Exams always make students worry, as they allow teachers to evaluate learners’ knowledge, skills, and understanding. Exam grades have a substantial impact on the average grade and can often lead to sleepless nights. In other words, many students associate exams with stress, anxiety, and dire concentration of willpower and reasoning abilities. However, if the students find the right approach to exam preparation, exams will become a natural part of the educational process like seminars, lectures, or home study.
To properly prepare for the exam, one needs to start doing it well in advance. As a rule, in 30-45 days before the hour X, teachers announce a list of questions that will be included in the exam tests. Consequently, the first โ and the main! โ step is to download these questions to the PC, print them, and read them aloud. Of course, you may consider saving this magic list on your favorite device, but the smartphone screen rarely uses A4 format, so printing out the list is a must. If the professor is in no hurry to share the questions, you can ask them to do this. This move will demonstrate you are a conscientious student and help you remove the anxiety in anticipation of the unknown.
The second imperative step is finding answers to exam questions. The list of questions can be short or long, depending on the number of hours assigned to the subject. Do not be scared by long lists โ usually, this means that the teacher did some work for you and broke the topics into smaller components. As a rule, you will find 80-90% of the required information in some textbooks. At this point, you will use websites allowing download good books for free, like z-library or other platforms. After all, your university library should have all the necessary sources.
The third big step is preparing written responses. Once you’ve found the information, you copy-paste it into a separate Q&A file. But, to be honest, copying information is not enough. After you find the right chapters, try writing some information in your own words. This step cannot be skipped; otherwise, where is the guarantee that you have read the text? In general, this is the most difficult and energy-consuming part of the preparation, and that is why teachers share questions in advance. Therefore, you will need a whole month to complete this part. My ideal way is to do it little by little during each week. Then you will not be overwhelmed by the amount of information and will assimilate it normally. Just in case, you can make cheat sheets or share your answers with classmates.
Thus, the correct preparation for the exam rests on three whales โ it should be gradual, done in advance, and requires your direct participation in the process. If you follow the three simple steps above and don’t skip any of them, your exam preparation will become just a part of your studies. Moreover, in the process of independent work, you will appreciate the time spent at the alma mater and become more interested in discussions, which is also likely to affect your grades.