With this in mind I thought I'd share some frequent mistakes I have seen students making with the exams. I will of course tell you how to avoid them.
If you don't know it, skip it!
Time pressure can be a factor in Use of English and Reading. So if you come across an answer you don't know, don't sit there staring at it for 5 minutes. Move on to other questions which you do know. If you have time, you can come back to it later. If you don't have time, then wasn't it extra important that you didn't waste even more time looking at it?
"Sorry for the length of my reply, but I didn't have time to write a plan" - Winston Churchill
Like Mr Churchill here many students see making a plan of their Writing parts as a waste of valuable time. The fact is, that writing a plan will not only SAVE you time, but also score you valuable points on the organisation. Briefly jot down the main ideas and some grammar structures you can use in each paragraph (do NOT write a draft) and then start to write.
Watch out for distractors!
In the Listening part, the exam will try to throw in distractors to separate the weak students from the strong ones.
If you hear exact phrases from the question paper, then the chances are that this is a distractor,Designed to avoid weaker students simply guessing the answers right, don't choose it!
Death to skim and scan!
With Reading and Use of English tasks that involve a long text. Don't spend 5 minutes reading or even scanning the text to find out the content before you start answering questions. This will take alot of time and experiments have proven it has little to no effect on the students ability to answer the questions. Maybe look at the title to make an assumption about it, and then get stuck in!
Hope you found those useful guys. Best of luck to all students taking Cambridge exams this weekend and next!
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