Developing Exam Skills: Answer what you are asked!

I’ve blogged about this before but it is worth mentioning again as we approach what I like to call, the ‘business end’ of the academic year - exam season.

One thing I often find is that students give an answer to a question they were never asked. For example, many students will spend valuable exam time discussing the downsides of a concept when they were asked only to analyse the benefits.

One way of preventing this, as well as allowing students to give a much more focused and well structured answer, is to use the key words from the question at the beginning of every paragraph.

For example,take the question:

Explain two benefits of targeting a niche market.

An ideal structure would be:

Definition of niche market…

One benefit of targeting a niche market is…

Another benefit of targeting a niche market is ...

As we can see, using the key words in a question ensures students actually ‘answer what they are asked’.

I really hope this helps and my original blog can be found here...........