Halgo for exam preparation

General tutoring moves a student along a scale with no particular urgency. Exam preparation runs backwards from a fixed date to a required score, which changes every planning decision: what to skip, what to drill, and when to stop teaching new material and start rehearsing under time.

That makes the useful record a countdown rather than a level. What matters in week three is not that the student is a solid B2 — it is which of the four papers is currently below target and how many sessions are left to move it.

Exam tutors do not teach from a coursebook so much as from a stack of past papers, and the exercises inside them are the practice. Halgo indexes the PDFs you already have, so a reading part 5 from a 2019 paper is findable by what it tests rather than by which file it lives in.

The same applies to the answer keys. A past paper without its key is half a resource, and hunting for the key is a large share of the preparation time exam tutors quietly lose.

Examiners mark against published criteria — coherence, range, accuracy, task achievement — and a student loses marks in specific ones. Homework that drills the criterion the student is losing marks in is worth several sessions of general practice.

Halgo drafts from what you marked as shaky for that student, and you review the draft before anyone sees it. Whether the shaky thing is the second conditional or writing an introduction that answers the question is your call, not the software's.

A student who can do every task with unlimited time and fails the paper has a timing problem, not a language problem, and it is invisible in ordinary homework. Practice under the clock is the intervention, and it needs to be set as such rather than added as advice at the end of a lesson.

Halgo carries an estimated minutes figure on every exercise, so a set can be built to fill the real length of a paper section instead of an arbitrary number of items.