Concours ENS Buea common mistakes
Concours ENS Buea · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
In the General Knowledge section, candidates answer questions about Cameroonian institutions (the two-chamber Parliament, the Senate's role, the Constitutional Council, regional councils created after the 2019 special status) using facts learned for older exams, and never check whether the body or rule still works the same way.
General knowledge questions on this exam draw heavily on the Cameroonian state and recent institutional change, but candidates revise from outdated summaries, WhatsApp forwards and old past papers rather than from current official sources, so they confidently give answers that were true five or ten years ago.
What to do instead
Build a one-page 'institutions sheet' from current official texts and update it each year: name the institution, its constitutional basis, its current head, its actual powers, and the date of the most recent reform. Test yourself by explaining what changed and why, not by memorising a single label.
Candidates treat current affairs as trivia and revise only headlines, so they can name an event (an election, a crisis, a summit, a policy launch) but cannot say when it happened, who was involved, or what its consequence was.
Reading news passively creates a feeling of familiarity without retrievable detail. Under exam pressure the candidate recognises the topic but cannot produce the specific fact the question asks for, and guesses between plausible options.
What to do instead
Keep a dated current-affairs log covering the last twelve months: one line per event with date, actors, cause and consequence. Review it weekly and force yourself to recall each entry from the date alone before checking the log.
In English, candidates write long, ornate sentences with several subordinate clauses to sound academic, and the result contains subject-verb disagreement, dangling modifiers and unclear pronoun reference.
Candidates believe length signals competence, and they have not practised editing their own prose. Complex structures are attempted without control of the grammar that holds them together, so meaning collapses exactly where the sentence is most ambitious.
What to do instead
Write the answer, then cut every sentence over about 25 words into two. Check each verb against its subject and each pronoun against its antecedent. Practise with timed 200-word essays followed by a deliberate self-edit pass before reading the model answer.
In English comprehension and summary tasks, candidates lift whole sentences from the passage or paraphrase so loosely that the original claim is changed, and they ignore the word limit.
Copying feels safe and paraphrasing feels risky, so candidates do one or the other without learning the middle skill: compressing the idea into their own words. The word limit is often treated as advice rather than a hard constraint.
What to do instead
Practise the three-step summary: underline the key idea, close the passage, write it from memory in your own words, then reopen and compare for accuracy. Count words every time and train yourself to land within ten per cent of the limit.
In French, candidates write the dissertation or résumé du texte without a visible plan, producing a shapeless answer with no introduction posing the problem, no announced partes, and no conclusion answering the question.
Time pressure pushes candidates to start writing immediately. The French academic genre rewards structure far more than it rewards volume, and a marker who cannot find the plan cannot award the analytical marks, however good the French is.
What to do instead
Spend the first five to eight minutes writing an explicit plan: problématique, two or three parties with titles, and the conclusion's answer. Then write to that plan. Practise the résumé du texte separately, since it demands compression rather than argument.
In French, candidates confuse register and idiom, inserting English-influenced constructions or informal vocabulary into a formal piece, and misapply accents and agreement in past participles.
Cameroonian French is a living variety, and everyday usage sometimes diverges from the formal written norm the exam rewards. Candidates write what they hear around them, and they have rarely had their written French corrected line by line.
What to do instead
Keep an error log of your own recurring faults (accord du participe passé, choix de préposition, faux amis such as 'actuellement' versus 'actually'). Read one page of formal French prose daily and copy out the structures you would not have produced yourself.
In the subject specialisation paper, candidates answer the question they hoped for rather than the one asked, writing everything they know about the topic instead of addressing the specific command word (compare, justify, design, evaluate, discuss).
Revision is organised by topic, not by task. Candidates rehearse content and never rehearse the different cognitive demands, so a 'critically evaluate' question receives a descriptive account and loses the higher-order marks.
What to do instead
Before writing, underline the command word and the scope limits, and state in one sentence what the question actually requires. Practise past questions grouped by command word so that each type becomes a recognisable routine.
In the teaching-option paper, candidates describe pedagogy in the abstract (learner-centred methods are good, group work motivates) without linking it to the Cameroonian classroom, the official curriculum, or a concrete lesson sequence with objectives, activities and assessment.
Candidates revise theory from textbooks and never convert it into teachable plans. The examiner is looking for applied professional judgement, and abstract advocacy reads as uncritical repetition of slogans.
What to do instead
Prepare a reusable lesson-plan skeleton (competence, objective, prerequisite, activity, assessment, remediation) and practise applying it to three different syllabus topics. For every method you cite, add one sentence on when it fails and how you would adapt it in a large or under-resourced class.
Candidates allocate time evenly across papers and run out of time in the longest section, leaving the essay or the specialisation question unfinished or reduced to notes.
Total time is known but per-question time is not planned, and candidates over-invest in early questions they find easy. An unfinished final section costs far more marks than a slightly thinner early answer.
What to do instead
Before the exam, write the minute budget for each section on the paper and obey it. Do a full timed mock under exam conditions at least twice, and practise abandoning an over-long answer to protect the final section.
Candidates prepare in isolation from the actual exam format, never writing a full paper under time, and discover on the day that they cannot sustain the handwriting, pace or concentration the paper demands.
Reading and note-making feel productive and are comfortable, while timed writing exposes weaknesses. Without a realistic rehearsal, stamina and timing problems appear for the first time in the real examination hall.
What to do instead
Schedule at least three full-length timed mocks in the final eight weeks, each marked against a checklist of the specific faults listed above, and treat the error log from each mock as the revision plan for the following week.