ABSTRACT
At this point in the book you have acquired the knowledge necessary to tackle the exam itself. Answering exam questions is a skill that this chapter shows you how to improve. Examiners obviously have first-hand knowledge about what goes wrong in exams. For example, candidates frequently do not answer the question which has been set; rather, they answer the one that they hoped would come up, or they do not make effective use of the knowledge they have but just ‘dump their psychology’ on the page and hope the examiner will sort it out for them. A grade ‘C’ answer usually contains appropriate material but tends to be limited in detail and commentary. To lift such an answer to a grade ‘A’ or ‘B’ may require no more than a little more detail, better use of material and coherent organisation. It is important to appreciate it may not involve writing at any greater length, but might even necessitate the elimination of passages which do not add to the quality of the answer and some elaboration of those which do.
