Exam Stress and Preparation

It still surprises me each year how underprepared the students feel for exams, and how underprepared I feel for them. This is my third year preparing students for exams, and at the end of last year I sat and thought - right. Exams. How am I going to manage the year so as to strategically include exam preparation throughout the year. I came up with having skills day on Friday - term one was basic skills. Language features, mainly. Term two was looking for those features in context - how could we use them in our writing and how could we find them in our reading? Term three has been hectic with internals, so the Friday skills day has fallen by the wayside a bit, and now - the week before exams, the students are fretting. Even though there has been an emphasis on this throughout the year and they've slowly built up the skills, they still are telling me they don't know what to do.

Is it because I've not given them paper notes? Overhearing some students today, they were loving on their teachers who printed them off exams, exemplars, everything. I make all this available - just electronically.

Is it because they have a fear of doing something wrong? Some of the students are still not even attempting in class, even though this is not the first - or tenth time - they've seen these types of questions.

Things to think about for next year:

Students copy the exam questions into their book everytime we do unfamiliar, so that they've got the style of the questions right there. 

Students to glue a paper copy of the marking scheme into their book so that every time they mark their work, they can refer back to it.

Students to identify where they're at and where to next after every attempt at doing an unfamiliar piece.

Plan Term three much more carefully so that it's not just a focus on internals coming in for final submission, but the students continue to practise unfamiliar text as well.

Start practise exam essay questions earlier for each class - one per text per month.