Learning from other people's mistakes

Put yourself in the shoes of the examiner

We all know that we want to do better than our friends... but do we need to compete with them? One of the best things I did during high school was work with friends. We would both do a practice exam, and then trade papers at the end and mark each other's papers. This was good because we would grade each other harshly, and have to justify why we gave (or didn't give) good grades. This meant that we had to dig deep to justify our knowledge and therefore had to understand what we were talking about. It also forced us to put ourselves in the shoes of the examiner. That is, in grading the exam paper, we used the examiner's report as a base or criteria to mark the question. This meant that we got an insight into what examiners were looking for in answers.