Example answer
Sep 11, 2008 in Uncategorized
By now you should be well into the swing of doing practice questions for the SAQ. This is a very demanding exam, and you need to practice under near exam conditions to make sure that you are able to deal with the pressure that you will feel on the day.
When you are in the exam hall, you will sit surrounded by hundreds of other people, with silence, except for the scritch, scritch, scratch of the pens of those around you…and it can feel oppressive. There will be no music to listen to, or TV on in the background. You might hear the occasional car engine, police siren or aircraft overhead, depending where you are, but other than that it’s just those pens, the shuffling of papers and occasional cough.
You will have 3 hours to answer 12 questions, and to some people that will seem like not anywhere near enough time. However, as many people who have gone before can testify, it clearly is.
In a previous post several months ago, I posted this entry, with these two images.
The first is an exmaple of a bad way to layout a question. Click on it to enlarge. 
You can see the lines of writing are not separated out. Headings are poorly underlined and difficult to distinguish from the main body of the text, and in general, when looking at it, it’s not easy to mark. Don’t make this mistake. If you lay out an answer more clearly (like the image below), you stand a much better chance of getting the marks, because you are making the examiners work easier, and they will be thankful (to some slight degree, at least) for it, and this gives you a psychological advantage…
Here is an example of a better way to lay it out (again, click to enlarge):
You can see here that all the headings are more space out, and it is easier to read.
In fact in my actual exam, I left even more space, and underlined all my subheadings in the manner of the word “management” on the right hand page of the second example. I also left more spaces between lines. Try not to put too much indentation in when you are using subcategories, because you can easily end up squashing your answer to the right of the page. Again, this is completely unneccessary, because the college has caused a small forest of trees to be felled to allow us to have enough paper to write on in the exam.
So on the principle that every advantage you can gain will help, we strongly advise using clear layouts to get your point across!
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