Tip 13 - Plan your answers

When you’re sitting the exam and faced with longer mark questions (shoutout to humanities!!) it’s recommended (read: essential) to plan your answers. And no, I don’t mean spend half of your time planning. What I mean by planning, is writing a quick word or phrase for each paragraph or point to cover. Quickly read over any texts given and highlight information/context you’ll be using in your answer. If you’ve already memorised how to structure each question, you’ll be able to plan very quickly (2-3 mins max depending on question size unless it is a creative writing or essay based piece which id recommend spending longer on - but do whatever works for you). Do lots of past papers to make sure you can stick to timings and also to practice your planning for the real exams.

Thou should not includeth unnecessary or overly detailed information in thine plan!!!!!

A quick example of what a plan could look like is this:

for - good for bringing investors, more sources, more investment into promotion against - may lose control, less decision making and slower, slow to react to change and lose to competitors conc - it depends upon.. but I’d recommend..

Or this, if you are able to connect written ideas while writing:

for - invest sources, promotion against - slower choices, can’t react conc - idu

Your planning only needs to make sense for the time you are doing the question. If you’ve made a plan, try and do the question straight away while your mind is thinking of what to write, so that you don’t struggle if you come back to it later. It can help to practice planning in revision, even just on its own without answering the question, so you can get used to doing it in the exam.