may need to swing into action to organise an application for special consideration. For these students, the time for rest and recreation may be cut short. It may also be cut short for those students who have to promptly organise an application and/or prepare for an interview to win a place in a prestigious university course or acceptance in a keenly sought-after position of employment. When you receive your results, to delightfully discover that you have achieved your objective, this is your time for celebration, marvellous celebration. It is a very special day, one to be savoured. However, for those students who find that they fell a little short of their objective, their struggle continues. Other options will need to be explored and other avenues found that will take them to their objective. Setbacks such as these are a test of character. The struggle is only over if you decide it is over, otherwise, it continues until victory. In this regard, you may draw inspiration from a year 12 high school student whom I tutored in English and Politics. He worked extremely hard all year to regrettably fall one point short of qualifying for his preferred university course, Arts/Law. However, he did not give up his campaign. He promptly enrolled in an Arts course with the aim of achieving the high grades that would permit him to transfer to Arts/Law, which he successfully did. He achieved his objective, only a year later than originally anticipated. When considered in perspective, this is not much of a setback at all. Because he had a dream to fulfill and he refused to be beaten, eventually he won.

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CHAPTER 4 THE SUCCESS ORIENTATION Having tutored many successful students, people have often asked me whether I can tell at the outset whether a new student will do well. They seem to be expecting me to talk about students who may exhibit a particular kind of intelligence, some kind of outstanding intellectual ability that marks certain individuals out for success. My answer usually surprises them. By observing many students over many years, I have noticed a recurring quality that appears to distinguish those students who are most likely to succeed – it is punctuality. Those students who arrive perfectly on time and fully prepared for the lesson, especially those who have travelled long distances, are more likely to be successful at school or university. Why punctuality? Well, it is more the reason for their punctuality that is decisive. It is their possession of a dream or goal and their determination to bring it to fruition. That is what motivates them to be where they need to be, on time and ready to make the most of something that will bring them closer to their cherished objective. As we noted earlier, the possession of a dream or goal can be considered to be the reason behind one’s reason for success. We looked at this earlier when we discussed how to succeed when doing exams, which involved exploring the personal qualities necessary to achieve success not only in exams but for most other things in life as well. Intelligence can of course be a significant contributor to an individual’s success in school and university. However, what matters most is not so much the degree of intelligence an individual possesses, but rather their willingness to make the very most of the intelligence 147


that they have. In terms of one’s abilities, any abilities, the issue is not so much what abilities you have but how you develop and use what you have that is often decisive. To make the most of your latent abilities you must have that hunger, the hunger for success. People who seek convenience are less likely to succeed than those who are willing to do whatever it takes to prevail. In this context, I consider the students who had to travel long distances for lessons with me to be, in a curious way, fortunate, compared to those who lived relatively nearby, although few of them would have realised this at the time while they endured several hours of public transport, sometimes in bleak weather. Those students who lived far away did not want help from any tutor. They wanted help from the tutor who would enable them to get results. They knew the value of good advice. By coming to me and by taking other measures necessary to take control of their education, they did what they believed was necessary for success and consequently they succeeded. Their determination inspiringly suggests that the responsibility for your success begins and ends with you. It is your choice. However, what can unfortunately hold many people back from self-improvement is not knowing how to change, not knowing a better way of doing things, not knowing a new way forward. This volume and Volume 1 are intended to provide you with that better way, but, better still, they furnish you with the outlook to draw on your own ingenuity to go beyond what is in these volumes to create your own better way. To enable you to determine what you need to do, you first have to clarify your objectives. Some students want high grades. Others want to develop their intellectual creativity. Others want to satisfy curiosity or to be enriched by the acquisition of knowledge. Others will want to enjoy social interaction with peers. You may at different times, have had most or all of these objectives. The clarification of your objectives is crucial because once this has been achieved, it will enable you to more clearly recognise what you need to do. Some objectives clash and others are complementary. For example, your approach to an assignment through which you intend to develop your intellectual creativity may not be appropriate for the pursuit of high 148


grades. This would be the case if what you passionately wanted to say was not what the examiners wanted to hear and liked to reward. Different objectives can require different strategies and tactics, and a trade-off may have to be made. In those school years when high grades are less important, you may decide to focus on developing your intellectual creativity. However, during a crucial gateway year, such as when making the transition from school to university, because high grades are essential, the development of your intellectual creativity may have to be put on hold until more opportune circumstances for the pursuit of that objective arise.

Understanding ‘the system’ in order to succeed in it This book is intended to encourage you to develop knowledge and skills in the four areas in which they are advantageous. You will need to know and be able to handle your examiners, to know and be able to handle the system, to know and be able to handle your courses of study, and to know and be able to handle yourself. Virtually all students appreciate that to succeed in the education system they need to know and be able to handle their courses, and many others appreciate that they also need self-knowledge, but too many students tend to not fully appreciate the significance of the first two inter-related areas of understanding and skill, the need to know how their examiners tick and the nature of the system. When you are dealing with your educators, you are dealing with the very human behaviour of particular individuals who happen to be in authority over you. However, from another perspective, you are dealing with a ‘system’, the education system, and each of these individuals can be seen as a particular example of one of the categories of people whom you will encounter in the context of this system, namely teachers, lecturers, and tutors. Their nature and behaviour are in turn partly defined by the nature of the particular institutions in which they reside and by the nature of the overall system in which they operate. In this sense, as well as being individuals with their own 149


particular traits, these people are, in part, shaped by the system and represent tangible manifestations of the system. Interestingly, much of what you need to know about the education system in practical terms would have been distilled into the behaviour of your educators/examiners and therefore be observable in them. So when you compile your psychological profiles of your examiners, as I advised you to do, under the categories of ideology, values, ethics, interests, preferred forms of language, character and persona, you will be gathering much of the information that you require to determine your strategies and tactics. As you are already aware, by appreciating how these people tick, you can make the most out of your encounters with them. However, the information that you gather through these psychological profiles can be enhanced by tuning into your wider environment and keeping your eyes and ears open regarding the nature of your educational institution and the broader education system in which it resides. This means becoming more aware of the nature of the system in order to succeed in it. You may have observed in your school, for example, that teaching appointments are relatively secure from the impact of market fluctuations or the threat of dismissal. Teachers’ pay usually increases incrementally over the time spent in the career rather than due to productivity or effectiveness, so they only have to stay put to receive pay rises, and their clients, unlike in other industries, are virtually a captive audience. In addition, most students are well aware of the authoritarian and virtually autonomous nature of the power structure in the classroom, with the teacher at the apex. However, there is another important characteristic of the system to recognise that is often overlooked. When dealing with teachers you are dealing with a section of the workforce who are, for the most part, separated from the consequences of their actions. By contrast, when you make a mistake in your studies, you suffer the consequences. However, when your teacher makes a mistake in their lessons, corrections or assessments, you also suffer the consequences. This characteristic of the system, which is currently accentuated by the prevailing education policy regime and the power of the teachers’ 150


unions, can have a significant impact on the motivation of teachers to produce quality work or to address their mistakes and rectify injustices. This also puts the responsibility back on individual students to protect your own interests by taking responsibility for your own education. In this context, I have encouraged you to adopt an optimistic attitude, so you are always looking for the opportunity in every situation. If you have the right attitude, you will find an opportunity in almost every situation, including apparently adverse situations. For example, if you find that you have an extremely biased teacher, this need not be considered a setback but rather an opportunity to learn how to tune into the mind of someone who does not see issues as you do, so you can ultimately manipulate this teacher to dance to your tune, to reward you with high grades despite himself. Alternatively, if you have a dull or lazy teacher, this is an opportunity to develop the skills required to effectively deal with such a person, as well as to develop your capacity to compensate for a poor-quality educator by cultivating your ability to educate yourself and to expand your educational horizons by drawing on other resources, such as quality textbooks, clever friends, or a knowledgeable private tutor. On the other hand, if you have a knowledgeable and broad-minded teacher, you can capitalise on this as an opportunity to develop your academic merit. Similarly, you should analyse any disappointments regarding results in an equally optimistic fashion, by asking yourself what you can learn from this experience and what you can do differently next time to improve your chances of success. In this way, nothing is lost to you as a source of your development into a formidable student. For example, one of my very capable year 12 English students had taken care to tune into the pro-feminist bias of her teacher, to reflect these values in the first essay she submitted to this teacher for assessment, hoping that this would do the trick and secure her an ‘A’. However, when the student received her essay back, to find that she had received a ‘B+’, the student was able to determine from the teacher’s corrections that her essay was not feminist enough for this teacher’s tastes. It had to be unequivocally pro-feminist. My student promptly increased the degree of feminist fervour in her next essay and received the ‘A’ she 151


desired. My student learnt that sometimes it is not enough to tune into the examiner’s bias. It may be necessary with some examiners to take care to precisely mirror the degree of the examiner’s bias to receive the high grade that you desire. The ability to get inside another person’s head (in this case your examiner’s head) to see the world from their perspective is extremely advantageous when dealing with people, especially those people who are in authority over you. You should be trying to do this at every opportunity, to gather any information that facilitates this insight, because it is a prerequisite for your ability to persuade. When you understand how your educators tick, assessment will no longer appear to be a mysterious or fearsome process. Consequently, you can become very skilful in the way you influence the assessment process, a dimension of education that too many students, in effect, virtually leave to chance. When you know what is really going on and understand precisely what you need to do, study becomes a game with which you can have fun, much fun. This attitude was evident in one of my year 12 English students. He was the younger brother of a former student, so he came to me knowing what to expect, being aware of the Method, that of establishing a psychological profile of the examiner so that everything put into an essay is calculated to pay a dividend in grades. I was only too happy to help this enthusiastic student follow in his brother’s footsteps. During our first lesson, as we became acquainted, we chatted about his older brother’s accomplishments, which included the episode, recounted in Volume 1, when his class had to write an essay about their personal hero. The older brother had used the psychological profile he had compiled of his teacher to create a fictional but supposedly real character, his ‘favourite aunt’, who had all the characteristics of his English teacher, such as a hatred of racism and a strong sense of charity. And, of course, what grade did this teacher award this essay about such a wonderful person? That’s right, an ‘A’. The younger brother loved this story so much that he wanted to emulate it when he had to produce his creative writing folio. His chance to do so came soon, when his teacher assigned the class to 152


write an essay on their favourite person. However, on this occasion the repetition of the nifty trick, used so well by my student’s older brother, posed a problem. The younger brother’s teacher was a noticeably bad teacher. There was very little about him to admire. According to my student, this teacher was noted for coming to class with a wellread copy of The Age newspaper tucked under his arm (which is the preferred journal of the politically correct Left). His lessons were not very informative, seeming to be more like self-indulgent conversations with himself, where he often complimented his own wisdom and laughed at his own jokes. On some occasions, when the mood took him, he would teach the class little or nothing, telling the students to ‘get on with your work’, after which he put his feet up and read the newspaper. He appeared to teach for his own amusement rather than for the students’ benefit, and on one occasion when a perplexed student pestered this teacher for additional explanations and references to consult, the teacher dismissed the student with the telling remark, ‘I don’t get paid for results’. This teacher was well aware that he was protected by a powerful teacher’s union and he was going to be paid whether he did a good or a bad job or nothing at all. It appeared to my student that his teacher’s profile offered him little in terms of material upon which to write an essay about one’s favourite person. Or so it seemed. An interesting tendency in human nature is that it is very difficult for people to see themselves as others see them. In addition, it is also the case that we all go through life with the continual narration provided by the voice of our imagination, which provides a very personal story line for our lives that only we as individuals are privy to. In addition, individuals tend to be highly selective when choosing characteristics about themselves from which to define their identity and worth. For example, an individual would be more likely to define his identity and worth by a recent act of kindness rather than by more numerous and frequent acts of laziness or unreasonableness. In this context, it is also often the case that an individual is likely to remember doing an act of kindness more readily than their more numerous displays of unreasonableness, which are often forgotten shortly 153


after they happen. Furthermore, such an individual would have had excuses provided by his ‘internal narrator’ that justified any incidents of apparently unreasonable behaviour in a manner that is acceptable to that individual, while it may not appear to be justified to others. Consequently, it was therefore highly unlikely that this teacher saw himself as his class saw him. I explained these tendencies regarding human nature to my student, and I told him that if he conceptualised a significantly idealised version of his teacher, he would probably come up with a version of this character that resembled how this teacher saw himself as a person, as a good person. That is precisely what my student did. For his essay on his favourite person, my student created the fictional but supposedly real character ‘Uncle Bob’. Uncle Bob was approximately the same age as my student’s English teacher, 55, and like him, married with two children. My student made Uncle Bob a high school Politics teacher who was, coincidentally, never seen without a well-read copy of The Age newspaper tucked under his arm. With some mutual amusement, my student and I used pictures in one of my history books on the peace movement to place Uncle Bob, who was then a radical student anti-war protester, in the crowd in the famous Vietnam moratorium march in Melbourne in 1970. We also used some of my books on the history of rock to describe Bob’s tastes in music, and then my student used information from the notes he had taken in his English classes to depict Bob as liking the same television shows as my student’s English teacher, comedies on the ABC that featured political satire. However, the main reason why Uncle Bob was my student’s favourite person was because of the way he would enthusiastically talk about history and politics with wisdom and humour to anyone who would listen. My student had much fun writing his essay about Uncle Bob, and frankly, I had just as much fun helping him. I was not surprised when my student announced to me at a subsequent lesson weeks later that he had received an ‘A’ for his essay on Uncle Bob. However, what was more of a delight was that the English teacher had approached my student, telling him that ‘your Uncle Bob sounds terrific’. He wanted to meet Uncle Bob, using the excuse of asking my student to invite 154


Uncle Bob to do some guest lectures on politics at the school. But Uncle Bob did not exist. Consequently, my student had to tactfully explain, several times, to his teacher that Uncle Bob would be shy about speaking at another school. The ‘Uncle Bob’ essay was a success because my student had tapped into the power of an individual’s narcissism and cleverly exploited it, by inviting his English teacher to fall in love with his own (idealised) reflection. This example demonstrates that the study skills in these volumes will make you very powerful indeed when dealing with those in authority over you. Consequently, it is important that you exercise this power responsibly, with an insightful shrewdness regarding your self-interest and compassion for the feelings of the people with whom you are dealing. If it is clever to be able to outsmart someone, it can be cleverer to resist the temptation to let them know that you have outsmarted them. Put simply, this means not letting them know that you know. If we are honest with ourselves, we would probably have to admit that often the motive to reveal the trick to the person whom we tricked comes from a desire for external validation, which in turn comes from an underlying sense of insecurity about one’s ability or worth. Instead, when you have outsmarted someone, you should ask yourself whether you can benefit more from revealing what you know, or benefit more from knowing something but pretending to those with whom you are dealing that you do not know it. You should also ask yourself the ethical question of whether you will be leaving happy people in your wake by revealing your methods to the people whom were the targets of your methods, or whether this revelation will compromise what is currently a win/win situation. You will find that it will often be in your interest to let the people in authority over you maintain their impression that they are in control over you, even if the reality is otherwise, as was clearly the case with my student’s manipulative ‘Uncle Bob’ essay. Despite the appearance of subordination, you will be able to influence the behaviour of those in authority over you without them knowing that they are being influenced. The power balance will be tipped in your favour. You will be a free agent, your own boss, and in control 155


of your own destiny. My student never revealed to his English teacher that the true identity of Uncle Bob was actually an idealised representation of the English teacher himself. This was the noble thing to do. He protected his teacher from a revelation that would have been hurtful. If one acquires power, and consequently the capacity to hurt others, it is often both nobler and cleverer to refrain from doing so. By keeping the identity of Uncle Bob a secret from his English teacher, my student successfully finished the school year, graduated, and left a very positive impression of himself in the mind of that teacher. Ironically, it may be necessary for you to exercise this restraint and compassion towards some teachers who were themselves unwilling to exercise similar restraint and compassion when dealing with you or your peers. Your ability to do this will help you to develop your character, as you make the progression from vulnerability to magnanimity. There is much more you can learn from school than the content of the courses.

Proceeding with confidence In addition to several powerful techniques of psychological manipulation, these volumes have also provided you with many ways to improve your academic merit, in research, essay writing, and exam technique, etc. By practising these study skills, your wisdom and ability should improve significantly. This will give you a great deal of confidence. Just as athletes can fall in love with their bodies because of the joy and fulfillment that physical prowess can bring them, I want you to fall in love with your mind because of the joy and fulfillment that intellectual prowess can bring you. You will study and succeed because it is your pleasure to do so. In addition, if you fall in love with your mind, you will be motivated to do what you can to develop and nurture your mind, and also to protect and preserve your mind from harm. You will have a good reason to avoid self-destructive behaviours that damage your mind. Fall in love with your mind’s capacity to create, to entertain you, to define your identity, to keep you safe, to make you prosperous, to enable you to help others. Nourish it, 156


nurture it, protect it, preserve it, and, above all, enjoy it. Be confident, very confident, but allow this confidence to afford you the ability to also be humble and modest. Keep in mind that although you may have acquired sufficient knowledge on a topic to write an excellent essay or to perform extremely well in an exam, there is always more to know and learn about any subject. The vastness of the world of organised knowledge is humbling. Clever people may have an awareness of what they know in a subject, but the cleverest people have a sense of what they do not know. Be curious. Be inquisitive. Be open to the possibility of continual improvement. No matter how expert you become, do not be too proud to look up an unfamiliar word or to ask someone for directions. People who, through pride, are unable to do this, inadvertently trap themselves at a particular level of achievement because they deny themselves the opportunity to keep growing and learning. In addition, although there is much to be gained from formal education, your intellectual growth should not be confined to school and university. Make the world your university. There can be something valuable to learn from almost every experience. Informal education, which is learning that is not undertaken at an institution in the pursuit of a qualification, can be as good as any other form of education. It can complement, enhance or enable you to go beyond what you learnt at school and university. Interestingly, it is also the case that you can get more out of educational institutions if you are less dependent on them for education. It is important that you take responsibility for your education, and that you recognise that this responsibility is lifelong. Learning does not cease when you graduate. When seeking to change your world, you need to change yourself first. Effective change begins on the inside. Fortunately, it is possible to reinvent yourself, not only once but many times over if necessary. This is not about being insincere or compromising your integrity. On the contrary, many people do not realise that there are many dimensions to their authentic self that they can explore or develop. To succeed consistently, you may have to become the kind of person (or version of yourself) who habitually does the things that bring success. We have already noted that these characteristics 157


include the ability to take full responsibility for any mishap, no matter how responsible you may actually be. This attitude has nothing to do with the issue of fairness (which can be a distraction) and everything to do with your power. If you blame others for your misfortune, you do yourself a great disservice by surrendering the power to change your circumstances to forces outside of your control. Instead, if you take full responsibility, you give yourself the authority to change your circumstances for the better in whatever way you can. Consequently, if you are in a dilemma, you will find that you immediately start thinking of ways to turn the situation around. This attitude means that you will no longer be buffeted around by fate. Successful people usually live according to a disciplined routine, of work followed by the reward of a pastime that they enjoy, so that their indulgence in life’s simple pleasures is contingent on completing their work, which means that their lives involve continual progress. In addition to these minor rewards, there are also occasions for celebration. When you begin achieving higher grades, you will initially feel elated and want to reward yourself with some form of celebration. This is a good thing. This is because this elation and celebration will be well deserved, and also because it will motivate you to pursue additional successes. However, over time the more successes that you experience, the more that you will come to expect them, and the less inclined you will be to feel elation and be motivated to celebrate. Do not worry. This is also a good thing. It means that your horizons of ambition have extended to encompass the pursuit of greater challenges, and that your sense of self-esteem and worth has become less dependent on the form of external validation provided by the awarding of grades. When this happens, it means that you are becoming stronger, more formidable, and more emotionally self-reliant. If the positive opinions of others are less likely to affect your morale, it usually also means that the negative opinions of others are less likely to affect your morale. Consequently, you will be more resilient and more likely to bounce back strongly after receiving a disappointing grade. The opinions of others, such as your examiners, affect your degree of success in the world but they should not define your concept of your 158


own worth. Instead, you need to be your own chief examiner. What matters most is your opinion of yourself. This independent disposition will make you a free spirit who sensibly appreciates the opinions of others but who is not dependent on seeking the approval of others, including those in authority over you. Instead, you will be someone who generates and capitalises upon the positive opinions of those in authority because it is advantageous to do so. Interestingly and importantly, this independent and more emotionally detached attitude places you in a far better position from which to successfully deal with those who are in authority over you. The more that your externally generated emotional swings between highs and lows moderate, the stronger and more independent you are becoming. A disappointing grade will no longer be seen as a measure of your worth but merely as an indicator that your tactics may need to be adjusted. The study skills in these volumes will do much to enable you to dramatically reduce or eliminate any fear or anxiety experienced while you are in the education system. This anxiety is often produced by uncertainty about the unknown. The antidote is therefore the knowledge that makes the unknown known, followed by the replacement of unnerving inexperience with reassuring experience. As you use these study skills to face your fears, by learning the ropes and chalking up successive successes, you will go from being fearful to fearless and then to fearsome. Similarly, these study skills will also do much to reduce stress. Stress often originates in a perception that one’s ability or one’s time is insufficient to deal with the tasks or expectations that one has to meet. While in the education system, you can reduce stress by eliminating the causes of the stress, by increasing your ability to handle the situations you may face. Furthermore, some moderate stress from time to time is not necessarily bad since you can learn to make it your friend, or more precisely use it as an indicator that it is necessary to learn a new skill or competency. This attitude to stress can motivate you to become increasingly formidable. A number of parents have contacted me as a private tutor because their children were experiencing stress due to the demands 159


of school. When this happened, I immediately informed them that instead of treating the symptoms of stress, I provide students with the competencies that remove the causes of the stress. One concerned parent with a daughter in year 12 contacted me with precisely this concern, claiming that she had taken her daughter to stress management classes, which unfortunately had not helped. When I told the mother my approach, she promptly asked me to tutor her daughter in English, English Literature, Politics and History – the works. From the outset, I focused on steadily increasing this student’s competency, and it was not long before it seemed that she had forgotten that she had originally come to me because of stress. She flourished as she acquired new knowledge and skills. By the end of the year, her self-esteem and confidence had risen dramatically. She handled herself extremely well in the subjects of Politics and History, while in the subject of English Literature, she produced some of the most profound poetry analysis that I have ever seen from a student. However, in English, she had faced a potentially stressful situation that could have undone many other students. Her English teacher had significantly misinterpreted the meaning of the novels being taught. This teacher was seriously in error, but since she was virtually autonomous and unaccountable, she did not know she was in error. In her mind, she had the right answers. By relying on notes taken in class that recorded this teacher’s interpretations of the texts, a student could get an ‘A’ for the work assessed by this teacher, but it would be impossible to repeat this result by using this material in the externally assessed final exam. The challenge that this teacher’s competency presented was heightened by the fact that my student’s objective was to qualify to study Law at university, so her grades had to be maximised and there was no margin for error. For a student with high aspirations, one erroneous teacher could be potentially fatal. However, my student was more fortunate than her classmates were. Since I had taught her the Method, she was well equipped to deal with the situation, due to her knowledge of the nature of the education system, the psychological profile she had made of her class teacher, her class notes that recorded the teacher’s idiosyncratic understanding of the course, as well as her 160


high-quality study notes that I helped her to produce. Consequently, in the essays that were assessed (internally) by her class teacher, my student produced one version of the meaning of the novels (which was incorrect), and another version (which was correct) for the final exam. My student handled herself brilliantly, achieving an ‘A’ or ‘A+’ for all her assessed assignments and exams in all her subjects. To our mutual delight, her most potentially worrisome subject, English, produced her best result, where she received a triumphant perfect score of 100%. My student qualified to study Law, virtually stress free, even though there can potentially be few things more stressful at school than to have your progress apparently dependent on the disappointing performance of a teacher. However, with the appropriate skills, which my student possessed, the situation was completely transformed. Fear, anxiety and stress are also significant for other reasons, because they can be behind the motivation to cheat. This can happen when doubts about one’s ability are coupled with ambition and the pressure to perform. The decision to cheat can come from, what is from the student’s perspective, a practical assessment of their situation. A student in this predicament may calculate the risk of discovery, the consequences of discovery, the potential gain from cheating, and believe that it is worth it. However, I strongly recommend against cheating. Firstly, I believe that the study skills provided in these volumes make it unnecessary. They reduce the motivation to cheat simply by providing a much surer way to succeed. For those students who use these study skills and are therefore no longer experiencing significant fear, anxiety or stress, and who feel that their abilities equip them to fulfill their ambitions and deal with the pressures of study, cheating would appear impractical. Secondly, the long-term costs of cheating, overlooked by many who contemplate it, are too severe. If an act of cheating produces the desired result, the gain achieved provides a strong motivation to do it again. The repetition of this behaviour over time runs the risk of producing a cheater’s mentality. Consequently, when faced with a challenge, the cheater may find himself automatically thinking of the shifty, illegitimate, corner-cutting approach to the problem rather 161


than face it squarely as it should be faced. This mentality, initially acquired young, can be carried into the adult world of work and other dimensions of life where it can be extremely detrimental, leaving a malignant trail of shoddy work and discontented people. Although a cheater will suppress much of the truth about their activities to the subconscious through repression, denial and other psychological ego defence mechanisms, the costs to one’s self-esteem and integrity can be severe, too severe. It is a far better approach to use the study skills in these volumes to train yourself to handle any challenge that you may encounter, legitimately, so not only will you succeed at school, but you will carry with you formidable abilities that you can profit from indefinitely. You can also profit indefinitely from a healthy, balanced diet and a physical fitness program. Although I have observed many sedentary people who achieved academically, it is nevertheless the case that physical fitness adds to one’s energy, mental alertness and capacity for concentration. Study is a sedentary activity that over time can seriously erode one’s health. Consequently, the dangers posed by physical inactivity should be compensated for by a physical fitness routine that can prevent the physical deterioration and illnesses that can eventually hamper or undermine your study routine. Physical fitness preserves the housing for your mind, your body. When you fuel your body with healthy food and strengthen it with regular exercise, you feel more vital, confident, and better able to face any challenges, mental or physical. It is important to find some time daily or several times weekly to exercise in an activity that you enjoy. Furthermore, a commitment to a sporting club can provide, in addition to revitalising exercise, another means to foster the competitive spirit that can inspire and drive scholarly endeavour. However, there is a risk. When sports training and competition take up so much of students’ limited time that they do not have sufficient hours left to study effectively, these sporting activities can become academically detrimental. Over-commitment to sport, especially during a gateway year of study, such as when making the transition from school to university, can significantly threaten a student’s progress. 162


In year 12, I have observed it to potentially be a major contributor to students falling short of their academic potential and short of their objectives in terms of grades. However, those among the young sporting champions whom I have tutored, who recognised that when undertaking study in a gateway year that they had to temporarily reduce their sporting commitments, usually found great success both in the classroom and on the sports field. They astutely understood that the balance between various commitments might have to be adjusted from time to time as one’s priorities change. This notion of shifting priorities leads us to reflect on the dilemma of trying to achieve a balanced life. Many people recommend the value of living a balanced life, which involves achieving an equilibrium between the attention devoted to, for example, study, work, relationships, family, friends, exercise and leisure, etc. The argument is that the neglect of one or more dimensions in favour of one or more of the others leads to some dimensions suffering to a degree that ultimately undermines the quality of one’s life. This argument makes some sense. However, it requires some practical modification for those who seek great success in one dimension of life, such as study. There seems to be an inescapable law of nature that to succeed in an endeavour or dimension of your life you need to apply sufficient time, attention and effort, and sometimes this may be a great deal of time, attention and effort. This inevitably means that the time, attention and effort put onto one area cannot be applied to another. For most people, especially high achievers, a balanced life with each dimension in equilibrium is an impossible ideal. So rather than expect to achieve a balanced life, it is more realistic to appreciate that it may never be in equilibrium. Instead, one should acknowledge that it is both possible and desirable to shift the balance when necessary to ensure that one or more of the dimensions of life do not suffer neglect too long or too severely. Rather than expect to achieve a perfectly balanced life, it is more realistic to aim to minimise the inevitable imbalance, by continually rotating the varying degrees of attention or neglect among different dimensions. However, one should also accept that there may sometimes be occasions when the need to focus on one dimension 163


of life may be inescapable, such as when presented with an especially demanding challenge. When this happens, it is appropriate to provide the necessary focus on the problem while bearing in mind that the other inevitably neglected dimensions of life may have to be revitalised as soon as it is possible to do so. Success in study or any other significant endeavour involves making sacrifices. However, if you manage your life with an awareness of all its important dimensions, you can take care to minimise any costs to the other dimensions of your life that a commitment in one dimension may entail. Instead of aiming for a balanced life, you should aim to manage or moderate an imbalanced life the best way you can. One of these adjustments to your priorities and commitments may involve shifting the balance between paid employment and study, with study being an unpaid form of work that can be considered to take up time that could otherwise be spent in money-making employment. In Volume 1, we noted how important financial viability and budgeting were to preventing university students from dropping out of their courses. Now we will consider another aspect of the impact of employment on study, which can potentially be extremely detrimental. Paid employment can encroach on study routines to the point of destroying them. If your paid employment is too physically tiring or mentally demanding to leave sufficient time or energy to undertake study, it is very difficult to make significant progress, or any progress, in that study unless the hours or form of employment are adjusted to provide the time and energy that are required to study productively. In addition, paid employment can overwhelm study time because financial reward is such a powerful incentive. Arguably, it is one of the most powerful incentives, since it can override most others. Consequently, unpaid study can have difficulty competing against paid employment for your allocation of finite hours. Too many students allow their studies to suffer or they drop out of their courses as a consequence of the attractiveness of paid employment. However, to succeed at study, you have to have the ability to work for free, because that is what study requires. This may entail devoting hours to study that you know could otherwise be spent in paid employment that would put dollars in your pocket. Furthermore, you also require 164


the ability to be willing to do something well simply because it warrants being done well rather than because you will be paid well. The more experience you have had in the world of paid employment, the more difficult these decisions can become because financial incentives can subliminally or overtly shape our perception of value in a manner that can compromise the motivation to study. These notions about incentives and rewards are relevant to an important concept that we have touched upon previously. They are connected to one’s capacity for delayed gratification, which is the ability to forfeit short-term gains for long-term rewards. Ideological, legal and moral concepts of economic exploitation, important though they are, can be a distraction from the establishment of certain qualities of character that can empower individuals to achieve their dreams or goals. If you only work because someone in authority tells you or sufficiently pays you to do so, you may unfortunately forfeit the opportunity to use work to realise your own dreams. When you can do a task and do it well because it needs to be done and done well, and when you give priority to doing what will bring your dreams to fruition, regardless of whether or not you are told to do so or paid, then you are no longer at the beck and call of others, but a free agent shaping your own destiny.

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CHAPTER 5 CLOSING THOUGHTS This book has covered a great deal. Building on what we learnt in Volume 1, we have deepened our understanding of the nature of assessment by exploring further what goes on in examiners’ minds while they assess or correct your work. This insight allows you to take some simple precautions to ensure that your work accommodates these cognitive realities, which will increase the likelihood that your work is consistently well rewarded. We also learnt how to appreciate official assessment standards and how to deal with different assessment scenarios, so you can acquire the versatility to succeed in any assessment scenario. We also learnt how to lobby for higher grades, which means that the grade that you initially received does not necessarily have to be the final result. In addition, we learnt how to handle some perilously difficult situations involving teachers’ negative attitudes, acquiring skills that can reverse a teacher’s prejudice or hostility. Armed with these formidable skills, if problems or injustices happen, you immediately know what to do to transform the situation into one in your favour. Sadly, many students have suffered because they did not know what to do in these circumstances. Fortunately, with these skills, those times are over and better times can begin. This is a book about empowering the individual. In Volume 1, we learnt the Method, which involves making a psychological profile of your examiner so that everything you put into your assessed work is calculated to pay a dividend in grades. We also learnt the value of adopting the kind of student persona that examiners like to reward. Rather than just walk into a system, like the education system, and expect it, fingers crossed, to work for you; it 167


is much smarter to take steps to understand the system and then to astutely work the system to make it work for you. In this bold fashion, you will capitalise on its potential benefits, avoid its pitfalls, and be far more likely to achieve your objectives. This is a book to help those who help themselves. In this volume, we increased our understanding of how to effectively deal with the subject matter of high school and university courses. In Volume 1, we looked at the acquisition of merit, how to succeed by mastering the tasks that students are required to complete. Notably, we covered the art of research, essay writing, and public speaking. However, at another level, you may have noticed that the skills articulated to help you succeed in essay writing and these related areas, can be appreciated as helpful for achieving success in any creative intellectual endeavour. They have wider applications than school or university, and consequently the potential to benefit you indefinitely. In this volume we expanded your repertoire of skills to enable you to succeed through merit by learning how to succeed in exams, including exams that feature essays, short-answer questions, multiple-choice questions, mathematical calculations and foreign languages. However, again, at another level, you may have noticed that this discussion of exam technique can also be appreciated metaphorically as outlining an approach for achieving success in any field of endeavour. While looking at what it takes to succeed in exams, we also looked at the personal qualities necessary for success anywhere, qualities like selfdiscipline, the capacity for delayed gratification, and the motivational power of a dream. This is a book for those who like winning. This discussion of the personal qualities required for success is related to self-knowledge, which includes an appreciation of the need to change on the inside first in order to change one’s outward circumstances. With the right attitude and effective skills, you can avoid or significantly reduce fear, anxiety or stress, or instead make them constructively work for you. With these skills, you can proceed with confidence. This is a book for those who appreciate the transformative power of ideas. Idealists want to create a better world. This attitude has its proper place and a role to play. However, realists want to create better 168


outcomes in the existing world. Although there is always room for reform, and progress may be possible and often desirable, it is also the case that you have to succeed in the world of today, now, not in the possibly better world of tomorrow. When you understand how the world works, really works, you are better equipped to succeed in it. The world of human interaction operates according to the laws of human nature. You cannot go beyond them or transcend them or escape them or afford to ignore them, but you can productively work with them. When you think about and operate in the world that is, you are better positioned to succeed than those who think primarily about the world that should be. This is a book for realists. To achieve, you firstly need to determine the nature of your circumstances and define what you intend to achieve in a penetratingly realistic philosophical sense, then develop or learn appropriate techniques based on this understanding. In this volume and in Volume 1, we applied this approach to the pursuit of achieving consistently high grades from examiners. This involved learning more about what really happens in the assessment process, so we could do precisely what would be required to succeed according to this reality. With this approach, I developed the following fundamental concept: Success in the education system primarily depends on how effectively you deal with people in authority over you. When you know the nature of your circumstances and know what is necessary to achieve your objectives, you can take action. Rather than sit around waiting to be ‘discovered’ by someone in authority, instead, you have to discover yourself – and make yourself into the success that you know you can be. If you wait to be discovered, you surrender yourself to fate. If you discover yourself, you can position yourself to determine your own fate, by positioning those in authority to recognise your ability. This is a book for those who want results. This book is intended to enable you to develop valuable knowledge and skills in the four areas in which they are advantageous when pursuing success in the education system. It will enable you to know and be able to handle your examiners, to know and be able to handle the system, to know and be able to handle your courses of study, and to know and be able to handle yourself. Consequently, you will be 169


able to shape your own destiny. But more than this, because you will realistically know precisely what you need to do while you are involved with the education system, not only will you become far more likely to succeed in it, but far more likely to have fun doing it. This is a book for those who like to make their work fun. Enjoy using it.

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