I’m going to stop assigning past paper questions

When I did my PGCE it was drilled into me that I should use past paper questions as much as possible with exam classes. It was billed as the ideal assessment for learning strategy in GCSE and A-level classes, enabling the teacher to gauge progress, while showing students what to expect in exams. This greatly influenced my teaching, but I have started to have misgivings.

Enlightened, progressive teachers, should be sensitive to their students’ own views about how they learn best. Teachers shouldn’t tyrannically insist that they are wrong when they make claims like, ‘Concept maps don’t work for me.’ But as I hear that phrase adapted to each and every new task, I begin to see a pattern. In the eyes of the students, absolutely nothing works for them – except past paper questions.

Tom Husband discusses why student and teacher reliance on past papers might be limiting learnign opportunities