Pep-Talk by Ms.Hema Chennupaty

As it turns out, we the current IGCSE 10^th graders needed a little pep-talk to get us going (with our exams being around the corner). This speech was given by none other than Hema ma’am herself. All the 10G and 10H students were seated in 10H Classroom on the 6^th of November to listen to this guest lecture and absorb all the motivational words.

To break the ice, we challenged Hema ma’am to name all of us since she was our former co-ordinator. She did a tremendous job by naming almost every single person in the class correctly. And everyone felt pleased that our dear Hema ma’am hadn’t forgotten us.

She started off her speech by giving us tips on how to revise for our trials (that are coming up soon) and our boards. Time management and proper revision are the most important factors for preparing for any exam or test, but when it comes to the IGCSE boards these skills are tested to its highest extent. The IGCSE boards stretch over almost a month and a half, making it very difficult to manage your time and keep your mind focused. 

A suggestion she gave us was to connect with our seniors and inquire them about how they have prepared for their boards. This way you can either follow the same techniques that they followed for their revision or you could add in your own imagination to do something different, which you think could be more helpful. Another way to prepare for these exams could be by looking through the past papers (even better: memorizing the marking scheme!!), but she warned us that this is the easy way to prepare and we wouldn’t be able to do the same when we go to IBDP. So, in the long run, relying on the past IGCSE boards’ papers wouldn’t serve us much. 

Coming to the next topic she gave us a lecture on: English. She gave us some tips on how to prepare for the English trial (because we always seem to claim that there isn’t anything to revise for in English). She told us that we should be familiar with all the types of writing for the optional question. Even though it is optional and you can choose the type of writing you want to do (discursive, argumentative, descriptive, narrative, etc.) it is better to know how to do all sorts of writing. You could focus on one type of writing (such as descriptive) to practice during your revision but there could some circumstances in which knowing the other kinds of writing would come in handy. 

She went a little into detail about how to answer the summary writing question. First, she told us to read the passage at least three times: the first time, to satisfy your curiosity; the second time, to understand the tone/mood of the passage (what makes it unique?);  and the third time, to mark the necessary points (according to what is needed in the question).

She also strongly advised us to draw out a plan/ a rough draft for each of your answers to make it easier for you to write in an organised manner with a clear head (you could draw a Venn Diagram, Spider Diagrams, etc.).

And the points she stressed on the most: clean handwriting, no spelling mistakes, and correct sentence structures. She made us realise the immense importance of these aspects of writing an English exam paper. We understood that even though we don’t directly lose any marks for these factors, it could irritate the examiner to an extent that they wouldn’t mind cutting a few marks. If we make a bad impression on the examiner we would risk losing the few marks that could actually make a huge difference. 

With that, she wrapped up by saying that she would’ve liked to go into more detail about writing the English exam (having been an English teacher) but we didn’t have enough time. 

She left all of us more determined to work harder for our exams and our boards because now we have a little more guidance on how to work hard and how to succeed.