Question Banks

A question bank is not a paper. It is a set of questions of the same kind, collected together, so that a student can practise one thing repeatedly instead of meeting it once every few weeks.

That is the difference that matters. A whole paper gives one attempt at each task type; a question bank gives ten attempts at the one task type that is costing you marks.

Use it to repair a specific weakness that you have already identified from a marked paper. Working through a bank at random is much less useful than working through the one your own errors point at.

• Find the weakness first. Mark two past papers, list what you lost marks for, and choose the bank that matches the top item on the list.
• Do ten in a row, then stop and look for the pattern. Ten answers of the same type make an error visible that one answer hides - always mishearing the same word, always forgetting the same tense, always writing past the word limit.
• Say the rule out loud before the next ten. Learners who can state what they were getting wrong fix it; learners who just do more questions usually repeat it.
• Come back a week later, not the next day. Practising the same task type twice in one sitting flatters your memory. A week's gap tests whether you actually learnt it.