Reading and answering simple exam questions

Answering simple exam questions, my personal know-how

Personally, I feel that the biggest downfall for any student, in an exam, is the misunderstanding of what a question is asking of you. Knowledge is not always the key role to which people lose marks for their answers, but can also be not necasserily answering what the question is asking of you. Often, what may happen in exam questions is that people will talk about the knowledge that revolves around the topic mentioned, yet will not actually answer the question specifically. For instance:

(Also as a further note the following methods can be applied to most types of exams, there are some exceptions, however I will not cover these exceptions as I do not know enough about them to try and explain them).

"Studies of the magnetic properties of rocks tell scientists about the rocks.

What do they measure and what does this tell them about the rocks?"      [ 2 ]

Now let's break this question down:

• Firstly, we can see that this question is worth two marks so we know that two points must be made.

• Secondly, I have highlighted the word "What" this is essentially the most important word  in terms of what the question wants, there are more…