Technique of the Week - Mini-Question Quiz

The Mini-Question Quiz is based around breaking down the information you need to know into the smallest possible questions which can be answered in a few words. This is great for exams where you have to know loads of facts.

The best way to do this is for each question you could be asked.

For example, for the question:
"Outline the Role of a Jury in a Criminal Trial - 10 marks"

We can break this question down into at least 7 mini-questions and if you include the answers to all of them in your exam answer, you'll get 100%.


* When and where is a Jury used?
* What is the job of the Judge in relation to the Jury?

* What does a Jury decide?

* How does the Jury decide, does everyone have to agree?

* How do the Jury come to their decision? What and who do they listen to?

* Once the trial has finished explain what happens. (Where do the Jury go to make their verdict? What can they take with them?)

* Once the Jury have reached their verdict, what happens?

These questions are not only testing your knowledge, they are giving you clues as to what information to include. Also, the process of having to break down lots of information into mini-questions helps to make it clear and memorable to you.

Top 10 Tips: Your Personal Statement

Writing a Personal Statement is one of the most important things you will do at college, it can be the difference between getting or not getting a place at the University you really want to go to.

1) See as many examples as possible of good personal statement to get an idea of the structure and things to include

2) Bullet point it first. It makes it so much easier to write out a bullet point list of all your achievements and reasons why you want to do the course. It also makes sure you don't miss anything out later on.

3) Key things to include: Why you want to do that course and Why you are suited to do that course.

4) Do many drafts. Don't worry too much if it's not great at first, or over the word limit. You'll write and re-write it, cut it down and include more.

5) Remember you might be asked to talk about things you have mentioned in your personal statement, should you be invited to interview. So everything you include, you need to be comfortable talking about.

6) Research the Course using its website. It will tell you the areas it studies and you can use this information to tailor your interests to it. For example, if I was applying to do a History degree at the Mentor Univeristy, and the vast majority of the course was about medieval history, it would seem a bit silly to only say in your personal statement how much you were interested in WWII.

7) Make it relevant to all courses you apply for. This balances out the point above a bit, because although you want to tailor it to a particular choice, your first choice, 5 different Universities see it and they don't know your other choices.

8) Go to University Open Day's, they usually give talks on how to do Personal Statements and what in particular they want to see in the ones they get.

9) If you can link the course you are applying for to your future career plans, it looks like your choice is a well thought out decision. If you can't link them, maybe you should wonder why you picked it?

10) Get as many people to read it and check over it as you can before you submit it. Hopefully this will weed out any spelling mistakes or anything that just doesn't quite sound right.

Revise with Highlighters

Highlighters can be your secret weapon in the war on revision. No, seriously, they are pretty damn useful for drawing attention to key words/phrases/information - I would say most people probably do this anyway. I hope so. If you want to see how effective it is, just keep reading and look how below the highlighted words jump out at you first.

But something FAR more effective is using the different categories to highlight where the information fits in.

So a couple of examples:

• German - Highlighting masculine nouns in blue, feminine in pink, neuter in yellow.
• History - English Civil War, Charles and Finance in yellow, Charles and Religion in Blue, Charles and Foreign Policy in Green.

Technique of the Week - Skeletal Notes

Skeletal Notes are extremely useful for revising large amounts of information and the great thing is, you're probably already an expert at it, without having ever done it. Skeletal Notes are basically you taking your notes or revision materials and really condensing them down to a few bullet points. Don't leave out any key information, just take out all the pointless language.

You're probably an expert at this already because human's are often by nature lazy, we try and get away with doing the least possible (it saves energy!) so when we speak, or when we write text messages to our friends, it's probably a lot shorter than if you were writing a formal letter.

It's so useful, because you can cut down the actual material you are looking at and trying to remember by over 50%! Memorizing 4 pages for an exam is a hell of a lot easier than revising 10 pages.

Let me give you an example:

"The YourLearningMentor blog is all about trying to make learning and revising easier for you so that you do better in your exams and reach your academic potential. It does this by explaining and giving examples of learning techniques such as flash cards, mindmaps and skeletal notes."

* YourLearningMentor Blog - revision skills = better in exams
* Learning techniques, e.g:
>  flash cards
> mindmaps
> skeletal notes

It's not just the fact that there are less words, it is also far clearer and when you read over the skeletal notes, you can get to the key information so quickly.

Outstanding Teacher Biography: Michel Thomas

Michel Thomas - Language Teacher

Learning is something that I enjoy. Continuing to learn also provides me with the opportunity to try out new Learning techniques before I try them with my students.

At the moment, my goal is to reach A1 of the  CEFR level in German. According to Deutsche Welle, who are sponsored by the German government, this can be reached with about 75 hours of German study. This is a big challenge for me, as language learning was something I have not done since I studied German (hated it, dropped it as a subject) for a year at age 13.


However, with all my knowledge of how learning works and techniques that I've since gained, I'm hoping this is enough to push me through my weakness for languages. I'll share my techniques here.


First I used Michel Thomas German Foundation course. It doesn't teach too much vocabulary, but Michel makes the language really come to life and makes grammar simple. He is a wonderful tutor. For people who do not know the story of Michel Thomas, he was a decorated WWII hero who spoke many languages. Following the war, he opened a highly exclusive language school in LA, where he taught film stars. Before his death, he released audio language lessons.

Following his death, other courses were made using his method, such as Chinese. However, I don't believe these were as good. However, the courses in French, German, Italian and Spanish have the amazing man himself. If you use these, you will have an excellent foundation in the language:




Michel Thomas French

Michel Thomas German

Michel Thomas Italian

Michel Thomas Spanish

If you want to find out more about the life of life and methods of Michel Thomas, with the man himself, have a look at this YouTube video. It is from a BBC documentary where they challenged Michel to teach French to a group of young people who had little or no language experience. The results were spectacular.