An examiner, who checks your board paper, gets paid a few rupees per paper corrected. He can afford to spend only a few minutes on your paper as he has a large bundle of papers to complete everyday. The answer sheet which he picks up is your answer sheet. It is the one for which you have studied for the whole year. This sheet has been written by you in abut two to three hours on exam day. The examiner would finish his evaluation in three to six minutes which means what you have written in an hour is examined in a minute or two. These few minutes would decide your future. Scary isn’t it?
You can use this information to your advantage. Your presentation in the written paper has to be good -so it must be good. Right? The next step is to make your paper examiner friendly.
An exam friendly paper makes it easy for the examiner to read your answers, and then give marks! Lets outline some more tips to enhance your paper.
Each examiner is given something called the model answers. The examiners generally see how similar your answer is with the model answer and give marks accordingly. This rule obviously does not apply to language papers! SO the most important tip among all is to write your answers as per the marking scheme and model answers provided by your board.
Write the question numbers EXACTLY as they are written in the question paper. It helps the examiner identify the answer immediately.
Underlining the actual content and keywords in your answers, in case of subjects like Mathematics, box your answers. This will help the examiner to identify the answer immediately and you’ll get the marks faster. this puts the examiner into a positive mindset.
Don’t do silly things like attempting a question in two parts – which are at different ends of the paper.
Tie your supplements in the right order, and
Start new questions on new pages.
All this will help the examiner, who in turn will then help you!
TIP – Get your practice papers evaluated by moderators and teachers – that helps you find out how examiner friendly your paper is! Ask the teachers to give stars to your answer sheet for being examiner friendly in addition to actual marks.
IN PRACTICE
It’s time to get your answer papers evaluated by others.
Write an answer paper, solving different subjects at least twice – and then check how examiner friendly they are. We will consider three opinions – your own, that of some intelligent friend and of a teacher or examiner.
Make a chart as under:
| Subject | Paper No | You | Parent/Friend | Teacher |
You should rate your paper on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the maximum – i.e. the best paper you could ever write.Try to get information on the following points and analyze:
| Question Nos. | |||
| Characteristic | You | Parent/Friend | Teacher |
| Presentation | |||
| Vocabulary | |||
| Accuracy | |||
| Handwriting | |||
| Others |
