Whenever you study any subject you are going to do a lot of tests; topic tests, practice papers, end-of-year tests and mock exams. All these exams are practice for the real thing, this makes it super important that you can constructively extract useful info to gauge how well you are doing in that subject.

Firstly it is important to understand the context of the exam, there are a few main parts to this: Was the test self-marked, was it an exam paper or a topic test, and how difficult the test was supposed to be?
Let’s look at the difference between a self-marked paper and a teacher-assessed one. When you are self-marking you tend to be biased towards yourself. For example, you might see an answer you wrote that is wrong, but since you know what you meant to say you mark it right or you don’t see the difference between what you wrote and the mark scheme. Whereas a teacher-assessed grade you don’t have this, a teacher may even fall on the side of marking too harshly. Knowing this will allow you to interpret your mark. As a general rule, I find if you have marked a paper yourself subtract 10% from the final score to obtain your percentage and grade that is fair.
We also need to if it was a topic test or a past paper. Often topic tests are made by teachers and a grade boundary I applied arbitrarily. This means that the grade boundary is not super accurate so if the test was super difficult you maybe should have a higher grade than the test suggest, the reverse is also true. Whereas if it were a past paper you should use the grade boundary found online

The most important thing to do after an exam is to review it, correct all your answers and make a plan to improve on the aspects of the test you felt short on. Begin by making corrections to your test in a different colour, be as detailed as possible and make sure you understand what is wrong with your answer.
Next, we make the plan, this is where your revision timetable comes in (learn more about how to a retrospective revision timetable here). Make sure you make time to do even more questions on the topics you didn’t know so well.

Understanding all this is important, make sure you spend time reflecting on what you can do better. Following this process keeps you working on the things that are important to make your revision as effective as possible

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