Should You Get a Tutor During Exam Season Too?

Tuition during Exam time can be a lifeline for stressed teens. The exam period is often a very confusing, stressful and lonely time for many pupils.

The exam period for GCSEs and A-levels on average takes roughly a month, this is a long period of time between the first and the last exam. Therefore not everybody is as ready for their last exam at the time that their first exam takes place. Regular tutoring can keep your child motivated, curb that exam period slump and help prioritise and organise their studies.

Here are 5 ways an online tutor can give you the best chance of achieving your grade goals during your exams:

• Reducing the strain on parents' supporting role
• Perfect exam technique before each A-level/GCSE
• Boosting confidence before (and after) each exam
• Avoiding any last-minute panic
• Staying organised throughout a busy schedule

Reducing the Strain on Parents

Exam season is undoubtedly a stressful time for students. They are often the first times that students face this high level of pressure and it can often be hard to spot the signs that they are struggling when locked away in their room revising.

This means parents can have a hard time trying to balance the increasing demand for support from their child with their own busy working lives and household stresses. Naturally, there are a lot of areas of academic support too that parents are unprepared for and this can cause a lot of frustration and amplify stress on both sides.

The first benefit of having a qualified tutor or teacher is that they are well-versed in supporting the specific academic and emotional stresses that come during exam season. You could call them veterans in that area! Regular lessons during this period are not only a benefit to students but also reduce strain on the parents. Consider reading more about our tips for handling exam stress and revision in another blog.

Technique Practice

Memorising every quote or equation they need to know is one thing, but getting through the whole exam with the appropriate time put into each answer is quite another. It makes sense for your teen to have focussed on all the information they need to understand for each exam, but in the final lead-up, getting their technique down is just as important.

By having one-to-one private lessons throughout the exam season, your child’s qualified tutor will make sure they strike the right balance of knowledge and exam technique. The exam technique for a Maths GCSE exam will be very different from how you need to answer an English exam.

Whether that means going over past papers and mark schemes or relaying their own experience of exams, a good tutor will know when to switch from remembering content to making sure your child knows how to apply the content to pick up the best marks. A tutor with examiner experience, well, that's the holy grail for knowledge on exam technique!

Click here to browse tutors with Examiner experience.

Our online tutors are all either qualified teachers or recent graduates in their chosen subjects. With Sherpa, the great thing is that lesson times are really flexible. So as your child weaves their way through their exam timetable, you can book lesson times that fit around it as needed.

Boosting Confidence

Once the first exam is out of the way, it becomes clear that your teen will need some stamina to keep doing their best until the end. It’s normal to feel self-doubt after exams too, as they play over in their head what questions they could have answered better. With more exams ahead of them, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of this. It’s important they stay calm and confident through exams, but it’s easier said than done.

A tutor can go over anything that’s worrying them in the safety of a private one-to-one lesson, and also remind them of everything they already know. The confidence boost this can give your child is really powerful. Confidence leads to better results too, so the real-time positive effect can be huge.

Avoiding the Last-minute Panic

Even if your child has every fact and figure memorised for an exam, becoming overwhelmed by worry the day before can make them less able to remember what they have revised. Taking an online lesson the day before an exam, they can go over everything calmly and also be reassured that they’re ready.

Tutors know all too well that there’s no point in cramming extra knowledge the night before. So in a pre-exam tutorial, instead they’re more likely to discuss exam technique, how they should pace themselves, and what else to expect. As tutors have sat lots of exams themselves, they can demystify what might have otherwise scared your teen about what happens in the exam hall.

Staying Organised

As your teen hops from one exam to another, balancing different subjects each week, a big part of doing well is staying organised. While they will have been told the importance of a study plan by their teachers. Sometimes teens need a helping hand with staying disciplined and they don't have the luxury of having their own teacher on call to give advice one-to-one.

By checking in with an expert tutor each week, they can get advice from someone who’s been sitting exams for years. A tutor knows how to balance long-term revision for a Physics exam a couple of weeks away, with a last-minute technique for the Maths one tomorrow. It's something that every student remembers struggling with - it becomes very difficult to prioritise your revision time sensibly without a professional educator to discuss it with.

Online tuition at Sherpa is professional, friendly and focused. Due to the years of experience that our tutors have amassed, in and out of school, it is always worth having regular online sessions throughout the exam period.