Don't be so Mainstream! The best order in which to tackle exam questions | Top 7 GCSE Maths Mistakes

Part 6 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.

I was guilty of today's mistake back in the day. Whether you're tempted by the orthodoxy of sequentially numbered questions, or just plain apathy, don't be so mainstream! Live a little. Channel your inner Olympic Triple-Jumper. Do the exam questions in whatever order you best see fit.

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Like an Olympic Triple-Jumper, you can hop, skip and jump around the exam paper to your heart's content!

If you don't like the look of a question, feel free to move on and come back to it later. Or perhaps you have two favourite topics, whose questions are all but guaranteed marks for you. Well in that case, scour through the paper looking for those two topics to bank yourself some easy marks and get an early exam confidence boost.

When sitting an exam, you ultimately have only one goal: to maximise the number of marks you can extract from the paper at large. Nobody cares how you achieve it, but you shouldn't leave any marks behind on the table when you stroll out of the exam hall to collect your mobile phone. Running out of time and foregoing by default a certain number of marks towards the back of the paper, simply because you didn't even read the questions, is tantamount to exam treason! Sure, there will be questions that you struggle with more than others, but don't leave a question on your strongest topic untouched just because it happens to be the penultimate one on the paper.

Just bear in mind, though, that jumping around too much could also be detrimental to your performance as well. Sometimes, you do have to get stuck into some deeper thinking, or get your hands dirty problem-solving. So yes, don't be so mainstream - but don't be too superficial either.

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The finale Part seven in our series covering the Top 7 GCSE Maths Mistakes will release tomorrow morning, just in time for the summer term restarting for many of you.