Dreaming Spires Revision

Do you know what a "meeple" is? It's a game--playing piece in the shape of a person, and coming to realise how you, an exam candidate, are like a meeple is important in your psyche for the exam, especially the CAIE English Language version. It's simple, really. Each question on the exam has a set of "rules" - the way it's asked, the way you answer, and what the mark scheme is looking for. There's a game to play here. Quite typically, the questions with longer answers will set a task along the lines of "You are the little girl" or "You are the father" or "You are the mayor" or some other kind of persona. In each case, "you" is not going to be ... well ... you. It's going to be the persona you adopt for answering the question as the game wants you to. This is particularly important in Paper 2, Question 1, where the task includes evaluating some texts. Personally, you may quite like the idea of start...

We're entering the heavy-duty revision season again as CAIE rolls its new 2020 version off the shelves and into the exam halls. Questions are coming thick and fast from those trying to navigate what the mark scheme means about this, what the instructions mean about that, and one of those pesky little details - that is, word counts - is causing consternation amongst my current revision students. Word counts are usually just a guide for how much the board is expecting the material to merit, though it's not unusual to go over the count for Question 2 (d), the one about language analysis (in the old style exam, this was Question 2 in the Reading Paper noted as 21, 22, or 23). None of them are extremely consequential as long as you're writing enough. The one exception is Question 1(f), the summary of Text B. The summary question (Question 3 in the old style) is definitely expecting concise expression, so if (as it is now) advising "not more than 120" words,...