Mock exam or past paper at home?

What a past paper tells you

A past paper tells you whether your child can answer questions of the right kind, at the right level, in the right format. Written properly, it also tells you how far into the paper your child gets. That is real information, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

Past papers and their marking guidelines are published online, and schools often hand them out before the exams.

Written under proper conditions, a free paper answers four questions you cannot answer from a term mark:

• Can your child finish? Count how far into the paper the answers go.
• Is the level right? A paper from two grades below flatters. The paper for the year your child is in does not.
• Which topics fall over? The pattern across a whole paper is steadier than the pattern in a single test.
• What does an unbroken stretch of 3 hours feel like? That is worth finding out before it counts.

None of that needs anybody else. A paper, a marking guideline, a clock and a quiet room, and you already know more than a report card will tell you.

What it cannot tell you

A past paper cannot tell you why a mark went missing. A cross beside a question says the answer was wrong. It does not say whether the method was wrong, the arithmetic slipped, the working was never written down, the question was misread, or the definition would not come.

That difference matters, because those five reasons have five different fixes and three of them have nothing to do with revision. A mark lost to arithmetic and a mark lost to a topic your child has never understood look identical on a marked script: a cross, and a number in the margin.

• Whether the last two questions were wrong, or never reached.
• Whether the method was right and only the arithmetic slipped.
• Whether the answer was right and the working that carries the marks was missing.
• Whether the question was misread in the first ten seconds.
• Whether the same reason sits behind losses in three different topics.

A marking guideline helps, and only so far. It shows where the marks were allocated, not why your child did not collect them. Working that out means reading the script line by line against the guideline and deciding each case. That is the work why your child loses marks in exams describes, and it is the work a report does for you.

The clock is the difference

The difference between practice and an exam is 3 timed hours. Untimed work flatters. A question solved in twenty minutes at the kitchen table is not the same question with forty minutes left and four to go. Marks that go missing to time only go missing when there is a clock.

A paper written over two evenings, with notes in the room, measures whether your child can eventually do the work. That is worth knowing. It is not what the exam measures. The exam measures what your child can produce in one sitting, once, with no second attempt and nothing to check against.

So if you are going to use a free paper, make it count:

• One sitting, start to finish, timed from the first question.
• Closed book. If your child uses notes, the result measures a different thing.
• Phone out of the room, and no questions asked or answered.
• A desk, a calculator and the same rules as the real paper.
• Mark it the same day, while your child still remembers what happened where.

There is more on setting that up, including what to do when your child stops early, in running a timed exam at home .

Side by side

Four things a parent can buy when a mark disappoints: a past paper at home, a marked diagnostic paper, a private tutor, or extra lessons. They answer different questions and cost different amounts. The table below is the honest version, with everybody else’s prices shown as ranges to check.

Printed study guides sit beside all four and do a different job again. Typically R250–R530 a subject. They carry content, which is the right buy when the problem is content. They cannot tell you whether it is.

Read the middle two rows together. A tutor answers the question what can my child not do? A marked paper answers the question where are the marks going? The second is cheaper to answer, and the answer tells you whether you need the first. Tutor, or exam technique? works through that choice.

When a free past paper is the right choice

Start with a past paper when you have the marking guideline, a quiet 3 hours, and the patience to sort the losses yourself. If your child has not written a full paper under time this year, that is the first thing to fix, and it is free.

• Your child has not sat a full paper under time this year. Fix that first, and fix it for nothing.
• You have the paper and its marking guideline, for the right grade and the right curriculum.
• You have an evening to mark it and to sort each loss into a reason.
• The mark is roughly where you expected, and you only wanted confirmation.

It stops being enough when the mark is not the surprise. If your child studies, sits the paper, and the number still does not match what you both know is in there, a second paper written at home produces a second number and no more understanding than the first.

It also stops being enough when a paper that counts is close. Sorting a script yourself takes an evening you may not have that week, and what you end up with is a list of topics rather than a list of marks that were already in reach.

What a diagnostic adds

Exam Diagnostics ZA is a South African service that marks a full Grade 10–12 mock exam paper mark by mark and reports every lost mark, with a strategy report and a video walkthrough, within 24 hours. That is the difference in one sentence: the same 3 hours, and a reason beside every mark that went missing.

Your child writes at home on the clock, in Paper 1 or Paper 2 of the subject you choose. Marks come back within 1 hour and the report within 24, by email and WhatsApp. A paper is R299, and pricing has the deals.

Diagnose a paperFrom R299. Report in 24 hours.