Top 5 Challenges Students Face While Preparing for O-Levels
Preparation for O-Levels is a major challenge for both students and parents in Singapore. After all, the O-levels present a key milestone in a student’s educational life. These exams are just as important as the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).
However, they can be difficult if your child has not prepared adequately. Besides the stress and anxiety most students face as the exams approach, here are five other challenges they are likely to face when preparing for the O-Levels:
1. Too Much Information (TMI)
For starters, the amount of information students need to absorb in preparation for the O-Levels exams can, no doubt, be overwhelming. Your child may experience an information overload given the sheer amount of content involved in the preparation process.
Especially as most of the O-Level content is studied in Secondary 3, your child will need to have a good grasp of everything he or she has been taught up to Secondary 4 or 5. Keep in mind that as your child learns new content, past understanding of previously learnt topics may start to fade.
Practising with old test questions from previous years will help prepare your child for what is expected during an actual exam by bringing up any gaps in knowledge that need filling. Spreading out the content into small portions over a long time can also be useful when it comes to revision time.
Additionally, attending tuition outside of school via the best online learning platforms in Singapore such as Superstar Teacher will provide your child with a more consistent mode of revision.
2. Developing the Right Examination Skills
As the O-Levels draw closer, it is understandable to feel confused and overwhelmed by fear of the huge task ahead.
It is therefore important to ensure that your child has acquired the right examination skills or all the hard work he or she has put in the preparation process may go to waste.
To get through the exam at ease, students need to learn how to find the right questions to prioritise first and manage time well. For instance, if your child gets stuck on one question, it is a good habit to skip it and get back to it later.
3. Avoiding Common Mistakes
Another challenge most secondary school students face when preparing for the O-Levels is steering clear from the common errors during the exam.
The hard truth is that exam time can be quite stressful, which creates room for small mistakes that end up costing the students precious marks, especially in subjects such as Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and languages including English and Chinese.
There is extremely little margin for error in the Singapore O-Levels, making it imperative for your child to learn how to identify and avoid those careless mistakes. This can be worked on as your child becomes familiar with his approach of completing secondary school past year papers.
4. The Last-Minute Rush
As the O-Levels draw closer, it is quite easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content your child has not covered and embark on a last-minute mad rush to cover everything at once.
This last-minute syndrome is often caused by procrastination when your child had time to revise but kept on postponing studies until the last few days before the exams.
You can help your child overcome the last-minute mad rush by organising a study schedule well in advance and enrolling them in a good online learning platform for timely and comprehensive O-Level revision classes in Singapore.
5. Handling Parental Expectations
Finally, every parent wants the best for his or her child. Yet with high expectations, it may adversely affect their performance especially when your child is afraid of letting you down. The best form of support is by giving him or her the much-needed encouragement to tackle the big exam confidently and perform well in the process.
If you are interested in signing your child up for tuition to catch up on the O-Level syllabus, it is easy to set up a free parent account today and view full trial lessons on our platform.
Get in touch with us for more information.
