The last stretch before prelims is for working timed past papers and the Ten Year Series, not rereading notes. Here is the method, and where the marks actually are.
By Marcus Toh · 2026-07-31
Prelim dates are set by each school, not by SEAB, and most land between August and early September, so check your school's own calendar for the exact week.
What is fixed is what comes after. The written O-Level season opens on 19 October, when English Paper 1 and Paper 2 are both sat on the same afternoon, and runs to 10 November. Prelims therefore sit roughly eight weeks before the real papers.
That gap changes what prelims are for. The work you do now is not a one shot performance, it is the base you will reuse in October, the same way we framed the English grade after the oral ended.
Four things, in order. Know where the marks are, work the papers under time, diagnose every mark you lost, then consolidate what you got wrong. The last one is the step most students skip, and it is the one that decides whether the first three were worth doing.
Before deciding what to practise, look at what each paper is actually worth, because the time you have left should follow the weightings. Take English Language as the example, since it is the clearest one.
| English paper | Marks | Weighting |
|---|---|---|
| Paper 1: Writing | 70 | 35% |
| Paper 2: Comprehension | 50 | 35% |
| Paper 3: Listening | 30 | 10% |
| Paper 4: Oral | 30 | 20% |
The default move when prelims are closing in is rereading notes and highlighting, which feels productive and mostly is not, because reading about a skill is not rehearsing it.
Work actual past year papers and the Ten Year Series under timed conditions, full papers where possible. That is the only activity that rehearses the real thing at once: the time pressure, the question phrasing and the stamina. Get them from your school or a bookshop, and treat them as training sessions rather than tests. Students who find it hard to hold timed conditions alone at home sometimes do this work at a tuition centre in Tampines, where someone else keeps the clock.
The mark at the end of a practice paper is the least useful thing about it. The diagnostic is the point. For every mark lost, ask one question: did I not know the concept, or did I know it and misapply it?
Then sort each lost mark into one of three buckets, because they are three different problems with three completely different fixes.
A student who scores 60% and understands where every mark went is in far better shape than one who scores 70% and moves on.
This is what the Ten Year Series is actually for, and why it beats a random worksheet. Across ten years of papers the same structures recur: topics that appear almost every year, question types phrased differently but testing the same idea, and the standard traps of each subject.
A student who has worked enough papers starts recognising the shape of a question before they finish reading it. That recognition is often the difference between completing the paper and running out of time.
Pattern spotting also sets the revision priority. If a topic has appeared in nine of the last ten papers, that topic comes first, not the one your child happens to enjoy.
Here is the part almost everyone skips. The key is not endless practice, because you can work twenty papers and still repeat the same mistake in October. Consolidating what you got wrong matters just as much as doing the paper in the first place.
The practice that works is simple. Keep one notebook, or one note on your phone, purely for your own misconceptions and recurring mistakes. Every time a paper is marked, write the mistake down in your own words, alongside what the correct thinking should have been.
Then go back to it. Revisit the notebook every few days, reflect on why the mistake kept happening, and reattempt those exact questions cold. Getting them right the second time, without help, is the moment the learning actually seals.
Do that and none of the papers you worked go to waste, because each one leaves behind a shorter list of things that can still cost you marks. Skip it, and the paper was just an afternoon of writing.
One more thing most students never check: what SEAB prints inside each paper. The memorisation list for the final weeks is completely different per subject, and our formula sheet resource reproduces every provided sheet in full. The short version is below.
| Subject | Given in the paper | So you must memorise |
|---|---|---|
| E Maths | Mensuration, sine and cosine rules, arc length, standard deviation | The quadratic formula, Pythagoras and the angle properties |
| A Maths | The quadratic formula, binomial expansion, trig identities | Everything else, including calculus results |
| Chemistry | The Periodic Table | Reactivity trends, colours, test observations |
| Combined Science | The Periodic Table plus a metal hydroxides Data Sheet | Less than pure Chemistry students, but the concepts still |
| Physics | Nothing | Every equation, with its units |
| Biology | Nothing | Every process and definition |
Cramming genuinely works, just not the way most students do it. I know that sounds like the opposite of what a tutor should say, but the stretch when you are closing in on prelims moves grades all the time, and the students who move them are doing the same thing: timed papers, marked honestly, with the same recurring mistake hunted down and fixed. The students who do not move are rereading notes with a highlighter and feeling productive.
Here is the honest tutor line: give me one marked paper and I can tell you which of the two your child is. Not from the score, but from the corrections. The student who moves has scribbled why each mark died next to the question. The student who is stuck has a tick, a cross and no post mortem, because the paper was treated as a verdict instead of a diagnosis.
And to the parent watching the countdown with a tight chest, remember what a prelim actually is. It is a rehearsal with a real audience, run by your child's school precisely so the mistakes happen in August instead of October. A bad prelim has never stopped anyone from a good O-Level, and the eight weeks between the two exist exactly for that repair. Get the papers out, keep the routine steady, and let the rehearsal do its job.