Love them or hate them, it’s hard to get away from exams.  All that preparation before the big day, a race against the clock as you sit at the desk, and the aftermath that sometimes feels as stressful as the exam itself. Effective technique goes beyond the exam hall.  You’ll never be stress-free from the examination process, but you can limit it.

While there are many tips to one can follow to prepare well for exams such as not panicking, finding a suitable place to revise, getting rid of distractions, being a good time manager, having a good night sleep etc. Yet one technique beats them all: Through the revision of past papers. I can say past papers played one of the biggest roles in my scoring A’s in 2008 K.C.S.E. Nothing beats past papers in exam preparation especially when you have limited time.

Why Past Papers?

1.They help you focus on common exam themes and questions.

It is a fact, most study courses have a wide variety of associated topics and thus, cannot all be covered in one exam paper. Scrutinizing these papers is the best way to determine the areas that examiners usually test students on, so that you can focus your revision on those areas.

2.Get a feel for sitting exam.

Practicing with past exam papers enables you to have a feel of your forthcoming exams, with regard to the exam questions. Fortunately, examiners use a common “template” to set exam papers

3.Refine your exam answering skills.

When you spend time studying past exam papers, you get to experiment on how to best answer questions. Comparing your answers with those from other students, and/or answers from the official marking scheme enables you to refine the way you answer exam questions. Better yet, you can directly compare the questions and marking schemes so as to get a gist of how certain questions are answered. I used this technique especially when I had a very limited time before exams.

4.Practice with actual exam-style questions.

Including past exam papers in your revision enables you to have a feel of the key topic areas and/or themes that you are likely to encounter in your forth-coming exams. As such, you have an idea on the subject areas that you are strongest in, as well as the areas that you know little or nothing about.

It is for these reasons that Enhanced Education Group was created to supply you with free past papers and their marking schemes.

You can download the Free KCSE Marking Schemes here.

As well you can download the KCSE Questions Past Papers here.

All the best.

P.S.

Please if you have plenty of time and want to prepare  adequately for examinations you may as well get a copy of my high school guidance book. Click this link to get the book’s page.