Smart Advance
Hundreds of exam-style questions
Smart Advance presents students with hundreds of exam-style questions written or reviewed by past or present examiners.
There is no substitute for revising with real exam-style questions. Using past-papers to practice answering exam questions is a critical part of the revision process. However, students quickly exhaust the available material from exam board websites.
Questions from Paul Long’s Ultimate GCSE resources for Computer Science available from 2022
Command word help
“State”, “describe”, “explain” and “justify” are just a few of what are known as command words. Students need to be able to identify the command words in a question so that they know the type of written response an examiner is looking for. Smart Advance identifies and explains the command words in every question.
Guided marking
Students can choose from two methods of marking their answers. Guided and unguided marking. Unguided shows the mark scheme to students and allows them to enter the number of marks awarded. Guided marking steps a student through a series of simple yes/no questions to help them judge their answer, automatically adding up the marks gained.
Smart Advance does not automatically mark a student’s answer. It is an important, and rich part of the revision process that students reflect on their answers for themselves instead of the computer doing it for them. Engaging with the mark scheme allows students to understand how examiners award credit for their answers.
Level of response
In addition to standard questions, Smart Revise also supports “level of response” questions that are marked in bands: low, mid and high.
After a question has been marked against the points in the mark scheme, the marks awarded are adjusted.
“It really works. Our A Level A* percentage shot up since we started using Smart Revise”
Ruchi Argarwal, Teacher
Insightful reports
A suite of reports enables teachers to review the answers students are writing to questions and also assess how well they are interpreting and applying the mark scheme. Discover if students need more practice with particular command words such as, “justify” or “level of response” type questions, or whether they are struggling to answer fully the questions worth higher marks.
Identify questions students are struggling with
Using the reports it is easy to see which questions students need the most help with. Every question has a unique number with an option to navigate immediately to a particular question.
Identify the individual bullet points in a mark scheme that students didn’t use when awarding themselves marks
A student responses report allows the teacher to look at the answers students give to a question. More interestingly, it also shows from all the possible answers that can gain credit, which ones the students did or didn’t use.
If a possible answer wasn’t used, does that mean that it wasn’t taught? Does it mean that the students didn’t remember that as a possibility? Or simply that the students chose other answers instead? Taking a deeper look at the analysis of the collective responses and application of the mark scheme is extremely powerful for teachers, and is unique to Smart Revise.
Getting the most out of Smart Advance
Smart Advance is great for private revision by students with its command word help and guided marking.
- If you want to use Tasks to set students’ unseen questions, for example for end of topic tests, disable Smart Advance to lock access to these questions. However, this might not be ideal. Giving students advance sight of questions might be ‘good learning experience’ for pupils, claimed the Ofqual chair in 2021.
- Enable Advance for students and periodically give them a question to tackle in class and self-assess themselves using the guided marking facility. Every question has a unique question number that students can jump to immediately.
- Use the reports to identify trends in the responses given by exploring the mark scheme bullet points used to self-assess answers.
- Encourage students to make use of Advance outside of lessons and especially for private revision as exams approach.
