Exams are a game.
 
You can be good at them, or bad at them. Either way, you can certainly improve your performance. Afterall, that's the whole point of  “mock” or “trial” examinations. To take advantage fully of your trial examinations, you should prepare for these examinations as fully as you can, and nearly as fully as for your real examination. You should revise everything you have learned in English so far as fully as you would revise for the real examination. This way, you will re-revise that material and the new material you’ve learned too, and the material you’ve revised twice will be really securely learned.

Once you’re prepared, the marking will be really worthwhile. Marking trial examinations is not worth while for candidates who are unprepared. That is why it is not really fair for a teacher or lecturer (as once commonly occcured in schools and colleges) to rip up a script in front of a pupil, and tell them to re-sit the examination after school or during the lunch hour!

An excuse: We can’t revise English!

In some ways, this is true. In examinations which present you with a previously unseen passage (blind text reading/comprehension exams), you are unliklely to have come across the particular text before. And even if, through some peculiar twist of fate, you found you had seen the passage before, the examiners will invariably looking for a fresh and spontaneous (albeit inspired!) response.

However, even these types of exam can be revised for.

Indeed, the person who is “good at English” will revise as they sit in the doctor’s surgery looking at posters or handouts, by asking questions like, "Is this effective? How is the information presented, and what is good about it, what improvable?

Is the language clear, or unnecessarily confusing?

If unnecessarily confusing, why is it so?"; Indeed, we are reading (well or badly) all day long in one form or another: listening to radio; watching TV; reading the paper; using the Internet.

So, not only is it not true to say that you can’t revise for such exams; it is false. You should be revising for that every day of your lives. Aim to be a good critical reader. For this, you need only a sharp brain and confidence in your ability as a reader. You have a right to an opinion, and, since these exams deal with material which is produced for readers like you, you have every right to criticise it, as long as your criticism is thoughtful and constructive.

That’s what these types of paper are testing, your ability to make decisions about how words are used and how well you read.

By Laurence Cawley MA (Cantab)