Exam Skills - Stick with the programme

I recently marked some homework completed by my Lower Sixth AQA Business AS Level students. A common theme ran through my feedback, and it led to an analogy which most of my class seemed to connect with, so I thought it may be worth sharing.

My main concern with my students' work (but let's give them a break, it was the first "Apply, Analyse, Evaluate" past paper longer exam question they had attempted!) was their tendency to briefly cover a range of points within a paragraph, but fail to stick to one point and develop and explain this argument fully, applying it to the case study and analysing the issues that may arise from it. I felt a growing sense of frustration and I knew I'd felt it before in another walk of life but at first I just couldn't place where.

Then it hit me. It's that sense of frustration I feel when my wife gets hold of the remote control and starts channel surfing. She will occasionally leave a channel on long enough for me to just start to get interested in the programme, and just as I want to know more she flicks the channel over to something else. Then, she repeats the trick with 2 minutes of another potential interesting programme before she flicks over again! Admittedly it's not something she does often, but it's very annoying when it does set in.

So I asked my students if they have ever experienced this pain too. As I expected most of them had, enthusiastically citing parents or siblings who have similarly trigger happy remote control fingers. So I explained that they were putting me through the same sense of frustration if they wrote paragraphs that briefly explained 4 good reasons for or against taking on the franchise featured in the exam case study. I said I'd be far happier if they concentrated on one, but "let me watch the whole programme".

One student said they liked to watch different programmes. That's fine I said, but finish watching one programme before you switch over to another! He knew what I meant - make your first point in sufficient detail and then move on to another. The analogy stretches further. Don't "watch too many programmes as you don't have time" (and it's bad for your eyes!).

Time will tell whether this analogy will have a positive impact. They will be doing another piece of work of this nature next week so I'll find out then. But they all seemed to recognise and connect with the analogy, so may be it will work for other BUSS1/BUSS2 students, and perhaps some Upper Sixth ones too.