Managing your exams
For most students, time-constrained unseen written exams are still the commonest form of final assessment on university courses or modules. Such exams (along with any other forms of assessment you meet) are intended to measure how well you’ve got a grip on what you’ve learned on your course or module. In other words, they’re intended to be a good measure of the level to which you’ve achieved the intended learning outcomes of your course. However, you will already know, from your own experience of exams, that exams measure several other things, including:
• how well you keep your cool during the exam;
• how well you manage your time during the exam;
• how well you edit and improve your own answers during the final minutes of the exam (and it’s worth saving up to a third of the total time for editing and improving your answers);
• how well you read the questions, and stick exactly to the questions in your answers;
• how practised you are at answering exam questions against the clock.
Even when you’ve learned your subject matter really well, exam technique plays a significant part in getting you the marks you deserve. The suggestions which follow are all just plain common sense, but all of them can save stress and earn more marks, so check through them in case there’s something you can do to improve your own approach to exams.
Preparing for an exam
Don’t try to cover the whole syllabus during the last day or two leading up to an exam. You’ll tire yourself out too much if you go over too much material that close to the exam. You need to save energy for the exam itself; it’s no use being infinitely knowledgeable, but too tired to write any of it down sensibly! Concentrate on polishing up the most important parts during that last day or two. Work with what you know, don’t go looking for what you don’t yet know. It’s too late to be discovering what you don’t yet know – that could lead to panic feelings. Get in some practice at the important areas once more. This adds to your speed in answering the exam questions, and builds your confidence.
When you see the question paper
Take your time to read it really well. When you’ve got a choice of questions, it makes a big difference choosing the best questions for you. You can’t choose the best questions unless you read all of the questions well enough to decide which ones you’re going to give your best shot. Tackle your strongest questions first but be careful not to spend too much time on them, at the expense of other questions. Don’t join the many candidates who end up making a false start on question 5, then find that question 3 is much better for them. Such false starts are not fatal, but they’re inconvenient and waste valuable time and energy. Far better to spend that bit of extra time making the best decision in the first place.
When you get stuck
Go on to something you’re not stuck with! If you keep trying to remember the fact or figure that’s eluding you, you risk going into a mental blank. Human brains don’t respond to their owners’ attempts to force them to do anything. If you feel yourself getting strung up about a part of a question you’re struggling with, leave it for a while, and do another question that’s not such a struggle. You’ll still be clocking up marks. Most often, after a while, the thing you were searching for will pop back into your conscious mind, and you can then jot it down quickly, and resume where you left off with the earlier question.
Editing and polishing
This can gain you more marks than you might imagine! If you leave, say, 20 minutes for editing and polishing towards the end of a 3-hour exam, the extra marks you gain could be worth 25%! That’s more than the difference between a 1st-class degree and a much less distinguished one!
How can you possibly get so many marks in 20 minutes?
• By putting down your second thoughts. It could be two hours or more since you wrote down your first thoughts for your first question. Meanwhile, even subconsciously, your brain will have been working away at the question. When you return to what you actually wrote two hours ago, you could be surprised at how much more is now in your head than was then. Some of this ‘extra’ will be well worth slipping in to your original answer.
• By spotting where what you wrote wasn’t what you really meant. Even if you’d read it again immediately after writing it, you wouldn’t have spotted as much as you can a little while later. We all do this, but putting it right can make several marks worth of difference.
• By just tidying up your answers, and rounding off your conclusions, and checking once again that your introductions are good ones.
LTSN Generic Centre Assessment: A Guide for Students November 2001
