Exam prep
Knowing the answer is only half the marks
Children lose marks they had already earned — by writing in the wrong order, skipping steps, or spending twenty minutes on a three-mark question. Exam technique is a skill of its own.
Trickly 6 min read
Every teacher knows a child who understands the subject and still comes out with average marks. Almost always it is not the knowledge. It is what happened between knowing the answer and writing it down.
Write the working, always
In Indian board exams, method marks are real and they are generous. A child who writes the correct working and then makes an arithmetic slip at the last line often keeps most of the marks. A child who writes only the final answer, and gets it wrong, keeps none.
Match the effort to the marks
A three-mark question deserves roughly three minutes. Children lose whole grades by spending twenty minutes fighting one hard question and then leaving four easy ones blank.
- 1Read the whole paper first, in the reading time. Do not start writing.
- 2Do every question you are sure about, first. Bank those marks.
- 3Then the ones you think you can do.
- 4Only then the ones you are stuck on — with whatever time is left.
This one habit is worth more marks than almost any amount of extra revision.
Use the rough sheet properly
The first thing to write, before answering anything, is whatever you are afraid of forgetting — a formula, a conversion table, the fraction-to-percentage list. Get it out of your head and onto the paper while your memory is still fresh and calm.
Leave the last five minutes for checking
Not for re-reading everything, which is useless. For three specific things: have you answered every part of every question you attempted, have you carried every minus sign correctly, and does each answer have the right unit.
Most marks lost in a maths paper are not lost to difficulty. They are lost to a dropped minus sign and a missing unit.
Practise under exam conditions at least once
Studying at a desk with the book open is a different skill from writing under time pressure with nothing to lean on. Do one full paper, timed, with no interruptions, before the real thing. The first time a child feels that pressure should not be in the exam hall.
This is why every Trickly lesson ends with an exam tip: what to write, in what order, and the trap most children fall into on that exact topic.
Try it on tonight's homework
Photograph the question. Get the answer, the steps and the words to teach it — in your language.
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