Your GCSE Maths Edexcel Exam Explained with Deb Friis

Hello, my name is Deb Friis and I’m a secondary maths teacher with over 20 years experience teaching both GCSE and A level maths. I’m going to talk to you about your Edexcel GCSE maths exam.

The exam consists of three papers. Paper One is a non calculated paper, this always comes first. Paper two and three allow you to use a calculator. Each paper is worth 80 marks, and the questions start off easy and get harder towards the end of the paper, any topic can appear anywhere in any three of the papers.

So I have two main tips for revision for your GCSE maths. Firstly is to practice and learn your key facts and definitions. This is things like the words that could come up like factor multiple prime. Fraction decimal percentage equivalents and formulae for things like area and volume.

There are some ways you can do this. Use the retrieval practice questions in your revision guides to test yourself. Make flash cards, also get your friends and family to test your needs.

Learning these key facts helps you to free up your working memory. So that you can use that to answer more tricky exam questions.

So the second aspect of your vision should be practicing these questions. Start off by using your revision guide to look at the topic specific questions and make sure that you can do these techniques. Then start to try exam questions where more than one technique may be combined at the same time.

There are some strategies you can use to help you do these. Firstly, write down anything on the question that you think might help you, and this might help you to go into the right direction. Make sure that you annotate diagrams and you write down notes as you go.

Make sure that you check your answers look reasonable in the context of the question. Always write down the key processes that you make on your calculator rather than just the answer, and then go back and check at the end that you fully answered the question.

So have you answered to the correct number of decimal places? Have you simplified any fractions and have you answered exactly what it’s asked you to do?

So my top five tips for GCSE maths revision are;

1. Revise little and often as much as possible, but only a little bit. At a time
2. Test yourself on key facts and make sure that you know these thoroughly.
3. Practice questions, mark them and then get help with anything you don’t understand.
4. Do as many questions as possible.
5. Start to do exam papers closer to your exam under exam conditions so that you get used to being an stressful situation and you don’t find it so stressful when you get to your final exam.