What if.....? Solving your biggest English exam fears

In this episode we answer the questions: 

What if I forget everything on the day of the exam? 
What if I block and can't think of how to start my essay? 
What if I can't sleep the night before my exam? 
What if I zone out in the middle of the listening exam? 

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Transcript

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Good morning everybody and welcome to the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to help you with all things related to the Cambridge Advanced exam and, of course, getting your level up to that C1 or even C2 level. So this week I asked my students who are already on our Cambridge Advanced Accelerator course. I asked some of my students what their biggest fears were when it came to the Cambridge Advanced exam. What was keeping them up at night? What were they waking up at the in the night worrying about? What would be the worst possible scenario that would appear on the day of the exam? Because if we can deal with these what ifs now, if we can find a solution to these what-ifs now, then it means on the day of the exam they're not going to be an issue for you. You're gonna feel a bit less stressed, a bit less anxious going into the exam. Okay, so I would recommend everybody to do this as well. Write a list of your what-ifs, your big fears about the day of the exam, and let's look at one by one how we can solve those fears. Feel free to comment under this video and tell me what your fears are, and I will add them in another podcast episode. I'm gonna make a series of these guys. So if you have any other biggest fears and you want me to tell you how to deal with those, just comment under this um this podcast, and I will um I will help you guys out. Okay, so some fears that came up. I'm just gonna go through uh a few of them with you guys today. Um, so fear number one is um what if I can't come up with a good introduction on my writing? Um, what if I can't come up on a with a good introduction and I run out of time or I spend 10-15 minutes just thinking of how to start my writing? So, what if I block on this? What can I do? Okay, so introductions for writing or writing in general, like your essays. So the good news is it's the same structure every single time, every single essay in the Cambridge Advanced exam is the same structure, okay? So if you're just starting out on your journey, the first thing you have to do is just learn the structure of a Cambridge Advanced essay slightly different to IELTS, slightly different to other exams. Learn the structure of a Cambridge Advanced essay, okay? Um, and then you're just going to repeat the same thing over and over and over, but with different topics. And again, it's the same topics that appear over and over and over in the exam. So once you've written one essay on the topic of the environment, um you will be able to write pretty much any essay on the topic environment, it will slightly change, but the kind of main ideas will be the same. You're just gonna slightly change it to fit the question. Okay, so let's take the example of environment. I've just got a question here, okay, which is um ways of protecting endangered species. Okay, so we've got to write an essay explaining which way of protecting endangered species you think is likely to be more effective, and we've got the options, okay. Introductions are always the same. I tell my students to use the G2Q method. G2Q, general opening statement. Say which two points you're going to talk about, and uh say what the question is in your own words. Okay, so general opening statement. Just use the same one every time. Pick one that you like. For example, it is a well-known fact that use this one. It is a well-known fact that general opening statement about protecting endangered species. So it is a well-known fact that we need to do something to help or to prevent species from going extinct. We want to try and change the words a little bit so we're not using the exact same words as in the question. It's a well-known fact that we need to do something to prevent species from going extinct. Then we're gonna say what the question is and the two points. So, however, what would be the best way to um to do this? Two possible ways are blah blah blah and blah blah blah. That is your introduction. You can just use the same one over and over and over again. Okay, so I wouldn't spend a huge amount of time trying to think of this super fancy, amazing first sentence. Just repeat the same thing over and over. So, for example, it is a well-known fact that and then put the topic into your own words. Let's just try it with another random one to help with that. Okay, here's a question. Your class has listened to a podcast discussion on students' motivations for studying. You have made the following notes below. Motivations for studying, future career, intellectual curiosity, and improving the world. Write an essay discussing two of the different motivations for studying. You should explain which motivation you think is stronger and provide reasons. Okay, so I'm just gonna use the same thing. It is a well-known fact that it is a well-known fact that people study for different reasons. Two possible reasons are to improve your career prospects and to um to learn more um about the world. However, which of these do you uh is more motivating for students today? That's it. Okay, so just for that opening sentence, just take whatever the topic is, put it into your own words, and that's it. That's all you need to do there. Okay, so don't overthink it. Um use that formula, and remember, even if you've used it a hundred times, the examiner is only seeing one essay from you. They don't know that you've written the same essay a hundred times before. Okay, um, this is the same thing I did with my Spanish exam. I basically just wrote the same essay over and over and over and over with using it for different topics, and uh, I got a very good mark in my writing. Okay, so you can absolutely do this too. Okay, next question is what if I zone out in the middle of a test? How can I bring myself back? So this is really common because the test is four hours long and often it's on quite boring topics or quite dense topics. It's hard to focus, it's hard to concentrate for long periods of time. So, the first thing I would suggest to help with this is in your pre in your preparation for the exam. So being able to focus for long periods of time is a skill that you need to build up and work on over time, it's a muscle we need to build. Uh, for example, if I'm going to run a marathon, and my sister just ran the Edinburgh Marathon in a heat wave at the weekend, um, but she didn't just decide the day before, oh, I think I'm gonna run a marathon and be able to do the full thing. She built up, you know, she built up from 5k to 10k to 15k to 20k, she gradually built that up and then she was able to do it. If I decided to go run a marathon tomorrow, I would be lucky if I completed five kilometers of it. So it's the same thing with the exams. If you have never practiced doing the whole thing all together while you're preparing for the exam, if you then go and sit down on the day of the exam and expect yourself to be able to focus and concentrate for four hours, it's just it's not going to happen. It's normal that you would zone out in the middle of the test because you're not used to it, you haven't trained for it. So, my first piece of advice would be make sure that before you do your real exam, you regularly practice doing the whole thing under exam conditions to get used to that. However, everybody's human and it might happen that in the exam you do zone out. Uh, maybe in the the listening exam you uh start thinking about what you're gonna have for for dinner instead of uh listening to what they're saying. So, if this happens, what can we do? So, first thing is don't panic, okay? Um, what tends to happen is if we zone out, we panic, then we lose the whole exercise or the whole listening exam because we start stressing, we start worrying about it, we start uh criticizing ourselves for it. Uh and by doing that, we're continuing to not focus and we're continuing to not do the exam. We're like, I've failed it, there's no point, I just give up now. Okay, however, if we don't panic, what we do is okay, it happened. I've I've zoned out. All I want you to do is move on to the next question in the listing. Okay, so if you zoned out, uh in the mid, it's usually in the middle of a listening, right? We're on about question three. We zone out, don't panic, just um think okay, question three, I didn't get it. Move straight to question four and wait for the listening to start for question four. Okay, just forget about question three. Question three we've got wrong. Don't worry about it. It's only one point, okay? Just move to question four, refocus, and keep going again. Okay, you also get a second time to listen, so you might be able to get that answer for question three where you zoned out on the second time you listen. Okay, so that is a key thing. Don't panic, just move to the next available part of the listening and refocus from there. Always put an answer anyway, always have a guess on the one you zoned out on. Put something because you might get lucky and you might get a point in the exam. Okay, never leave it blank, always put something down as an answer. Next question is what if I forget everything? What if I forget all the grammar and all the vocabulary that I know? So this is typical, a typical fear for speaking, but it could also be, for example, for for the use of English exam. Like, what if I forget everything and I can't answer the use of English questions? Or what if I forget everything and I can't speak during the exam? So again, just like the zoning out, the key thing here is preparation and knowing that you have practiced the speaking exam a hundred times before, okay, or you've practiced the use of English a hundred times before, and you've never ever forgotten absolutely everything, you've never forgotten your English completely in these scenarios, okay. Um, but if it does happen that we either don't know a word, maybe you're given pictures in the speaking exam, and we don't know something in the picture, or we've forgotten the word for it, how can we deal with this? Okay, um, and if you have strategies to deal with this, then again it's gonna make you less stressed on the day of the exam, it's gonna make you more confident. And if you're more confident and less stressed, then you're less likely to forget things in the first place. Okay, so strategies to deal with this. Number one, if we forget a word or we don't know a word, number one, we can give a synonym of that word. Okay, so if you've forgotten some really fancy phrase that you knew, um, for example, an adjective versus how the person is feeling, and maybe you wanted to say that the person was feeling over the moon, which is very, very happy. The person was feeling over the moon, and you forgot that phrase. Okay, but don't panic, don't stop talking, just use a synonym, and it can be a basic synonym, just use happy, use a synonym. This would be the first thing to do. If you can't think of a synonym, the next thing to do would be to give a description of the thing that you have uh that you don't know the word for. Okay, so if, for example, it's skydiving, a sport in the picture, but we don't know the name for this word, skydiving, we could say the person is jumping out of the plane with a parachute, or the person is doing a type of extreme sport. So we're still answering the question, we're still showing our fluency, even though that we we forgot that very specific word or we didn't know it. Okay, so synonym or description. If we still can't do that, if we're still going blank, all we need to do is say that out loud to the examiner, uh, because then we're still speaking rather than staying silent. So just saying to the examiner, oh gosh, sorry, my mind's gone blank. Let me move on to question two, or let me move back to uh let me move to the next picture. Okay, so if you're describing pictures, we're just going to move to the next question or move to the next picture and start again and basically start describing or answering that question. The word will probably come back to you in a few seconds, and you can always return to the thing that you were stuck on later. But the key thing is not to stop, okay, in the exam. If we can keep going, that is the most important thing. And this is a skill that's really useful for real life as well. Like if you're trying to have a conversation with someone and you forget a word or you forget the rules of a grammar point, rather than stopping the conversation to be like, okay, uh, oh gosh, I need to use a third conditional if if plus past perfect plus would plus have, uh, and then running through that in your head and trying to make the sentence. Rather than doing that, I'd much rather you just said it in a more simplified way, and we can continue the conversation, we continued communicating. Um, that is going to make you sound more advanced than losing your fluency and stopping and starting. Okay. If it's a different part of the exam, if it's let's say it's use of English, and you come into use of English exam, you sit down, you're looking at the use of English part four, you have all these uh sentences uh that you have to transform, and your mind goes blank. You think, oh god, I don't know what grammar it's testing me on. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Okay, so if this happens, what if this happens in the exam? First thing I'd recommend is just run through in your head, okay, what do they usually test on in this part? Okay, run through the top grammar points that they test on. Inversion, okay. Is it an inversion? Let me just check. No, it doesn't look like an inversion. Passive voice, let me check. Okay, is it passive? Cleft sentence, relative clause. Just run through in your head the like top ten grammar points that appear in this part of the exam, and just start eliminating them, okay, until you find the one that it could be. Okay, and if you're not sure, again, just have a guess. You can usually get um at least one point for uh for each question here. There's two points per question. You can usually get at least one point if we have a logical guess at part of it. Okay, so again, preparation before exam day. Make a list of the most common grammar that appears in the exam. If you're on course with me at the moment, you already have that list in the use of English challenge. Those are the most common grammar points that appear in the exam. First, number one, make sure you're confident using all of those before you book your exam. Number two, think about where you would see those grammar points. What words go with those grammar points? For example, inversion. What are the expressions that we use with inversion? Uh conditionals. What words replace if? Do you know these? Do you know how to use these? Um relative clauses. Where do we usually see these in the sentences? What are the comma rules around them? Do we know all the grammar is the first thing? Okay, do we know the common words that we might see with that grammar? Present perfect tenses, what are the magic words like for or since that tell us that it's a present perfect tense? Once you know that, okay, and you have that little list, then again it's a case of going through that in the exam. If it's use of English part two, we have a gap at the beginning of a sentence. I'm gonna automatically start running through my head, okay, what are the most grammar points common grammar points from my list where there's a gap at the beginning of the sentence? Probably something like number one I'd be checking is conditionals. It's the word if. Number two, I'd be checking is it contrast words, although, though, while and whilst. Is it going to be a cleft sentence? It at the start of a sentence with cleft sentences. So these are all things I would be automatically running through my brain until I find the correct grammar point. Okay, there's not hundreds of grammar points that are tested in this part of the exam. Okay, we're looking at about 10 to 15 that are tested over and over. So you just run through those in your head, okay? So make sure you have that list. You can have a look at it a little bit before uh the exam, the night the day before the exam. Make sure that you know it very, very well. But again, that's gonna help you feel confident going into the day of the exam. If you know all those things and you know it's not thousands of grammar points that you need to learn, that it's a few that you need to know very well, and you need to know where they appear in the exam. If you know that, then you're gonna go into the exam more confident. Okay, believe in yourself, guys. Trust yourself and your level. You wouldn't have booked your Cambridge Advanced exam if you weren't ready for it. Okay, there's a little conditional for you there. You wouldn't have booked it, you wouldn't be doing a C1 level course if you weren't of that level, if you weren't ready for it. Okay, so trust yourself, believe in yourself, you've passed your mock exams if you're doing if you're doing your your exam, if you've booked your real exam, you have passed your mock exams, you're regularly scoring over 70%. There's no reason why you should fail this exam. Okay, so trust yourself, believe in yourself, you can absolutely do this. Okay. Another what if was, but what if I can't sleep on the night before the test, and then I'm exhausted, and I fail the exam because um because I'm really, really tired. So I get it. This can happen, you know, if we're stressed about something or excited about something. I I never sleep the night before a flight if I have an early morning flight because I'm worried about that I'm gonna miss the flight and I keep on waking up. Um so it it can happen before exams if we're very, very nervous about it. Okay. Um for me, the best thing that helps me being able to sleep before something stressful is um I make sure I do a lot of exercise that day. So I make sure I take the dogs for giant walks, I go to the gym, or I go climb the um climb a mountain, go uh go hiking or something. Something that is going to exhaust my body physically, so that when I do go to bed in the evening, then I'm gonna feel tired. Um I also stay away from mobile phones and screens uh several hours before bed to to stop my brain kind of overthinking and staying wired. Staying away from coffee or uh or caffeinated drinks as well, um, probably the whole day. Um, if you know that you have trouble sleeping, can be something that can help you as well. Having a hot shower before bed, having a chamomile tea or a herbal tea, um, but just doing my best to not really think about the exam. So can so again, anything that I have with stress, I deal with or I find the best way to deal with it is by doing exercise, uh, and that stops me being able to think about anything. So that is how I would deal with it, and staying away from screens in the evening. In fact, I even use with screens I use uh yellow lens glasses uh when I'm working on screens in the day and I use red glasses at night to um to stop the kind of uh I don't know the the science behind it to stop the blue light uh from screens. Um and these are kind of tricking your brain and telling you it's daytime. So if you wear those in the evening if you've got lights on and things, this can help tell your brain that it's time to go to bed and help it relax. Um so again, that's something that you could try. It's not you know gonna be a miracle fix, but that's uh that's what I would do if I had my exam tomorrow. So, guys, uh I think that's enough questions for today. I've been rambling on for 25 minutes now. Um, so uh we will come back to these, we'll come back to some more questions um over the next few weeks in the podcast. Um, but I hope you found those useful. Uh I hope they kind of help to make you feel a little bit more confident about the exam. And as I said before, guys, if you have any other what ifs, let me know and I will do my best to help you with them. Take care, have a good week, and we'll see you soon.