Having said all that, he wasn't always getting things right. The consistency wasn't there. Silly mistakes were being made and time was taken up in working backwards through his answers in trying to detect where these mistakes were occurring.
He was very confident in his ability and quite stubborn in his lack of acceptance that his technique was causing him problems. I noticed that he was doing too much of the working out in his head without writing it down - he didn't want to waste his time writing this stuff when he knew he was right and it didn't seem worthy of committing it to paper.
The Eureka moment for him came when I asked him to pretend that I was a year 10 student and he needed to teach me how to answer a question. I observed him stumbling over some of the basics as he hadn't had to articulate certain steps before - he just 'did them' in his head. Having to explain to a year 10 student what he was doing forced him to really think about every bit of information he was processing.
This helped me to convince him to use a new line for every change he made to an equation, or make a note of the narrative that was going through his mind - he resented the way it slowed him down but when he began to realise that he was making fewer 'silly mistakes' [like missing off minus signs or basic multiplication errors] and that his answers were becoming more reliable, and his answering was more disciplined, he started enjoying himself.
I was then able to open him up to the concept of Exam Craft. His hard work and newly-discovered discipline helped him achieve the A* he wanted.
