Hanoi teacher points out 'strategy' for taking 10th grade English exam

Allocate time wisely

According to Ms. Huong, immediately after receiving the test, candidates need to skim through the entire test in the first 1-2 minutes, estimating the question type and difficulty.

Then, determine the order of doing: usually you should start with the “easy” questions (pronunciation, stress, some simple vocabulary and grammar) to get in the mood and score points quickly.

Reading comprehension, sentence arrangement and sentence rewriting often take up more time, so students need to time it appropriately.

You should spend the last 5 minutes to check the highlighted sentences, avoid highlighting the wrong box or wrong sentence order.

“Swipe - select - return” strategy

Skim: During the test, when you encounter a difficult question, mark it and move on to another question immediately if you cannot find the solution. This is simple to avoid wasting time.

Choose: Quickly identify “sure” or “relatively easy” sentences to get the safe score first.

Go back: After finishing the easy questions, go back to the difficult questions to review them more carefully and deduce the solution.

Candidates in the 10th grade entrance exam in previous years. Photo: Thanh Hung

Review before submission

Before submitting the test to the invigilator, candidates need to check again to see if there are any blank answers.

Make sure to mark the correct number - answer column.

For questions that have had their answers corrected many times, you need to make sure you erase the old answers to avoid being marked incorrectly.

Keep your mind relaxed and focused

Maintaining a relaxed and focused mindset is not only a general “spirit”, but also the “key” for students to effectively utilize all the knowledge and skills they have learned.

“Having test-taking skills and being careful will help students be more confident with each of their choices and especially not to ‘unfairly drop scores’, thereby achieving optimal scores for the 10th grade exam . Students should believe in themselves, stay strong, and confidently express themselves to achieve good results,” said Ms. Huong.

Ms. Mai Huong also notes the types of exercises and mistakes that can easily cause you to lose points in English.

Phonetics exercises, rules for pronouncing the endings “-ed” and “-s” are common in the word-finding exercises with underlined words that are pronounced differently from the rest. “Most of the exam questions in recent years have included this. However, students tend to be subjective, even if they take notes,” Ms. Huong said.

Or the type of exercise where you find mistakes in a sentence: The answers in the sentence are also shuffled, students often easily make mistakes when they assume the first underlined part in the sentence is answer A, the second underlined part is answer B... Therefore, when the answers are shuffled, many students, even though they know how to do that question, still choose the wrong answer.

For example: The mistake in the sentence below is “many homeworks”, which is equivalent to the second underlined part (answer A), but in reality many students lose points because they mistakenly choose answer B (because they think the second underlined part in order is answer B).

Or the synonyms exercise (Writing skill): Many students do not read the question, hastily read the answer and immediately choose an answer that is correct in both grammar and semantics. However, the correct answer must be "a sentence that has a similar meaning to the given sentence".

For example: In the sentence below, answers A and D are grammatically and semantically correct, but do not have the same meaning as the given sentence. The correct answer is B.