The Single Greatest Enemy Of The Good Student

Why have you spent all week learning everything and cruised through that exam showing that learning to the examiner, only for her to award you that D grade? Again.

How can it be happening?

Well, in my experience it may all be down to the dreaded comma. Use it to list your knowledge within a sentence and statistics clearly show that you will lose up to 10 per cent of the marks available to you.

For example, look at this sentence:

`Mountain environments are difficult to live in due to cold climates, avalanche threats, lack of resources at high altitudes and poor, thin, rocky soils.`

It`s a perfectly good sentence and entirely accurate. However, the exam question requested you explain why mountain environments are difficult to live in and was providing five marks for you doing so. Your sentence will get you maybe three marks....examiners will reward basic accuracy.....but the four or maybe five you want and need will only be won by taking each of your explanatory points and creating separate sentences around them. This reveals a high level of literacy and allows scope for using examples and deeper explanations (why do poor, thin rocky soils keep populations in mountains so low.....etc....)

It`s that easy.

So, out with the dreaded list within a sentence, and in with exam success!