Exam season can be stressful. Depending on your exam schedule, you may have multiple exams within only a few days. Effective study strategies can help you prepare for these situations, but if you’re the type of person to freeze up when you actually get into the exam, these exam writing tips may be helpful:
Tip 1: Write down the hard stuff first
Right before the exam begins, go over the hardest topics on the exam and the formulas you just can’t seem to remember. As soon as you get your exam paper, write those things first before looking at anything else. Doing this allows you to have a ‘cheat-sheet’ throughout the exam that isn’t actually cheating!
Tip 2: Write something for every question
This tip has always allowed me to do much better on my exams than I think I’m going to. I try to write down everything I am thinking, no matter how irrelevant I think it is. You’d be surprised how many part-marks you can get, just by showing your thought process. In the end, you can always improve your answers at the end of the exam, if you have leftover time.
Tip 3: Do the questions you know first
When you start your exam, do the questions you are confident that you know first. This strategy ensures that you get most of your test done without wasting time on the questions you aren’t sure about. When you’ve done all the questions you knew right away, you can spend the rest of your time trying to figure out the questions you don’t.
Tip 4: Look for clues from other questions
This tip works especially well for multiple choice exams. Looking through the other questions may allow you to eliminate incorrect multiple choice options.
I hope these tips help you during exam season. Knowing how to write exams efficiently is helpful, but studying is important too. We’ve all struggled to keep up with a course and then tried to teach ourselves the entirety of the course two days before the exam. This has never worked in my favour. Studying a bit of course content everyday will help you actually retain the information. Try studying a concept each day with Minute School. When the exam comes around, you will already know a good amount of information, and you can focus on studying or reviewing rather than learning the information for the first time. Good luck with your exams!