This brief guide is intended to give you some ideas about how you can get the marks you want in your exams with the minimum of stress and panic! Few people like exams, but if you think carefully about how to approach them they can be easier to handle than you might imagine. If you still feel stuck once you've read this guide, then have a look at the section on 'Further Sources of Advice'.
Preparing for Exams
When students struggle with their exam preparation, it's often because they're not clear about:
· What to revise.
· How to allocate their time.
· Which learning strategies to use.
It can be really tempting to plough straight into revision without finding out the answers to these questions - especially if you are a bit worried about facing up to any study problems - but good planning can make the whole revision process much less stressful. Also, the more you practice planning and organising your revision the better you will get at it.
Working out what to revise
For University exams you may find that there is more material available than you could possibly cover and it may not immediately be clear what to focus on; in effect you may have to work out a 'syllabus' for your revision that will help you to target your efforts. Here's a list of some of the things you might need to know to make an effective plan:
· What kinds of questions there will be in the exam.
· How long you'll have to work on each question.
· Whether you'll have a choice of questions.
(You can usually find these things out from past papers on the library web site, but do check that the format of the paper hasn't been changed).
· What clues there are in your course materials, like lecture outlines, learning outcomes or exam guidance.
· Whether there are any differences between what's expected in a good exam answer here, as compared with your prior learning experiences.
Once you have all of this information you are a good way towards working out what topics to revise and in what depth. The next step is to look at how much time you have available.
Making the best use of the time available
Although there's no one way of time planning that will suit everyone, there are some broad guidelines that many students find useful. Remember that no one manages their time perfectly so don't worry if things don't go exactly to plan.
A good first step is to count up how much time you actually have and to look at how the tasks you want to get done will fit in; often this throws up some real surprises. To do this you will need to:
· Make a note of all of your upcoming deadlines.
· Allow time for things you find enjoyable and relaxing.
· Leave some 'slack' in case something goes wrong.
· Then count up roughly how much time you have available for studying.
This can help you to work out the total amount of time you can realistically give to the revision for each exam. If you are less experienced at University exams this may involve a bit of guesswork.
Once you have an idea of the time available, you can put this together with what you have learned from your exam papers and course information to work our a revision plan. How detailed a plan this is will depend on your own personal preferences. What is important is that you ask yourself whether what you plan to do is realistic; for example, if it takes you 2 hours to work through the notes from each lecture and you have 60 lectures to cover, but only 50 hours to revise for the exam then you need to think again.
As you are making your plan, remember to block out some time to work with past papers. This is one of the things that people often miss out, yet it is something that can really make a big difference to your marks, even if you don't spend very long doing it. How you might use past papers is discussed below.
Developing effective revision strategies
You may well have good ideas about revision from exams you've sat in the past. So developing effective revision strategies at University may simply involve thinking over what you've done before and adapting it. One key thing to remember about revision is that it should be an active process.
Revising actively implies making a real effort to understand what you are learning, rather than simply memorising by rote. Even if your exams require you to remember a lot of facts, you are much more likely to retain detailed information if it is related to an underlying understanding. There are many ways to achieve this; here are some suggestions you might like to try:
· Looking for underlying themes or principles.
· Thinking about inter-relationships.
· Relating what you are learning to 'real-life' situations.
· Thinking how the solution to one problem may help you solve others.
· Organising material into a hierarchical structure.
· Creating a diagram or chart to represent a topic.
· Looking for similarities or differences.
· Looking for points for and against an argument.
· Trying to really understand how formulae work.
· Critically evaluating what you are learning.
· Discussing topics with a friend.
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