Academics
Past Questions Are a Diagnosis, Not a Prediction
You have worked through four years of past questions and your score has barely moved. You are practising without learning: check the answer, feel briefly good or bad, move on.
Most students treat past questions as prophecy, hoping a question repeats. Their real value is diagnostic. They are the cheapest instrument you have for finding out exactly where your marks are leaking, and that information is worth far more than any leaked question, because it tells you what to do on Monday morning.
Keep an error log with three columns: the question, why I got it wrong, and what I will do differently. Then classify every wrong answer into one of four causes. Knowledge gap - I never learnt this. Comprehension gap - I knew it but misread what was being asked. Procedure slip - I knew it and made a sign or arithmetic error. Timing - I would have got it with two more minutes. These four require four completely different remedies, and students routinely apply the wrong one. No amount of re-reading your notes will fix a timing problem, and no amount of speed drilling will fix a topic you never covered.
Then review the log rather than the questions. One session a week working only from your own errors is worth more than three fresh past papers, because your losses are almost never spread evenly across a syllabus - they cluster in a handful of topics and one or two habits. Fix the cluster and the score moves in a way that grinding through more papers never achieves.
In practice
A JAMB candidate in Ogbomoso was stuck around 210 across three mock attempts. She kept an error log for six weeks and the pattern was unmistakable: in Use of English almost all her losses were inference questions in comprehension passages, and in mathematics nearly half were sign errors under time pressure rather than unfamiliar topics. Two remedies followed - twenty inference questions a week, and a habit of rechecking signs on every second question. Her next two mocks came in above 250.
Your wrong answers are the syllabus.
Action step
Take your last 30 practice questions, log every wrong answer with its cause in one of the four categories, and spend this week's study on the largest category only.