Saying the word “exam” is usually enough to bring a dreadful silence over a students faces.examinations can indeed be scary stuff. Studying ahead of time and getting a good night’s sleep before an exam are two good ways to defuse stress and do well. Here are five more suggestions for doing well:
1. Overprepare. That might seem like a poor way to study. But over many years of teaching, I’ve found it to be sound advice. It’s much wiser to take an exam too seriously and find it easier than you expected than to wish–when it’s too late–that you’d studied more. Think of the baseball player who swings two or three bats before stepping up to the plate. His on-deck time is what makes his work with one bat stronger.
Don’t confuse overpreparing with cramming. If you overprepare, do so in advance, so that you can get a good night’s sleep before the exam.
2. Bring several writing instruments. If your one pen or pencil fails and you need to borrow a replacement, you’ll lose time, annoy others, and look silly.
3. Use your time wisely. keep a eye on ur watch and manage ur time.distribute ur paper and allocate time accordingly.It’s not unusual for students in the blur of exam week to lose track of when an exam has started and will end. So map out your work not only in minutes but with starting and ending points. Then you can’t lose track of where you are
Don’t rush. This advice is especially important if your exam falls late in exam week, when many students have already left campus. Just take your time; your vacation will be waiting for you when you’re done.
4. Elaborate. If you have a choice between making a point briefly and elaborating, choose to elaborate. A professor reading a final exam is reading to “get to done”–to assign a grade and move on to the next exam in the stack. So you should show your knowledge and understanding in all appropriate ways. As I tell my students, I like reading an exam that lets me say “Okay, okay, you know the material. Enough!”
This suggestion assumes that whatever you’re elaborating on is relevant to the question at hand. Irrelevancies won’t help your case. Nor will mere bull, which is altogether different from knowledge and understanding.
5. Don’t panic. In the worst-case exam scenario, an exam-taker goes on automatic, misreading questions, skipping key directions (e.g., “Choose only one”), and producing verbal babble as the time zooms by. It’s important to stay calm enough to focus on the work there is to do. You might visualize yourself sitting down, reading the questions, planning your responses, and doing well. Another way to avoid panicking is to remind yourself how much time you really have. A three-hour exam equals six episodes of a situation comedy–a lot of time when you look at it that way.
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