astranti

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Keys to passing T4: Thinking ahead - use your personal "autopilot"



A student who recently passed his T4 exam emailed me recently to say thank you for my help.

Alongside those thanks he made a very interesting point leading to why he’d passed – and put it in a way that, despite all the years I’ve been teaching T4, I’d not heard before. So here’s the email from Matt – and to give you a little background, he’d got an average of 51% in his three practice mock exams before doing much better (66%) in the real exam

“Hi Nick, I'm very happy to inform you that I passed with 33.

It was a relatively nice paper, although that itself was a result of preparing with your predicted scenarios and the mocks. I felt reasonably confident of a pass as I had been borderline pass in the submitted mocks and managed to write almost 1,000 more words in the real thing. My problem before was pausing too long to think. On the day, once I had done the "thinking" in the plan and calculations then the rest was like being on autopilot. Which I think is very much the "trick" to T4. This was my first taught course and I did find the compressed timetable and tight deadlines difficult, but that pressure also helped me focus. I will definitely recommend your course for my colleagues and friends sitting T4 and its replacement in the new syllabus next year.

Many thanks,

Matt”


The key point I liked here (beyond the compliments of course!) was the analogy of being on autopilot as the key “‘trick’ to T4”, as he put it. This is so, so true. One of the biggest problems I see is people struggling with their time management and then not writing enough, and Matt has hit the nail on the head of many people’s problems with this. Too often people are spending too much time ‘thinking’ as they write. They think again and then write. They stop and think. Often they then reread the unseen. Then they write a little more. Then the stop and think and so on. In the end they are no where near the 3000 words which is absolutely key to passing the exam. Not enough content means there’s just not enough to get you through!

So how did Matt manage to get onto “autopilot” and write 1000 words more in the real exam? The key was his planning. He produced a very strong, detailed plan, so had done all his key thinking early, meaning that once he’d started writing he could do just that – write, and write some more and write some more! Also note that he’d also done a lot of mock practice including full 3 mocks he had marked.

So take a lesson from Matt – practice lots of mock exams so you know the process and formats for the report and do really good plans so that when you start to write – that’s exactly what you are doing. That way you should write a long and relevant report that will score well and easily pass, just as Matt did.

My masterclass this weekend has a whole element on planning and preparation. If you're interested in attending the live class or watching a recording click the link here

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