How to Resit and Get Back on Top

Guest Post by: Suzanne Reece - 07.01.2019

I know that it is disappointing and sometimes devastating to receive the bad news that you have not passed all your assessments. After a day or two, you have to pick yourself up and put a plan together to deal with the resits. These are my top tips for getting you back on top.

1. Time to read and understand your fail feedback.

Before you even think about picking up a book to revise, you need to understand why you didn’t pass the assessment. You need to absorb that feedback report and understand where you went wrong.

Can you identify AND simply explain the 3 most important reasons for your failure? If you can’t, time to get help from your subject tutor; either email or book an appointment. Take your feedback sheet and highlight the areas that are confusing. Often students read the feedback but don’t understand how it applied to their work [not helped by not having your assessment paper returned!]

2. Take your fail feedback and look for similar problems in your coursework.

Most students don’t just make a mistake in the assessment it often arises in their coursework. In order to solve the problem, you have to find the problem in your previous coursework. Look for the same recurring mistakes in your coursework. How many similar examples can you find?

3. Understand how to solve the problem.

Your fail feedback has two functions: to tell you what you did wrong AND to help you solve the problem. You have to understand what you need to do to solve the problem. Can you identify the steps you need to take? Write them down. Confused? Again it’s time to get help from your subject tutor.

4. Apply the solution to the problem.

There is no point in understanding the problem, how to solve it but NOT applying it to your work. Time for another plan - How are you going to apply the solution to your work? You need to set out the steps you are going to take to make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

5. Practice makes perfect.

You have the plan – you know the problem, how to solve it and have a plan to apply the solution. Now it is time to test that plan. Find coursework with the same problem as your fail feedback and do that exercise again with the NEW plan. It is really important for you to see the difference between your old way and the new plan. Once you see how the new plan is working you will feel much more confident. In short, you have reset and risen to the challenge. For each of the main feedback problems, you have identified go through this process.

Suzanne

The Study Coach

www.inspiredtostudy.org