I have three exams coming up at the end of this term: Statistics, Environmental Hazards & Risks and Global Development & Inequality. Each exam is an hour long with a mix of multiple choice, longer questions and essay questions to answer. The Statistics exam includes calculations to do which is a little worrying as the last time I used maths was in year 10. Fortunately, I will be given the formulas in the exam so won’t have to memorise things like chi squared and t-testing. I am concerned about running out of time on this exam and so have completed the practice test that is on the VLE under timed conditions. Whilst I did not score highly on this, I worked on the things that were incorrect and wrote a few pages of bullet pointed information taken from week 12’s comprehensive review, also on the VLE.

Preparation for Environmental Risks and Hazards involves looking back over lecture slides  and compiling notes on the things I do not understand. I am also learning case studies for each topic such as examples of floods; what happened, why and how it was dealt with. I find revising for this topic a little dry as it’s pretty well reading through the facts and noting down figures to use in the exam. The course closely follows ‘Environmental Hazards’ by Keith Smith:

And so it is a case of reading through each chapter again and trying to understand as much as possible.

Revising for Global Development and Inequality is the module I am finding the most interesting at the moment. It is a seen exam so we have been given the questions already and must choose 2 out of 6 to answer. I have not done a seen exam before but it is fairly similar to doing a piece of coursework, just under timed conditions. As the exam is a little while away, I am still at the stage of reading and gathering quotes for an argument on the 2 questions I have chosen. There is a huge amount of reading material on Neoliberalism, Fordism and other stages of economic development and so it is a bit overwhelming trying to choose what to use when making an essay plan, especially as each essay must be written within half an hour. It is key to get a strong argument running throughout and, as we don’t have to include a bibliography due to time constraints, this is the most important thing I am trying to plan for. I have taken information from the core books for the course ‘Key Concepts in Economic Geography’ by Yuko Aoyama et al. and also ‘Development’ by Payne and Phillips:

I’m now concentrating only on the subjects involved in the 2 questions I have chosen to answer. I am also using articles recommended by my lecturer which provide a different viewpoint to use in the exam.

So these are the first exams I’ve done since A-levels – wish me luck!