By Sonia F, student in Year 12 at Caxton College in Valencia

IGCSEs don’t have to be stressful if you prepare well. For me, what helped the most when exam season arrived was that I had already prepared all my study resources. After we finished a chapter or topic in class, I went home and made a set of flashcards about that content, so that when it was time to study for the final exam I didn’t have to worry about it. This saved so much time and made me less stressed and able to use all my time on building knowledge.

Another thing that was important for me was that all the resources I used were my own. If you get notes from someone else or use AI to make your flashcards, you don’t actually absorb the information and can’t make personalised materials, which is a big part of studying. Many times I would add specific questions about topics I was unsure about into my flashcards to clarify, and I wouldn’t have gotten that if I had used someone else’s resources.

The other strategy was to do as many exam questions/past papers as possible. There are a lot of quirks in the mark schemes of exams (especially sciences) that no one will teach you in class, like needing to say “into” instead of “onto”, or “therefore” to get the mark. The only way to know these things is to practise with real mark schemes as much as you can; they’re just not in the specification. This way you get used to the special things you need to mention, because in IGCSE it’s easy to lose lots of marks off of random things like wording.

Finally, during exam season I went out with my friends to study at coffee shops and libraries. The change in location can really help, as personally if my TV is just down the hall it is so tempting to sit down on the couch and not do anything. When studying with friends, I made sure to have some times where I could talk to them to go over a topic, but most of the time would be for individual studying so we could focus. For example, we could go through a specific maths question together, but I would not talk to anyone while I did a past paper with a timer. It can be motivating to be near other people studying just as long as you don’t get distracted.

Good luck to everyone on IGCSEs!