Make a PLAN! (Just like your English teacher says) | Top 7 GCSE Maths Mistakes

Part 4 of 7 in our series "Top 7 Mistakes which GCSE Maths students make".

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Invest three minutes of your time now to avoid heartbreak on Results Day!

For those of you in Year 11, or with children in that same year, you'll be acutely aware that GCSE exam season is little more than six weeks away now! The Easter holidays, during which you might have done lots of revision - or conversely, none at all (I won't tell if you don't) - are fast drawing to a close. This timely blog series by Gill Learning highlights seven common GCSE Maths mistakes and HOW to resolve them before the day of your exam rolls around! And whichever exam board your school or academic institution opts for, these common mistakes will apply to yours.

Today marks the midpoint in this blog series, so let's go wild and dare to think cross-curriculum. "Making a plan" might seem a little alien in GCSE Maths, but don't pre-judge! If you give it a chance, you could really reap the rewards. And for any veteran Blackadder fans out there, there's the Easter-egg to end all Easter-eggs hidden in plain sight in the image below!

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Cast your mind forwards and imagine for me: you're halfway through your Maths exam paper, with good time left on the clock, but now you start to run into the heavy-hitting 4- and 5-mark questions. Single questions which can be worth as much as 5% of the entire paper - and hence your grade - just on their own, and sometimes even more (I once saw an 8-marker!).

Some of these multi-mark questions are kind; they come in parts (a), (b), (c) and so on, already broken down into digestible chunks which can be more easily tackled in sequence. Part (b) will usually build upon, and directly use the answer to, part (a). Part (c) the same with regards to (b), and so on like Russian dolls. There's a certain logic and flow to it all, which seems rather apt for a Maths exam!

However, some multi-mark questions are less kind. A few lines of text, perhaps a diagram… and then one very large, empty white space that quietly awaits your (attempt at a) solution. Here's where students often fail to see the wood for the trees: just because someone else hasn't already broken the question down for you, doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't do so for yourself! Every 5-mark "unstructured" question is still naturally solved by a sequence of three or four logical steps. And you can think about what those steps might be without having to actually crunch any numbers. In other words, you should consider making a short plan.

Taking 60-seconds or a couple of minutes to "make a plan" is so universally recommended as exam advice to students of English, History, Geography, Business… frankly any humanity or other subject which involves written responses or essays. And yet in Maths, bizarrely, it's seldom to never spoken about (except by me!). Making a short plan has become an increasingly important skill for GCSE Maths students in recent years in particular, ever since the exam boards pivoted towards a greater emphasis on "applied, worded problems", which examine your abstract problem-solving skills and your ability to "translate" words into maths on-the-fly.

So, I always recommend that students make a plan before they dive head-first into a 5-mark unstructured question, and crucially, I encourage them to write that plan down on their exam papers! Even if you can't see exactly how to get all the way to the final answer from the beginning of the question, then write down half of a plan; that's still much better than nada.

Your plan will serve two purposes: firstly, you'll essentially have created your own part (a), part (b), etc. and thereby broken down a long, convoluted question into a handful of much more manageable 1- or 2-mark chunks; secondly, and this isn't to be underestimated, you'll signal to the examiner from the very beginning of your solution that you know what you're doing. It will make awarding you credit (a.k.a., "marks") much smoother and easier to justify; examiners are ultimately human beings, and if you make their lives hard by scattering random numbers across your page, devoid of any semblance of structure, then they're less likely (unintentionally) to award you with as many marks in the round.

Lastly, two important things to note: (i) your plan does NOT need to be long or elaborate to serve the purposes described above; and (ii) your plan should NOT include many numbers. Your plan is a set of simple, logical steps which need stringing together in order. It is not the calculations, expressions, and equations themselves. I've included a picture of a "typical plan" below as an example. Easy-peasy!

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Part five in our series covering the Top 7 GCSE Maths Mistakes will take a deeper look into something that we actually touched on in yesterday's Part three, so-called "sanity-checking" your answers. Your grandparents might call it "applying common sense". Whatever name you choose to dub it with, it goes a surprisingly long way to catching silly mistakes and errors without any hassle. If that sounds like something that would benefit you, then stay the course, and return tomorrow to read Part five.