By the time you’ve worked through this study skills guide, I hope you will be better-able to:
(1)       prepare in advance things you’ll need during your exams.

(2)       choose the best way to spend the time immediately before each exam.

(3)       use the first ten minutes or so of each exam in the safest and most productive way.

(4)       adopt a logical approach to timing your answers during exams.

(5)       in your answers, cater for the fact that examiners are human - and probably tired, stressed humans!

(6)       use the last fifteen or so minutes of each exam to pick up several extra marks.

(7)       choose what to do after each exam, so that you avoid demoralising yourself, or wasting valuable time and energy when another exam is coming up shortly. Do you like exams? Maybe not, but they’re likely to be an important part of your life as a university student. Some people sail through exams without a conscious thought as to technique. To be at university, you’ve passed a lot of exams already, so your technique can’t be bad. But will it be good enough for your next lot of exams?

There are all sorts of possible answers to this question, let’s explore a few, critically.

•           “Employers like proof of your capabilities”

There’s certainly some truth in this. When selecting candidates for a job, at an early stage in the selection, “paper qualifications” are usually considered. Everything counts! Even if you get a couple of degrees, application forms will still ask you to list your main exam results from schooldays!
But what capabilities do exams measure? Do they really measure how good people are at their subjects? Or do they tend in fact to measure how good people are at tackling exams? If so, you need to not only know your subjects, but also to be good at the business of taking exams. That’s what this study skills guide is about.

•           “More marks are gained (or lost) per minute in exams than in any other part of life as a university student”

There’s certainly some truth in this. You may spend many hours in lectures on a topic, and study it yourself for many more hours, and everything about that subject may depend on just an hour or two in an exam room. Even if your course work counts towards your eventual qualifications, exams are likely to count much more.

•           “Exams are the only fair way of comparing people’s abilities”

There’s some truth in this too. Exams can be very fair in one sense: there can be a very detailed marking scheme so that the examiner gives exactly the “deserved” mark to each script.
A schools examining board I have worked for over the years can rightly claim that any one of a team of thirty-odd examiners marking a particular paper will give the same mark within one per cent. So it doesn’t matter which examiner marks which script, the result is demonstrably “fair”. But we still end up with that question I posed earlier: however “fairly” exams are marked, don’t they still tend to measure people’s skills at handling exams? So, let’s see what we can do about your exam skills.
Ask yourself this question, now.

•           Has it ever happened that a classmate of yours got a better exam mark than you, when in fact you knew that subject a lot better than your classmate?

If you answered “yes” to this question, it’s all to do with . For your classmate to score more highly than you, either his or her was particularly good, or your’s could be improved. Let’s now go into more detail about your feelings concerning exams. Look carefully at the options in the activity below, and choose the option or options which most closely resembles your feelings.

Which option (s) most closely resemble how you feel about exams at the moment?

(a) I'm scared stiff of exams!

(b) I never seem to do as well in an exam as I know I could have done, somehow.

(c) Exams don't bother me, in fact I quite like them.

(d) I think exams are an unfair way of measuring people.

(e) I usually do far better in exams than I really deserve.

(f) Exams loom up on me like a big black cloud.

(g) It's the tension of a lot of people crowded into an exam room which gets to me. If I could do exams by myself I'd be much happier.

How did you get on? We’ll now go into a bit more detail of ways of making sure that you do yourself full justice in any exam you take in the future. We’ll also see what we can do about any problems you’ve had in the past, and try to make sure they don’t bother you again! Probably the best way forward is if we go in sequence through good things to do before, during and even after your exam. But before we do this, let’s get one thing out of the way.

What’s the worst thing that can happen to you in an exam? Write down your personal “worst” below. Most people say “failure” or something along those lines. Did you? Another fairly common answer is along the lines of “mind going blank”. We’ll deal with that one a little later, but first, let’s get failure into perspective.
What does it really mean if you fail an exam? I propose it means the following:

•           on that particular day

•           in the mood you happened to be in

•           with the questions on that occasion

•           the things you wrote

•           in answer to those particular questions

•           weren’t quite what was being looked for

•           by particular fellow-humans

•           in their own particular moods

•           looking for particular answers What a lot of variables! So if you failed an exam, there are all sorts of things for you to “blame” besides yourself. If you failed an exam, it doesn’t mean that you were a failure. You simply didn’t quite match up to a whole series of circumstances.

Notice I’ve talked about “failure” in the past tense. I want you to think about it as something that won’t happen again, because you’re going to prepare yourself for the process of taking, and passing exams, as well as preparing your knowledge and skills in your subjects .

Let’s now go on to explore how to do as well as you can in your exams. I think it’s useful to split up the task into various separate “time zones”, and discuss each separately.

The things you do just before an exam - let’s say during the 24 hours before it starts - can affect how you feel during the exam itself. How you feel at the very beginning of the exam can be affected quite a lot.

In particular, you don’t want to be using up your reserves of mental energy (and even physical energy) on pointless tasks just before an exam. Here’s a short list of pointless tasks. They can all be avoided by a bit of forethought!

•           Last minute searching for the exam room location.

•           Rushing to get there on time because I set out too late.

•           Scrabbling round looking for pens and pencils.

•           Hurrying to the shop to get a battery for the calculator. It’s best not to try to do too much last-minute revision. You need to save your energy for the exam questions. It’s no use doing so much revision that during the exam you know it all, but are simply to tired to get it down on paper!

Another thing to avoid is that little cluster outside the exam room before they let you in. Remember it. Here’s what you hear:

•           “Do you know the Law of Politicality?”

•           “Do you think we’ll get a question on grobbleworts?’’

•           “I found it hard to learn Lobbards Theorem”

•           “I hope they’ll give us one on Quasipods”

•           “I hope they miss out Wompology”

(Substitute your own topics for the nonsense words!)

As you stand there what happens? You begin to think that everyone knows everything better than you. Every time someone mentions a bit you haven’t studied much, your feelings sink!

And the tone’s a bit like a racing commentary, getting more feverish as the start time gets closer. Avoid it!

Let’s take for the sake of argument a three-hour written exam. This is a rather common format. If you have shorter ones, you can scale down the timescale I discuss below, to suit your own exams.

These are very special. They can be “make or break” minutes. You may naturally be a bit tense as you prepare to see what’s in store for you, but it’s now when you need to be your coolest. It’s only natural that when you first see the question paper you’ve been preparing for, maybe for months, that your pulse rate and blood pressure will be a bit higher than usual. But there are some things you can do, which need to be done anyway, and which will give you a bit of time to settle down. Let’s look at these first.

•           Check for a few seconds that you’re sitting in front of the right question paper. (No use struggling through half an hour of someone else’s exam, than having to get started amid a lot of fuss - on yours!) •           Write your name on the answer paper (However tense you may feel, I’ve never seen anyone so nervous that their name eluded them!)

•           Write the date on the script. (Even if you’ve forgotten the date, you can probably get it from your watch - or it may even be printed on the question paper).

Now, with the administration out of the way, you’ve got some decisions to take. Actually, they’re very easy decisions, if you approach it logically. You’d be surprised how many candidates (because that’s what you’re now called) make a mes of this simple bit of decision making. What decisions?

(1)       How many questions have I to do?

(2)       How many minutes for each question?

(3)       Which questions shall I do (if there’s a choice)?

The best thing you can do in these early minutes, is slowly and carefully make these decisions. Work out an approximate timetable, splitting the available time up among the number of questions you have to try, leaving say a quarter of an hour “spare” at the end - more about that later.
Then, for most of the first ten minutes, read each question very slowly, and more than once, before you decide whether it’s one for you. If it’s not, maybe put a cross beside it. If it’s a “possible”, maybe a tick. If it’s a “definite”, maybe two ticks beside it. After you’ve done this with all the questions, you’ll know which is going to be your best one, and it’s good to start with that. While you’re doing this careful, decision-making reading of the questions, it’s very useful to underline the key words of the questions. Words such as “describe”, “discuss”, “explain”,“sketch’’, “calculate”, “prove”, “determine”, “compare and contrast”, and so on are crucial. It’s important to have these words clear in your mind both when deciding which questions you’ll do, and when actually writing down your answers.

•           keeping an eye on the time

When you are answering your best questions, the main danger is that you’ll say too much, because you know a lot about them. This is a serious danger, because if you do over-run, you may not have time for your last two questions at all. If you were supposed to do 5 questions, and you only did 3, your maximum mark would be 60%. And that would be if all your 3 answers were 20 out of 20! Now if you do all 5 questions you only have to score 12 out of 20 each time on average to get a total of 60%. It’s much easier, and safer this way.

•           showing what you’re doing

In an exam, you may think that whatever you do correctly will get you marks. Actually, it’s not always that simple! What often happens is “what the examiner sees that you’ve done correctly earns you marks”. So you’ve got to make sure the examiner sees how you got to your answers. Always show your “working out” in any calculation-type question. If you just have a muddle of numbers down, and you get the wrong answer, you can only get zero marks for that bit. You may only have made one simple mistake. But if the examiner can’t see that you were correct most of the way, he can’t give you any mark at all. Now if he can see where your mistake happened, he’ll give you marks for the other correct things you did, so even with the wrong answer you could earn even l9 out of 20 say. This means you could have lost 19 marks simply by not making it easy enough for the examiner to see what you were trying to do!

•           avoiding “mental blanks”

Ever had your memory go blank on you? Frightening when it happens. Actually, it doesn’t just happen, you made it happen if you’ve suffered this. What you’d probably been doing is this: struggling to remember something, that you knew was there somewhere, but was lost for the moment. Now the more we try to force our brains to do something, the more they rebel, even to the point of closing down temporarily!

So if you feel those panic symptoms even just starting, slow down, take a deep breath, and relax. If you were trying to remember something, and it’s gone, move on to another question for a while. (It’s worth temporarily leaving aside your timetable on such occasions). Given the chance, the ‘missing’ bit of information will come back, not long after you’ve “taken the pressure off”.

•           sticking to the questions

It’s important to stick exactly to the question all the time. We’d all love to show off our knowledge of various bits and pieces given half a chance sometimes. An exam is not the time to do this. If you start giving things the question doesn’t require, you’re simply wasting your time. The marks to be awarded go with the required information. It’s well worth reading the question every now and then to make sure you’re sticking to it. Don’t just read it at the beginning then never again - by the end of 30 minutes you could be answering a very different thing than the original question!

•           humouring the examiner

Examiners are human! There are things that you can do to annoy them, or to please them. For example, a bit of colour in your answers may make the script look more attractive. Not too much of course, you don’t want your script to be psychedelic! Also, avoid red, red is the examiner’s colour by tradition. If you use red too, you’re invading the examiner’s territory, psychologically speaking. But coloured labels on diagrams, graphs or sketches can brighten up your script, and maybe cheer the examiner up enough to score a “benefit of the doubt” mark or two. (I’m thinking of that moment that the examiner looks back over one of your answers, wondering whether to award it 16 out of 20 or 17.5 out of 20).

•           illustrating your answers

Depending what sort of subject you’re doing, there may be the chance to illustrate your answers with diagrams, graphs, sketches and so on. Something “visual” can often be a much quicker way for you to prove to the examiner that you know what you’re writing about. A diagram can be worth a hundred words, and it can take much less time to draw than explaining in words. This means diagrams can save you time - more time available for other questions. Also, examiners tend to like visual things, it’s much less boring than reading your writing!

•           problem versus essay?

Now, before we leave the main business of answering questions, let’s explore another issue which may arise in some subjects. This is the possible choice you many have to make between
“essay” type answers, and “problem” type answers. By the latter, I mean questions where there is a “black and white” correct answer.

Such questions can be calculations, derivations, and so on. (If you’re not going to meet such questions in your own exams, skip ahead to “The Closing Few Minutes”).

Choosing whether to do an essay or a problem depends on:

•           whether you can actually get the right answer for the problem-type question,

•           how fast you can do such problems,

•           whether it would be safer for you to stick to an essay-type question. Have you thought how the marks may be picked up as you answer these two kinds of questions? I think that scoring marks goes rather differently in fact. Try Activity 2.

Suppose you have the choice between an essay-type question, and a problem type one. Imagine that either question should take 30 minutes, and they are worth 20 marks each. On the axes below sketch a line on the screen graph (by right clicking with your mouse on the computer screen in the graph area and keeping the button pressed as you draw) to show how, as a function of time, you may pick up marks for the following five cases (a-e).

a) "good essay" you're using the 30 minutes to produce a good essay on the topic concerned.

b) "good problem" you're able to get to the right answer and it takes most of the 30 minutes to get there.

c) "good-fast-problem" you've done alot of practice at this sort of problem, and you get to the right answer in well under 30 minutes.

d) "poor problem" you get lost doing the problem, and you don't get near the right answer.

e) "poor essay" you don't know much about the topic, but do your best with the stuff you can remember.


•           Conclusions


Obviously, if you’re well-practised and quick with problems, those are the questions to go for. Even if you’re not too fast, but manage to get the right answer in a reasonable spell of time, you can still expect high marks for such questions. If you’re not good at problems, but good at essays, go for the essay questions, but don’t rely on getting all 20 marks. Also, when doing a “good” essay, make sure you don’t over-run your time allowance, or other questions will suffer. If you have to choose between a “poor” problem, and a “poor” essay, you’re likely to be safer choosing the essay.

During the last quarter of an hour or so, even if you’ve still not finished some of the questions, it’s worth stopping writing and moving into the following mode:

Quickly read through all that you’ve done.

You probably won’t feel like reading it all, but it’s well worth forcing yourself. As you read you’ll find:

•           mistakes. Quickly amend then as you go. Often you will find that what you have written down was not exactly what you meant to say. A few words here and there added in now can rectify that.

•           Bits you missed out, things that have come back into your mind since you wrote your answers: quickly slip them in.

•           Ways of “tidying up” your script: underlining answers, main points, headings, ruling off between sections of questions.

If you use these closing minutes like this, it is possible that you could gain more marks in this quarter of an hour than in the preceding half hour! It’s amazing how many candidates write down things that they would immediately have realised were wrong if they’d ever looked at the answers again. The examiner may even be able to tell that what was meant was different from what was written, but he can’t give marks for what he can guess, he can only give marks for what’s there.

If you only have one exam, you can do whatever you like after it -– I’m sure you’ll know how to celebrate!
What I’m thinking about is when you may have a group of exams. If you do the “wrong” things after the first exam, say, it can demoralise you so much that you fail the second one, and so on.

Examiners like to be able to give out marks. They are just looking for things that earn the marks. The easier you make it for the examiner to find the mark-earning points in your answers, the happier will be the examiner.
It is possible, however, to put an examiner in a bad mood! Going on and on about irrelevant things is one way! He’s still got to read it all in case something relevant comes up, but he’ll get fed up with this. Also, if you’ve been writing so fast that your writing is illegible, it’s harder work for the examiner. It’s worth saying that little bit less, but writing it that little bit more neatly sometimes.
In most subjects, examiners like diagrams. Pictures, graphs, sketches tend to give a bit of visual relief to the examiner. Anyway, it’s often quicker to explain something using a sketch rather than just in words. The examiner in such instances may be able to tell more rapidly from your diagrams that you know something. As soon as he knows you know it, you’ve got your marks!

•           summing up

Most of us left school with “bad” feelings associated with exams. There used to be that mass-depression around when they were on. Many of us didn’t realise then that there’s a lot of mileage in developing our skills in doing exams, not just trying to learn all of the subject matter. We can know it all very well, and still not do ourselves justice in an exam. If you’ve adopted the ideas I’ve been exploring with you, by the time your next exam comes you’ll know the relevant things better, have had much more practice at answering questions, and have adopted a cool, logical approach to the matter of scoring the points in an exam. It’s really a point-scoring game, after all.

If you get to regard exams as such a game, you’ll get to like them more and more - until you actually enjoy them - challenges and all.

Here, I’m going to ask you to do something which will help you find out what it’s like to be an examiner

(1)       Select an exam or assignment question on a topic you know well. (Alternatively, make one up yourself, if you prefer to).

(2)       Rule a narrow margin at the right hand side of some paper. Next, write out a model answer for your selected question. (You don’t need to do this under exam conditions.)

(3)       Now suppose that your answer is a perfect one and is worth a full 20 marks. Take a red pen, and decide what the mark-scoring points in your answer actually are. (In other words, make a marking scheme for the question). Enter the marks scored in the right hand margin.

(4)       Approach a lecturer, or someone else who knows the topic if you prefer, as follows. Show him or her your answer and marking scheme, and ask whether you’ve missed out anything important from your answer, and whether you seem to have divided the 20 marks sensibly.

Summarise below any main ideas you are determine to try out in your next lot of exams.


Before the exam:


The first few minutes:


The main part:


Towards the end:


After the exam:

Let’s explore your feelings about exams. You may find it useful to think about my comments about all of the options, rather than just the one(s) you chose yourself.

(a)       “I’m scared stiff of exams!”

You’re not alone! But why are so many people scared stiff of exams? Look at it logically. You’re not going to die in an exam. Statistically, sitting in an exam room is one of the very safest things you’ll ever do in your life. You’re not going to be hurt in an exam. In all my experience of exams I’ve never seen an invigilator savage the candidates!

I guess what you’re scared stiff of is the possibility of not doing particularly well? Scared of failure? None of us like not doing well, but we needn’t get paranoid about it. Later in this section, I’ll explore what “failure” actually means - you’ll find its not nearly so frightening as you may think (and it most probably won’t happen if you take on board some of the advice in this study skills guide) .

(b)       “I never seem to do as well in an exam as I know I could have done, somehow.”

This is a common feeling, but one which you can do a lot about. Once you have developed your exam skills, you’ll be much more likely to be able to give of your best in every exam. Especially if you have made learning tools, and spend a lot of time practising using them, you’ll be well prepared to put the practice into action during exams. If for weeks or months you’ve practised answering questions, the exam is just another bit of practice for you.

(c)        “Exams don’t bother me, in fact I quite like them.”

Good, that’s the spirit. You’re a natural competitor. It’s all a game, really, the aim being to extract as many marks from the examiner, by carefully and selectively giving back “what you know” in answer to the questions. When you like exams, you can relax and concentrate on this game, without all those negative feelings of anxiety which inhibit so many candidates.

(d)       “I think exams are an unfair way of measuring people.”

I agree. They don’t measure people. But they do measure people’s relative abilities to do certain tasks, in a particular way, in identical circumstances. Anyway, I guess we’re stuck with exams, so the best thing to do is to become as good as you can at dealing with them.

(e)       “I usually do far better in exams that I really deserve!”

You’re lucky! Long may your luck continue. But don’t rely on such luck! I think you should look deeper, and see why you tend to do well in exams. It could be that you’ve already developed some particularly useful exam skills, without knowing it. If you find out what these skills of yours actually are, you can consciously employ them in future exams, without having to hope that your “luck” will continue.

(f)        “Exams loom up on me like a big black cloud.”

How well I remember that feeling! You might have a marvellous holiday booked for after the exams, but you just can’t think of it until the last exam is done? Develop your ; do plenty of practice at answering questions. Then, the exams themselves will just be additional occasions where you go through the motions of expressing answers to questions. Exams will just be an extension of what you’ve been doing for weeks or months. In fact, the exams will just be a small part of your question-answering routine. Your “private” practice at answering questions may last for weeks, the exams themselves take only a few hours.

(g)       “It’s the tension of a lot of people crowded into an exam room which gets to me. If I could do exams in a quiet room by myself I’d be much happier.”

This is a common feeling in fact. About one candidate in three would prefer to do exams in a private room. I suppose it’s partly because other candidates’ anxiety is a bit infectious. Also, a lot of people working in absolute silence in one room is to say the least a bit unnatural. But think how expensive (and difficult) it would be to arrange a separate room, and a separate invigilator, for each candidate? Are you willing to pay for this? Once you become confident in your exam-taking skills (and assuming you’ve done a fair amount of work for the exam) you’ll soon be able to get on with the simple task of answering the questions on the exam paper. You can then forget all the other people doing the same thing.

Of course, there’s sometimes a drastic way out of the exam room. In some universities, if you get a notifiable disease (mumps, chicken pox, and so on, whichever you prefer) you may be allowed to do your exams in a sick bay, with nursing staff ministering to your needs! But do you honestly think you’ll do better at your exams while fighting illness? I don’t recommend it!

How do your graphs compare with mine? Let me explain why mine are the shapes shown above.

(a)       “good essay”: you’d get quite a lot of marks fairly early in your answer, but you’d probably “level off”. It’s a bit unlikely that you’d get all 20 marks perhaps because the examiner likes to think he or she knows something you missed out!. So you could reasonably expect something like 16 marks for a good essay.

(b)       “good problem”: since there’s a definite correct answer, and you get there, you should get all 20 marks. The marks may be scored rather slowly at first, until you work your way towards the correct answer.

(c)        “good-fast-problem”: the curve resembles (b), but you get all 20 marks in less than 30 minutes (and of course can divert to other questions the time you save).

(d)       “poor problem”: not getting near the correct answer, there’s not much chance of getting marks. Your score remains fairly low.

(e)       “poor essay”: even if your answer misses some important points, if what you put is relatively relevant and clear, you’ll still pick up quite a few of the marks available. Quite likely, your answer - though not brilliant - will be enough to “pass” on the question.

What are the “wrong” things to do just after an exam? Well, what normally happens outside an exam room after it’s over? What’s it called? Yes, the post-mortem. It couldn’t have a better name in fact. The exam is now dead! There’s nothing at all you can do about it any more. So why waste your mental energy going over it all once again? Think of the chatter.

“Did you do question 5?”
“What did you get for the answer?”
“I didn’t get that”
“Did you remember to ..............?”

The more you listen, the more you feel that everyone else has done wonderfully and you’ve done terribly! By now, the people who actually did do well are probably doing something much more sensible.

In fact, if you indulge in a post-mortem, you’re a masochist! You’re choosing to re-live the whole exam, perhaps in painful slow motion. A post-mortem may help you learn more about the topic, but it can’t improve that exam score.

What’s the sensible alternative? Well, get away from that group for a start. Now you need a rest, but probably need to wind down a bit before you can really relax. Have a go at this. Use some summary notes or question bank lists connected with your next exam for half an hour, gently doing a bit of revision for that. You may get the pleasantest of feelings: that of gently replacing all the information that was in your mind for the past exam with things you’ll need for that next exam. After a little of this gentle revision, you’ll be ready to have that rest. And you’ll be much happier than if you’d done a post-mortem.