How to Prepare for a Concours When You Do Not Know the Cut Off

You cannot revise towards a number that does not exist yet.

That is the honest starting position for a concours. The mark you need this year will be produced by this year’s results, so it is not knowable while you are preparing. Candidates find this genuinely unsettling, and a lot of them respond by chasing last year’s figure as if it were a target, or by giving up on planning altogether.

Neither works. What works is changing the question. Stop asking what score do I need and start asking how do I finish as far up the ranking as I can. That question you can actually answer, and everything below follows from it.

If the ranked structure itself is new to you, start with how a concours actually works, then come back here for the preparation.

Separate what you control from what you do not

Write these two lists once, properly, and a lot of anxiety goes away.

You control	You do not
How much of the syllabus you cover	How many people sit it
How fast you work under time	How difficult the paper is
How accurate you are on easy marks	How many seats are offered
Whether you finish the paper	How well anyone else prepared
How many concours you enter	Where the line finally falls

Everything in the right column is real and none of it deserves a minute of your attention. Every hour you have goes into the left column.

Rank is won on the easy marks, not the hard ones

This is the part candidates get backwards, and it costs places every year.

When everyone is ranked against everyone else, the hardest questions do not separate the field very much. Most candidates get them wrong, so they move nobody. What separates the field is the middle of the paper: the ordinary questions that most candidates could do and a large number still lose marks on through rushing, misreading, or running out of time.

So the instinct to spend your last month wrestling with the most difficult material is usually wrong. Being reliable on the marks you can already reach moves you further up a ranking than being occasionally brilliant on the ones you cannot.

Put it in practical terms. If you routinely drop four marks a paper to careless slips and you cannot reliably answer the hardest section at all, the four marks are the cheaper purchase, and the person one place above you in the ranking probably lost theirs the same way.

Three levers, in the order worth pulling them

1. Coverage

A topic you never studied scores zero no matter how sharp you are elsewhere. Gaps are the most expensive thing on the paper because they are total losses rather than partial ones.

Early on, breadth beats depth. Get something on every topic that appears in past papers before you make anything excellent. You can improve a weak topic later. You cannot improve a topic you have never opened, in the hall, in real time.

2. Speed

In a ranked competition, finishing is worth marks that ability alone does not deliver. Two candidates of equal knowledge, one of whom completes the paper, do not place equally.

Work with a clock from the start of your preparation, not from the final fortnight. If you consistently run short, diagnose it rather than resolving to hurry. Almost always it is one of three things: too long on the first section, rereading questions because you did not read carefully the first time, or writing far more than the marks available justify.

3. Accuracy

Only once coverage and speed are decent does polishing accuracy pay well. Keep a written list of your own repeated mistakes, actual ones from actual attempts, and read it before every timed paper. Most candidates make the same handful of errors for months without ever writing them down.

How to prioritise when there is no syllabus

Several concours publish no syllabus at all, which candidates read as permission not to plan. It is the opposite. The past papers are the syllabus, and they are more specific than a published one would be.

Do this once and it will direct months of work:

1. Gather every past paper you can find for that specific school, not for the subject generally.
2. Go through each one and write down the topic of every question. Not the question, the topic.
3. Count how often each topic appears across the years.
4. Sort the list by frequency. That is your revision order, and you did not have to guess at it.

Two or three afternoons of dull counting will tell you more about what to study than any amount of advice, including this article. Papers set by one institution develop habits, and the habits show up in the tally.

There is more on running that process, and on where to find the papers in the first place, in our guide to exams and past papers.

Build a margin, because the line moves

Since you cannot know where the line falls, aim to clear it by a distance rather than to reach it.

If several years of published cut offs are available, they will show you a band and roughly how much it moves between years. Prepare for the top of that band and treat anything below it as a margin, not as a plan. Candidates who prepare to exactly last year’s figure are, in effect, betting that this year’s field will be no stronger, and that bet loses often enough to be a bad one.

Be careful with the numbers themselves. Cut offs circulate on social media for years after they stop being current, and some were never accurate. Anything you did not read in the institution’s own announcement is a rumour, and a plan built on a rumour is worse than a plan built on nothing, because it feels like information.

Enter more than one, deliberately

Sitting several concours is not pessimism about your ability. It is a sensible response to an outcome you cannot forecast.

Choose them so the preparation overlaps. Two schools testing similar material means most of your revision counts twice. Two schools testing entirely different material means you have halved your preparation time for each, which is worse than entering one properly.

Then check three things before you commit: whether the examination dates clash, whether the registration windows clash, and whether you can physically be in both places. The registration windows catch more people than the examination dates do, because they close earlier and are announced less loudly.

The last month

Three rules, and they are harder to keep than they look.

Stop adding topics. A topic learned in the final weeks displaces revision of topics you already half know, and the arithmetic almost never favours the newcomer.

Sit full papers, timed, in one sitting. Not sections. The specific thing you are training is concentration and pacing across the whole duration, and you cannot train that in twenty minute pieces.

Protect your sleep. Memory is consolidated while you sleep, so trading sleep for extra hours of revision trades the mechanism that stores what you learned for more material it can no longer store properly. It is the worst deal available to you and it is the one candidates make most often.

On the day, finish the paper

If you take one instruction into the hall, take that one.

An unattempted question scores zero with complete certainty. A rushed, half remembered attempt sometimes scores something, and in a ranked competition something beats nothing by exactly the margin that separates two candidates.

Practical version: give every question a first pass before you give any question a second one. Leave the difficult ones with a mark in the margin and come back. Candidates who work strictly in order routinely run out of time with questions they could have answered sitting untouched on the last page.

Questions candidates ask

How do I know if I am on track?

Not by comparing yourself to a cut off, because it does not exist yet. Compare yourself to yourself. Are you covering more of the paper than a month ago? Are you finishing? Are your repeated mistakes getting rarer? Those three answers tell you what you need to know.

Should I prepare differently if the school is very competitive?

Not really, and this surprises people. Competitiveness moves the line, not the paper. The same coverage, speed and accuracy win places at every school. A more competitive school simply means the margin you want is larger.

What if I sat it before and missed out?

You start the next attempt far ahead of where you started the first one, and because the line moves with the field, a near miss can become a place without any dramatic improvement. Go back to your paper if you can and work out where the marks actually went, rather than assuming you simply need to work harder in general.

Is there any point studying if I cannot afford preparation classes?

Yes. The single most valuable resource is past papers for your school, and they are the cheapest thing in this entire process. A frequency tally and honest timed practice cost nothing except the discipline to do them.

Start here

This week, do two things. Find the registration window for your school and write the date somewhere you cannot avoid seeing it. Then start the topic tally, even with only two past papers.

Neither takes long, and together they replace the question you cannot answer with the one you can.

For the review method that makes the covered topics stick, see spaced repetition and a twelve week revision plan.