Yes, all students do that. In fact, schools and tuition centres do that as well. There was a year that the English PSLE question was spotted by a tuition centre conducting English tuition.

So how do you go about spotting questions.

Commonly Tested Areas

There would be areas that would be tested year after year. The concept is always tested but framed in different forms of questioning or embedded in long structured multi-topical questions.

Iodoform test is a commonly tested area for JC tuition students reading chemistry. In every A level tuition revision assessment, the chemistry tuition tutor would put in questions involving iodoform test which could be part of QA or synthesis type of question.

Conservation of momentum is another area tested annually for physics tuition students. A level tuition students would be given questions on them as part of a mechanics question where 2 trains collide or 2 moving objects collide, or a nuclear question when 2 atoms collide, or 2 nuclei collide.

Every A level tuition student would be given pictomicrographs of plant parts or animal parts with or without the use of microscope to study and answer a series of questions including a sketch of diagram during biology tuition.

Analysis of Last Year Assessment

Whatever that was asked in the previous year is very unlikely to be repeated. In PSLE, GCE O or A level science examinations, we have seen an MCQ or short question being repeated the following year.

Basically, the analysis would let you have an idea what is not likely to be tested for the current year.

The trend is that, if the same knowledge area is being asked, the question would be more demanding and harder than what was previously asked.

In the selection of questions for PSLE tuition revision worksheets, the teacher would select harder questions that were tested in the previous year. For example, we would focus on structured questions for the topic/subtopic that was asked in last year’s MCQ assessment in our math tuition. For the science tuition, more complex data analysis questions would be selected for discussion in the lesson for a topic/subtopic that was asked last year.