Year 2020 is quite a bad start for most. The latest fear lingering in the air is the corona virus that originated from the Chinese city of Wuhan. It's been 2 months and I think already it had claimed more deaths than 2003's SARS virus. If you believe that the Chinese authorities have a habit of under-reporting their figures, the actual death from the Wuhan's corona virus might have way way exceeded official figures. 

Is it something to be worried about, especially when MOH had issued an orange alert last Friday, upgrading the alert from yellow previously. I had one cancellation of lessons due to fear of the virus spreading, especially when a private car operator had it too. 

Either way, I'm prepared for it. I'm going to get a webcam today (hopefully) and had a tablet with digital pen ready. I've also researched on the best way to conduct online lessons, so it's all set and ready to go. Following 2003's SARS experience, I think MOE might close JC for 1 week, secondary schools for 2 weeks and primary schools for up to 3 weeks. The children will take all the online e-learning at home to continue their studies, while all external cca will be stopped, including all inter-school competition and Nationals. It's a way for them to stem the spread of the virus.

Frankly, I'm quite excited to try online tutoring, because the last time I did was decades ago, and the experiment failed multiple times. But last time, there wasn't Udemy, Khans academy etc, so maybe the time wasn't right. Perhaps this time it'll be better? If successful, students don't have to travel anymore (to my place for lessons) and distance will no longer matter. There'll also be a potential for group lessons where the tutors/tutees are all at different place, but connected together through the power of the internet. 

I hope to survive this period and hopefully get out of it stronger than before.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

This app definitely is a must share.

Ever since I'm a tutor, I've been trying to find the killer app for calculator - that one calculator app that will kill all calculator apps. My requirements are:

1. Scientific calculator with log, ln, sin, e^ options
2. Able to plot graphs and do graphing manipulations like intersections
3. Able to do statistical calculations like permutations, combinations, binompdf, normcdpf, inversenorm etc
4. Financial calculations (optional)

Usually most calculators can do (1), as long as they are scientific calculators and not those accounting ones with only + - x /. I also don't need any financial calculations but that is good to have. The hardest is to find one single app that can do (2) and (3). I did find one, but the interface is not intuitive, because you have to remember the arguments of the function. Still okay, workable, but I had to have 2 calculator functions. One serves as my normal working scientific calculator but without graphical or statistical functions. The other one serves only to plot graphs and do statistical calculations.

Imagine my delight when I found the killer app - Wabbitemu!

This is the emulator of the graphic calculator that IP/IB/A lvl students use for their math course! It's really fantastic because it combines all the functions (1) to (4) into one single solid killer app. 

The only gripe I have about this is that it doesn't have some of the programs in the APPS function button. Things like conics app and poly simultaneous solver app is missing. While I couldn't care less whether the conic app is there or not (it's that useless, yes), the poly simultaneous solver app is quite an essential tool. Thankfully a friend (thanks, Junwei) managed to hack this and kindly sent me the instructions to do so. So here's how:

1. To load any file to your calculator, you need to first download it to your SD card or internal storage on your device. You can find the link for the various apps here. 

2. Open wabbitemu, swipe from the left edge of the screen to bring up the menu, and select LOAD FILE

3. Select the file that you just downloaded and the file will be sent to your calculator. Apps for the 83+ and 84+ calcs will end in *.8xk. Apps for the 84+CSE will end in *.8ck or *.8xk.

This also means you can find games app and download it to your calculator to play. But nah, this isn't for me. 

This killer calculator app will be so useful for my work. And it also saves me a couple of hundreds because I'm using the Ti-84 coloured edition, which is faster and more intuitive to use than my Ti-84 plus. 

In a blink of an eye, another year has passed and another batch of students had left. I used to be quite sad by this, because some of my students had been with me for a very long time. I was wondered if I could find another batch of students who are as nice. Well, I always do, because most students I met are uniquely nice. They have their own particular temperament and character, so after so many years of tutoring, I still find it challenging and engaging :)

The year 2016 is the year where I started to take in some cases of students who have financial problems. I took in 4 such students. Some are very hardworking and thrive under the tutoring environment but generally most gave me some sort of trouble, either disciplinary or particularly picky over calculation of fees. I am wondering why I should even embark on such things in the future, but we shall see. I do know that there is a substantial cost to me for such cases, because I had to work a lot of extra hours at below market rates, yet suffer some sort of trouble. It makes me not want to take up such cases in 2017.

Anyway, here's the results for year 2016:

There are 19 'students' in 2016. I put in the quotation marks because if a student took 2 lessons with me, I will treat it as 2 students. I have 6 N level students (1 to 6), while the rest are O level students (7 to 19).

Here's some comments on their performance:
1. For the N lvl students, I have a mixed class. Out of 3, only one made it to Olvls, so the other will have to go to ITE. They are very very weak in both math and science (failing pretty badly) and they came in pretty late. I think I started with them around April. With the N'lvl in Sept, I don't really have a lot of time to do what I need to do. But that's life - we don't always get to do what we want to.  R always gets into trouble with authorities, and has huge disciplinary issues to the extent that he has to downgrade from express to N lvl because he had to be retained. He did better that I expect, scoring B4. I think I managed to make him care in bit about his results. M's results is quite disappointing, both to him and to me. I think he screwed up in the actual exams itself. It's a lesson he will have to learn. But I think I managed to give him hope and made him not give up on himself. S always did good, and I've no worries for him. I'm still coaching him for the harder O'lvl in 2017 this year.

2. T did badly for his overall, scoring 25 in L1R4, easily the worst of my batch of students. I think he didn't really try hard enough. He got B3 for the combined science that I taught him, but he said that's his best subjects already. Not sure if he can have much choice other than RP engineering, considered the main dumping ground for student in Singapore (my opinions).

3. D is a repeat student, and he managed to get much much better results this time round. He's a little stubborn and prefers to do things his own way. We used to have much more conflicts since I don't understand why he would want to do things his way especially when he don't have much results to show for. After compromising, we worked out our differences and things are better. He is very hardworking but does his work too slowly. Tends to panic in exams also. The usual remedy is to do time trials in front of me and let him get used to the stress of sitting in a timed practice, which is essentially what exams is all about. He managed an A2 for amath and B3 for combined science, good enough to qualify for JC.


Of all the 19 subjects, 52.6% is distinction (A1/A), 21.1% is B3 and 26.3% is B4. Nobody scored worse than B4 for the subjects I taught. Frankly, I have no wish for all students to get A1. They should get the results they deserve, based on the consistency of the effort. As a tutor, there's a limit to what I can do. Ultimately, I'm not the one sitting the exams for them. As in all the previous years of results release, some will be in tears of joy, some will be in tears of disappointment, but all of them will learn and take away something.

​In the end, life is a lot more than just a letter grade for a 2 hr exam they took.

Whenever I meet a new student, I will always ask for their most recent exam papers. There’s several reasons why I would want to see their past exam papers and I will attempt to list them out here.

1. To make small talk and build rapport

I find that to make a student care about his results, you have to somehow make them like you as a tutor. It will make things a lot easier with this basic relationship issue settled. If ‘like’ is too strong a word, at least they mustn’t dislike you. I’ve seen a lot of students who complained that this teacher and that teacher slighted them, and always picks on them, hence they refuse to do well in the subject that is taught by the same teacher. It’s silly to think like that since the one who is really suffering is the student, but you can’t deny that powerful logic to ‘take revenge’ on the hated teacher. I had a student that had this kind of warped thinking and I had to re-wire his thinking to this: ‘Take revenge’ on the teacher on doing exceedingly well, so well that the teacher had to eat back his words. It’s not for the best intention but it does produce the correct outcome. I guess I would have to content myself with that.

While browsing through the exam papers, I will make small talk. I’ll ask what sort of cca (co-curriculum activities) did they participate in school. The point here is to find out similarities and definitely not to judge. I’ll play the role of the listener and ask several open ended questions and hear them talk about themselves. It’ll ease the discomfort of meeting a stranger for the first time (this is more for me than for them, haha) and a good mentor-student relationship just makes the whole journey easier in the future.

2. To find out if the student is weak because he has poor time management

By looking at the marks allocated for each question, usually listed in front of the exam paper, I can see if the student has poor time management. If that’s the case, you’ll see that the first few questions are near full marks but as we go down the questions, the marks can lesser and lesser and you see a few zero at the back. Then as you flipped to the answer scripts itself, you’ll see that the zeroes are left blank. Sometimes it could be the whole question that is left undone.

There’s another reason for this, and that’s a lack of stamina. Usually I’ll see IP (integrated programme) students having this issue. They can more and more tired and eventually crash out. The correct prescription for this is to teach them efficient ways of doing the same problem, and also lots of drilling with time trial to improve the speed, and lastly some exam skills like doing the easy questions first, cutting losses etc. Usually such cases of students having poor time management is very rare, at least not for the first time of meeting me.

3. To find out if the student has content gaps that I will have to fill in

Here you’ll see that the student has plenty of time, so much that he might be falling asleep during the exams. You’ll notice that the marks are usually low, and here and there you’ll find zeroes. As you flip to the answer scripts, you’ll see that there’s a lot of blanks with no attempt to do any because the student don’t know how. This type of problem forms the majority of the students that I tutor.
​
It’s also easiest to solve. I just need to write down the topics that the students have problems with, go through the content one topic at a time until completion. Usually there’ll be a massive improvement in the exam results, usually from like a F to a B kind of jump. By then, I will usually have another problem at hand, which is time management and I covered that in point 2. Hence, a student having time management as a problem is a better student than having a one who has content gaps. It’s much harder to solve time management issues, from my experience.

4. To assess the school’s level of difficulty

Not all schools have the same level of difficulty. Generally all girls school set crazily difficult papers and branded schools usually set the easier papers (and follow syllabus closely) as compared to neighbourhood schools. It’s important to find out the level of difficulty of the school so as to tailor the correct level of teaching to the students. For students that comes from school that set more difficult papers, I have to teach the content from Level 1 all the way to level 3. Generally level 1 is basic formulaic questions, level 2 requires some application and is harder, while level 3 requires cross topic integration (like a question that involves both trigonometry and vectors). The minimum level is level 2, and usually because of time constraints, that is all that is needed. We can worry about level 3 type of problems when we settled all topics up to level 2.
 

It looks like a lot of work, but most of it is done subconsciously and it wouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to form a quick general assessment. I think like a doctor, tutors need to do this physical examination to assess the problems so that the correct medication and prescription can be given. With 2 hours a week for tuition lessons, not a lot of time can be wasted.

I was reading this graduation speech by DJ Patil, U.S chief data scientist, for the graduation batch in the University of Maryland. It was very inspirational so I had to share this together with my thoughts. You can read it fully here. 

One particular paragraph strikes a chord with me. This is it:

"As I looked around at everyone else nodding along with the instructor (including my girlfriend), it dawned on me, I hadn’t failed because of the teachers or the material. No, I failed because I didn’t try. I didn’t even put my self in a position to fail."

I observed this happening to a lot of very weak students. How weak is considered very weak? Basically there are two types of students who are weak. One type are the ones who wanted to do well but somehow the knowledge acquisition is problematic. It's either the school or the home environment is too non-conducive to studying, or just studying skills, or lack of understanding of content. This is easy to solve for me, because at least the motivation to do well is there. I can work on this type of weak students.

Then there is the other type - the ones who are very weak because they simply do not care how they do. It's very very difficult for me as a tutor to work on such students because our goals are simply not aligned. You might ask why a student would have such behaviour and lack of motivation to do well. I believe it's a defense mechanism to isolate their ego from suffering further heart aches from failure. It takes several years of failing consistently to have such hardened students. The thinking is that since I'm going to fail anyway, what's the point of trying to study? And for some reason they want to try to study, and the results is still the same dismaying F, then the action and rewards simply favour not doing anything. Over time, this behaviour is reinforced until we have this type of students who do not care about their results at all.


The symptoms are describedbelow:
1. Empty blanks in the exam. A lot of them will leave maybe 50% or more of the paper blank.

2. Half hearted attempt. The default action is to skip the question, so any perceived difficulty in a question will result in the question being skipped. A long question (with many sentences and description) will be skipped. A question with difficult words will be skipped. A question without diagram will be skipped. A complex looking equation in the question will be skipped.

3. Sleeping during exams. Or going to the toilet frequently (if that is allowed). 


There could be more, but you get the idea. The point is that it's very hard to help such students. Usually they are forced by their parents to attend tuition, which is always a bad sign for me. And frequently it's too late also. Such cases take the most effort and energy from me, and it's not about the teaching part that sucks up energy, it's actually the motivation part. 

As much as I expect all students to come in all motivated and ready to learn, I know that kind of scenario is too idealistic. Maybe that happens 2 out of 10 times only. If I'm lucky.  Most likely, I will have to provide that motivation too, besides the teaching. Thus my job to teach is multifaceted - I have to be the cheer leader, a psychiatrist, a slave driver, a disciplinarian, a teacher, a friend, a mentor... I think almost like a second parent. Is grades so important that we have to focus so much energy  (and money) to get it? No, grades are not important, but a person's resilience against failure and want of success is. It's so important that it will affect their self esteem and how they navigate the failures that they will definitely face in their lives.

It's very easy to blame them and say that the students are not motivated, so how can I teach them when they are not interested? But I think it's important to own the problem. Even the problem with them being unmotivated IS my problem. How can I engage them further? How can I make them care? How can I introduce small success to make them want more? How can I make them like me so much that they won't want to disappoint me by failing? These kind of things made up the bulk of the mental work I'm doing as a tutor. Teaching is the easy part, while this motivational business is not. A lot of it is based on trial and error - if it fails to work, I'll try another way. After 12 yrs doing this, I'm still relatively clueless on whether I can motivate a student successfully. The chances are definitely far from 100%.

This particular year, I have 3 such students, which is quite a lot for a year. Usually I have only 1 such case per year! 1 is already passing, after failing for 4 years in secondary school. 2 of them is still in limbo land, and the national exams are coming in 2 to 4 weeks time.

​
I'm going to try harder to make them try harder.

I watched this TED talk recently by Johann Hari regarding Addiction. It's a good talk show, and it talks about how everything we knew about addiction is out-dated and wrong. In essence, addiction had been shown to be cured by introducing more social bonds to the addicts. If the addicts have something to look forward to, where they feel they are needed and wanted, then they will not depend on substances like alcohol, gaming, gambling or drugs etc to fulfill that need for connections.

This might be important information when I meet computer games addicted teenagers in my line of work.

Usually gaming addiction is a more serious problem afflicting boys. Girls have their own set of nightmares to deal with, but it's seldom with gaming. At least I've not seen it before, even with my 12 yrs in this business with more students being females than males. The worst case I've seen that I can't handle is a boy who lives around Serangoon area. He lives in a well to do district in private estate and also studied in a very good school near his district. Everything seems to be fine for him except that he can't stop gaming day and night, somethings without much sleep. He will go to lessons with me feeling all grumpy and sleepy, and sometimes I've to wait a good 30 mins or so to wait for him to come down. I was pretty newbie back then, so I couldn't handle this case and had to give up. I always wondered what happened to him.
While I'm pretty sure restricting access to tablets and smartphones to young kids is going to work, especially for young boys, I think there's also another way that we had to work on. Most of these kids have highly successful parents - all high flyers in their respective fields. And unfortunately all very busy with their careers to really take care of the little nitty gritty details in their family life. Most of the time the maid (and occasionally, maids) will have to take care of the kids. The situation is kind of ridiculous - it's like telling the policeman to catch criminals but they can't touch the criminals. They can only yell and scold and hope the criminals will slow down and head for the nearest jail themselves. Paper tigers won't stand a chance; kids these days know the power relationship very very well.

​​The other way that we had to work on, based on the TED talk mentioned above, is to work on connecting them to something outside of themselves. Usually this connection is fulfilled by parents or grandparents, then followed by friends. But these days with the social connection kind of being fulfilled online by gaming or social media, it's all going downhill. Maybe reality is so bad and stressful that people are finding connections online. Fighting demons with a powerful wizard in greater rifts level 70 easily with a press of a few mouse clicks can be quite empowering. Probably much better than facing an empty connections in an empty house in real life, or the prospect of being an un-liked kid in school.

I'm a gamer too, and I played games throughout exams period since primary school. But there's always something out there in the real work that I felt obliged to go back to, either out of responsibility or duty. Maybe that is what parents need to work on. And from experience, they will really have to start young, probably in primary school level. After that, it's going to be harder and harder to change. 

I've seen plenty of cases where the parents, suddenly aware of the dropping results of their kids in secondary school, started to punish the kids by withdrawing their laptop or handphones. It works initially because of the cold turkey treatment, but eventually that emptiness still needs to be filled by something tangible. If not, the kid will go back to the gaming. Do you think your locked passwords can stop them? These kids are digital natives, and probably know a few tricks that you don't even know. Besides, they can also go LAN shop or some friend's home for 'group study'. With games being online and so mobile, you don't even need your own computer to play.

I'm a bit long winded here because this is something close to heart. The key takeaways mixed with some suggestions:

1. While making sure your kid are not having unrestricted access to any gaming devices, do make sure you set a good habit also. Taking the mobile devices away from your kid but using them yourself to play games is kind of pointless. The irony of which can be easily noticed by your kid.

2. While removing mobile gaming device from your addicted kids, do make sure you have something else to replace that connection. Gaming as an addiction is just a symptom. The real cause is the need for connections. How about spending more time with them?

3. I believe dads can play a greater role in parenting. 99% of the parents I liased with are with the mothers. 99% of the time the mum are the ones who bring the kids to my place for lessons, regardless of whether the mums are working or not. It's something to reflect on when I become a parent as well. This is probably the best reasons to be financially free.

The results for the year 2015 O and N lvl are out already. Just like last year, I decided to keep a proper account of my student's results. This is not meant for marketing purpose (even though it can be), but honestly, it's more for my sake. There are good times and bad times in this work that I do, and hopefully when I'm feeling down, I can look back and look at the good I've done.

I had a total of 11 graduating students with me tutoring 15 subjects with them. Out of the 11 students, 10 are express O lvl and 1 is from the Normal (acad) stream.  The students are with me for various duration; some stayed with me for 2 years while the shortest duration is only 1.5 months. 

Here's the breakdown of the results:

A1 - 6.7%
A2 - 80.0%
B3 - 13.3%
B4 and below - 0.0%

86.7% of the students I taught managed a A2 or better. Again, we see this weird trend where a lot of students are getting a bulk of A2 to B3 and not many getting A1. Because this is the 2nd year where it happened since I started tracking, I think it's a great cause for concern. Perhaps it's no longer sufficient to get 75% to get A1 these days with the current grade inflation situation. To get A1 for emath, we already need perhaps 95%, so what's next? 99%?


I'm actually very happy for my students this year. Here's the more memorable cases:

1. G had a fantastic showing for his N lvls. He's one of the rare ones that managed to skip the dreaded O'lvl and go straight to N lvls. I've always said that it's an uphill battle for N lvl students to get a better score for O lvl simply because it's not a fair fight. You have only 1 year to adjust to the more demanding and qualitatively different syllabus while the rest of the express stream had a full 2 years to do so. It's like a newbie fighting in the land reserved for the pro. Glad that he did so well that he can skip the Olvls. Will miss our weekly talk about anything under the sun and his crazy curiosity about the world about us.


2. I met S only 1.5 months before his Olvls. Since it's only like 6 to 7 weeks before his exams, we had to rush through the entire syllabus to prepare him well. His foundation is very very weak, almost non-existent. It doesn't help that he is usually so worn out by his crazy revision schedule organised by his school for the weaker students. As a result, he is always dozing off during lessons while I'm always rushing to meet the timeline in order to cover as much as possible! It's impossible!

I fully expected him to get at best B3 for his combined science, but he outdo my expectations and got an A2. Very happy for him. Unfortunately, it's only those subjects that he sought help that managed to get As and Bs. The rest didn't do as well. Not sure if he can get into poly.


​3. D is a under confident girl when I met her. She always thought she couldn't make it. Perhaps years of constant bad results make you reluctant to even attempt. After letting her experience several small success, she gets better and better, to a point where I thought she don't need any more help from me. But after talking to her, I realised that she needed help in another subject (which I can teach as well), so I offered to change our lessons to that. I told her it's pointless getting just one A; you need everything to be fairly good. In the end, she got two A2 for the subjects I taught her and overall score of 12. That's super super decent to me. 

I hope she goes forward with better confidence in her own abilities to overcome life's problems.


IB results came out earlier, but I only have one student taking SL maths. She is really really struggling with math but I think she did put in the effort during the last few months and managed to score a 5 out of 7. That is with a combined score of 32 out of 45. Not the crazy full score you see from the ACS side, but hey, she's happy with her results and can get to where she wants to. And to me, that's good enough.

So that's it. Now we wait for Mar period of the release of the Alvl results.

Recently, I made acquaintance with a long time student of mine that I taught way back in 2006. He had since become a private tutor like me. Back then he was a chubby kid who is bright and always very inquisitive. I met him up this year for lunch and we kept in contact ever since. He’ll sometimes text me to ask for my feedback and advice on stuff related to students and work in general. All in all, a nice feeling to this because I see that I did help him in some meaningful ways or another.

Just yesterday, he texted me and told me an incident with a student that left him very distraught. The student killed an ant and he told me that he was so upset with the whole incident that he didn’t talk for 5 mins. I guess it’s his way of mourning over the passing of a life so carelessly and needlessly taken away. 

And then he told me it was me who taught him to value the life of an ant back way when I taught him as a student.

Frankly, I couldn’t remember that incident. I have a habit of asking students not to kill ants when I see them crawling over their textbooks or notebooks. For my student, he reminded me that he was going to kill it with liquid paper but I told him not to do it. I vaguely recalled that he was toying with the life of a sentient being and I was disgusted with that attitude, so I had this huge  argument with him over it.  However, he told me recently that it took him nearly 10 years to learn the lesson.

I’m both proud and humbled by this incident. As teachers or tutors, we have to be careful of what we say and how we treat others. Eventually the integration and trigonometry that we teach the students will be long forgotten, but the values and the life lessons will remain. Well, at least some of it,  and to some people. Ultimately, we need to show more love at the end of the day.

I’ll continue doing what I do – changing the world one student at a time.

It's exam season now.

Generally I love this time of the year. Why? You see students, especially graduating students, who are a lot more serious than usual because of the impending exams. That bout of seriousness mixed with desperation can work wonders for their results, enabling them to do things outside their normal range of studying. During this time of the year, I will have more quality questions asked, which is way more challenging (and fun) for me instead of the usual level 1 type of recall and remember questions.

Another reason why I like this time of the year is because I generally have an easier time when tutoring. Easier is a relative term here. I remember when I was younger tutor, this is an especially stressful time. Students start to do their  past year exam papers and the typically harder prelim papers. What if I didn't know how to do them? What if I taught them the wrong things? All these tend to make me prepare a lot more in advance, in case I let my students down. But I think all these 'over-preparation' stands in good stead now, because after doing so many prelim questions in the past, I generally know what's the trick to doing them, so it became progressively less stressful to handle them should they arise during the tuition session. 

It's funny how things that were once stressful for me turns out to be easy now. I guess that works for life in general. Practice (the right things) and it'll tend to get better with time.

The last reason, albeit a more selfish one, is that I finally get to 'smell' the end of my work season. Being a tutor is feast-famine kind of job, I feel. When I work, I really work 7 days a week. When I slack, I'll have months of (relatively) free time in my hands to do the stuff that I want.  I guess months and months of stretching myself work-wise does take a toll on me. I generally get more tired towards the end of the year and couldn't wait for my graduating students to take their exams so that I can relax a lot more. Then I'll have, hopefully, a few more weeks of rest before I tackle the new work year again.

For all the students taking their exams, study hard and savour the experience. You probably won't believe me, but it's quite a luxury being able to study. It's one of the more enjoyable time in your life, save the occasionally exam stress, where you don't have to deal with those 'adult' problems. All in due time, so enjoy while you can. You won't get another chance like that again.

In my years of tutoring, I found that there are 6 categories of problems that students faced. I’m going to list out all these potential problems and then we will see how we can reduce or eliminate them. 

1. Not knowing the content well
2. Lack of exposure to different types of questions
3. Unable to finish exams in time due to lack of speed in finishing the questions
4. Poor exam skills 
5. Stress related issues during exams
6. Carelessness

1) Not knowing the content well 

This can be the easiest problem to solve, but can potentially be the hardest too. Lack of knowledge can be caused by a variety of problems that may occur during the transmission of the knowledge by the teacher to the student. It can range from a noisy classroom, teachers who don’t know the content well themselves, unmotivated students, lack of proper note taking etc. It’s not a major problem and most students want to do well in school, so the motivation is somewhat there already if the knowledge can be packaged and structured in such a way to make things easy for the students to grasp. But if the problem comes inherently from a lack of motivation, then this can be a tricky issue.  Students don’t always come into classes all prep up and motivated to learn. They may have a whole baggage of issues that needs to be unraveled in order for them to be ready to learn anything. A lot more counselling with both the parents and the student will be the usual practice in such circumstances.

2) Lack of exposure to different types of questions

The symptoms usually go like this: Student can do all the simpler questions during lessons and when doing homework, but when it comes to exams where the questions are trickier, they crumble and can’t do it at all. This shows a superficial understanding of the content such that when the question is not presented in a standard format, the students are unable to recognize them immediately. Lack of exposure can be reduced by exposing them to harder and more challenging questions. But the trick is not to let them tackle the hardest one immediately. An ascending progression towards more challenging questions of the same topic or theme can be prescribed to slowly ease the student towards tackling the ‘funnier’ sort of questions. Usually other school prelim papers will help a lot in exposing students to non-standard questions.

3) Unable to finish questions in time

Knowing something and able to do a question given unlimited time is quite different from being able to finish it efficiently within the time constraint. In exams, there is always a time limit and students who can do the questions but unable to finish it in time will be severely penalized. This is actually a good problem to be in because it shows that the student can do the questions, but just not fast enough. Not a lot of students will fall under this category. In this case, the remedy is to drill the student.  Constant practice will streamline thought process and develop the necessary muscle memory to do different types of question efficiently within the time constraints. Every question will be a timed practice. Like an athlete preparing for a sprint, timed practice will stress students sufficiently and force them to always keep a watchful lookout to finish the question in time. Such speed drills are different from accuracy drills. The general principle is to expose oneself to different sort of questions so that one can do at least 80 to 90% of the whole exam paper regardless of the time taken. Thereafter, speed drills will force the student to confirm to the time constraints of the exams. Usually speed and accuracy are inversely related, so by doing it faster, accuracy will be lost and there will be more careless mistakes. The student will then learn the right balance of speed and an acceptable loss of accuracy to maximize their marks.

4) Poor exam skills

This is an important component but seldom taught to students. Best practices include knowing how much to write given the marks allocated, definition of keywords in the question so that one is answering the question adequately, techniques in doing MCQ papers, checking of answers, knowing when to cut loss and move on, choosing option questions to maximize marks, time management in handling different sections of the paper etc. A good student with minimal exam skills will be unable to maximize the marks scored. 

5) Stress related issues during exams

There is a small percentage of students who behave like a different sort of person when the word ‘exam’ or ‘test’ is mentioned. This group of students can handle everything competently during non-examination time but when it comes to crunch time, they will have a nervous breakdown. The symptoms are: Very good results during non-major exams but just passing or failing when it comes to the major ones, with the heightened possibility of having stress related psychosomatic illnesses like severe headaches, fever and general unwell. This is a very difficult problem to solve and the success rates of the remedy vary widely with individual students. The remedy is to let the student have as many stress practices as possible. Usually this will involve timing them during their practice sessions and giving them lesser time than normal to complete them. Hopefully, and that is all we can do, that they will get used to the elevated stress level and learn to treat major exams as mere practice. Even with many hours of tuition, we cannot really get to the root of this problem easily. 

6) Carelessness

This is a spectrum of effects ranging from very careful (less than 5% marks lost) to normal (about 10% marks lost) to the extremely careless (20 to 30% marks lost). This is not easy to root out. Carelessness can be masked as a defense against not knowing how to do. Usually the self is more comforted by the fact that it's a random and unavoidable careless mistake rather than under preparation of the exams and general lack of content etc. Genuine carelessness comes when the students settle on the very first answer that comes to their mind (or had worked out) without the expectation that their answers may be wrong. Even with checking, they can miss out the careless mistakes that are hidden in plain sight because they are not really looking out for errors, since they believed the answers they had given are correct in the first place. Therefore, reducing carelessness is a matter of following a set of procedures that iterates in a loop until the correct answer is found: 

(1) Read the question 
(2) Find the answer
(3) Check to see if the solution answers the question 
(4) Repeat (1) to (3), until (3) is satisfied

Most students will do (1) and stop at (2), without going through the all-important step (3) to reflect and examine the solution to see if it really makes sense. The balance, really, is to do all these steps within the time constraints while maintaining accuracy and speed.

These are not isolated problems and most are actually dependent on each other. If you manage to solve one, you’ll likely reduce other problems as well. 


Some students will no doubt ask why they have to learn trigonometry or integration when they have no need of such knowledge in real life situations. The skills needed to perform well in exams are part of this hidden curriculum that is not taught formally. After all, once you had left school and returned all the academic knowledge back to your teachers, what’s left in you are all these skills of success, of determination, of building a proper system of feedback and reflection that will guide you in through the tougher, the crazier and higher staked game of life.