Help! I keep losing marks in exams for being ‘off topic’

Organising Students - Image of a student working with a teacher for BLOG Help! I keep losing marks in exams for being 'off topic'

Text/Exam responses not addressing the question?  Here’s six questions students can be asking themselves to improve.

When it comes to preparing for exams, it’s easy to think that the hardest part, the thing that takes most work, is going to be remembering all the information you need to answer the questions. But that’s not the only challenge students face, and for some it’s not even the hardest one.

Consider whether your child has ever received feedback from a test or exam paper like this:

  • ‘What you said was true, but it didn’t answer the question’
  • ‘Your working out was correct but that wasn’t what the question was asking for’
  • ‘Some of your points were not relevant’
  • ‘You need to work on staying on topic’

In all likelihood this has happened at some point. For some students, it happens repeatedly.

This can be a very frustrating experience! Those students may in fact be putting quite a lot of work in to study for the test or exam but feel like they are then not getting the results that would reflect their effort.

Organising Students blog Help! I keep losing marks in exams for being 'off topic' - image of a student with a pencil answering questionsLearning how to answer a question in a test or exam paper is a skill in itself. This might seem like a waste of time, but there are actually two very good reasons for this:

First, examiners can’t see inside each student’s head and they can’t try to guess what students mean (that would result in very inconsistent marking). Students need to set their answers out clearly so that exam papers can be marked fairly and consistently.

Secondly and most importantly, tests and exams assess more than just students’ knowledge of facts. They also assess students’ understanding of concepts, their reasoning, and their problem solving skills. This means that it won’t be enough for students to simply reproduce a list of facts — they also have to demonstrate these skills in the way they answer.

For both of these reasons, preparing for exams requires not just memorisation, but also practicing answering questions. (Tip: if students aren’t practicing this, they probably aren’t remembering very well either!) When they practice in this way, they are practicing putting that knowledge to use and learning how to communicate it well.

So the first question students should ask themselves when they receive that kind of feedback is: Did I practice answering questions?

If the answer is ‘no’, stop here and try practicing first! But if the answer is ‘yes’ to this first question, students can then start evaluating where they might be going wrong by asking themselves the next five questions:

  1. Do I know what is being asked?
    Sometimes students go wrong in their understanding of the question itself. To test this, they should check that they can identify the ‘command words’ in the question and understand what they are asking for.
  2. Do I know what a good answer looks like?
    Seeing some sample responses can be extremely helpful, especially for understanding the difference between a 3, 5 and 8 mark question. A common place students can go wrong is not providing enough relevant points in their answers. Most students understand the number of sentences or paragraphs they should be writing, but not necessarily whether each of the sentences they have written would count as a ‘point’ in answer to the question.
  3. Do I know how to plan my answer and am I using my plan?
    Good planning is especially important for extended response questions, where students often lose marks by wandering off topic over the course of their essay or paragraph. An essay plan done before starting writing provides a reference for keeping the writing focused.
  4. Have I sought feedback on how to improve?Organising Students - image of a student with a teacher seeking feedback
    If students practice answering questions but don’t seek out feedback on their answers, they won’t learn how to improve until after the exam is over and they receive their marks back — which is helpful feedback but coming too late! By seeking feedback from teachers beforehand, students can learn how to view their answers from an examiner’s perspective and work on improving their responses before the test or exam arrives.
  5. Have I applied the feedback?
    To learn from feedback it is not enough to say ‘I’ll remember next time’ — students also need to be practicing applying it. This means practicing on similar style questions, or (even better) submitting a new answer to the same question to check that the feedback has been understood.

Because answering exam questions is a skill, it often does take practice and some work figuring out how to incorporate it into a study routine. It is a study skill which also requires organisation, self-advocacy, and self-reflection — four of the six key elements to student success! We coach all of our students through this aspect of their test and exams, especially in their senior years of secondary school.

If you would like to know more about how we can assist your child with this and other study skills, please get in touch with us.

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