Your GCSE Geography OCR B Exam Explained with Tim Bayliss

I’m Tim Bayliss and I’m serious editor for the New Oxford Revision and Practice Guide in geography.

I’ve been teaching GCSE geography since it started and I’ve also produced teaching resources, student textbooks and revision guides.

This new OCR B Guide is absolutely superb. It covers all the knowledge you need. It has reinforcement of that knowledge. It’s got all the key terms you need to learn. It covers all the skills you need to understand. We’ve put in revision tips, exam tips and hundreds of practice questions too.

Just make sure that you’re comfortable with the structure of the exam. Paper one is physical topics, but it also includes questions on your physical geographical inquiry. Now we’ve put a section in the guide to help with this, and lots of practice field work questions too. Paper 2 covers human topics, but again there will also be questions on your human field work, and again, we’ve put practice human fieldwork questions in there too.

Both papers have case studies and we’ve put case studies for every topic into the guide, but you must check to see if these are the same case studies that you studied in class. And make sure that you’ve got flat files for your case studies in your notes. Paper 3 covers both topics and papers one and two in a decision making exercise.

Now the best revision for this paper is practice, and you’ll do lots and lots of practice for this in class. But again, we’ve put a section in the guide to help with this on how best to approach and structure answers for this particular part of the exam.

So how best to revise. The most productive revision is always structured. It’s always planned and organized with the exam papers in mind. For what it’s worth, I find with my students that the more they put into it, the more they get out of it.

The more time they put in, means that they get to a point where they’re anticipating what’s coming next, and this means that they have time to then put in for practice exam questions, which will help enormously.

So how to wrap all this up, well. Put the time in. Have confidence in yourself and you’ll be fine. Good luck!