Guide to exam success

Study skills counsellor and author of The Student’s Guide to Exam Success, Eileen Tracy, gives some advice to those of you who have exams on the horizon.

Are you getting that sinking feeling yet?

You’re in good company: the mere mention of exams upsets most students, irrespective of how many exams they have already passed. And at university, many students imagine exams to be harder than ever (though many post-graduates comment that A-Levels were hardest). Many dread that anything below a 2:1 if they’re studying for a degree will ruin their career prospects (a fact perhaps worth checking out with respect to your own prospective career if you share this anxiety).

Students often depend on a grant or family support, and may feel a real or imagined pressure to repay their benefactors with a fantastic result. Mature students may be pinning their hopes for a life change on their studies, yet fear academic muscle-wasting after a long absence from study. Students resitting or with a history of failure usually feel jinxed. Students with high-achieving siblings, likewise. A university syllabus is in itself a small book – yet has to be juggled with that part-time job. To add insult to injury, tutors behave differently from your old chemistry school teacher: they don’t hand out revision notes summarised on a page of A4.

These are the most common stresses that make students panic and freeze or, equally uselessly, panic and swot. However, the good news is that simply identifying these commonplace pressures can substantially diminish them, as you start to separate fact from fiction and assess your situation from a rational rather than an emotional perspective.

Get active

Then, any remaining anxiety can be relieved by useful action. By useful, I mean throwing away your excuse for not doing real work, a.k.a. your highlighter. Bite the bullet and make your revision as active as possible. This means reproducing, in a variety of summarised forms, what you’ve learnt, rather than just passively re-reading or copying out your notes. Revision becomes memorable once it is reduced to key words and bullet points. You can also write out index cards, sketch ideas out into mindmaps, spider graphs, flow charts or other types of diagram that suit your fancy, using colours and drawings to draw out main points. And above all, try practising a few exam papers.

You may hate them, but exam papers give you a sense of what subjects to revise, to what depth and how urgently. Targets and deadlines are your friends, not your enemies.

Resist the urge to do more revision first: you’ve probably already accumulated enough knowledge. University topics never end: the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. Revising ad nauseam isn’t always helpful and can even tempt you to digress: examiners’ top complaint is that students don’t answer the question. To score points, you need to practise being relevant, clear and succinct, and analysing wherever possible. No need to write out answers in full (though you should practice that a bit too): essay plans will do nicely, keyworded and crammed with information (avoid vague scribblings like ‘say why’, ‘etc’ or ‘show how’: planning means thinking your ideas through with precision).

Manage your time

With a watch ticking, you’ll notice how little opportunity you have to show off the erudition you hoped to acquire through more elaborate revision. For the sake of argument, you have a three hour essay paper with three questions. That’s only just over half an hour’s writing per question. Why? Well, deduct ten minutes from your three hours to read the paper and make your question selection; deduct another 15 minutes to check all your answers; deduct five minutes spent losing concentration and going blank (normal in exam conditions, by the way, and remedied by focusing on your breathing.) That leaves 150 minutes. Subtract at least 30 minutes planning time (I’m allowing a minimum of ten minutes’ planning per question – bear with me, I know you’re protesting). Total writing time left: 120 minutes, in other words 40 minutes per question. Max.

That’s enough time to make basic points, with a few refinements thrown in but nothing too elaborate. Students often protest, “If I skipped planning, I could write more!” Indeed, but why bother? Examiners don’t want pages of your stream of consciousness. They work with a score-sheet: even your most brilliant asides won’t count. And if you believe you can write spontaneously without straying, think back to those unplanned essays in your past, marked down for answering a rather different question, for being too general and low on analysis, digressing, containing contradictions, over-developing unimportant points, under-developing relevant points, failing to give examples and references and other assorted blah blah blah. How long you should spend planning depends on time considerations and the difficulty of the question – but you should plan until you know what you’re going to write.

Limit yourself

Another reason for exam practice is to familiarise yourself with the law of diminishing returns. Let’s make each question on your paper worth 100 points. Scoring the first 60 points on each question is relatively quick and easy. Getting the next 20 points takes considerably more skill, knowledge and effort. The last ten points are virtually unattainable. So wrap up if you start running out of time: infuriating though it may be not to finish properly, you’ll score more by moving onto the next question. You’ll develop a hardened attitude once you see the pay-off. And you can always mention in a rapid conclusion what you would have liked to develop further.

Indeed, I myself have had to omit much that I’d like to tell you, such as the benefits of taking breaks after 40 minutes’ revision, the relationship between sleep-deprivation, coffee-drinking and exam underperformance… and how, if you’d really like to remember your revision, you should recap what you’ve learnt after a night’s sleep, then go over it again one week after that, then again after a month after that, then finally after a term.

But my word-count forbids me. This puts us in the same boat. I too suffer from constraints and limitations. Our subjects are infinite, we can’t say it all. The most we can do is to develop a healthy perspective on our tasks, prioritise and plan, practice and then pray.

Eileen Tracy is author of The Student’s Guide to Exam Success and runs a private practice offering study counselling for students.

Useful links

• Eileen Tracy website
• OU exam tips