Do you have an exam coming up? Waste no more time, start preparing right now.
There’s an old but true saying that those who do not prepare for
success are preparing for failure. Passing your exams with high marks is
not a particularly difficult task. The successful student plans his/her
exam long before the actual due date.
In this post, we will briefly discuss how to prepare for an exam in a
rational and efficient manner. To do this, we first need to know where
you stand in terms of the exam date. The best way to handle an upcoming
exam differs depending on how much time you have to study.
For this reason, I have therefore divided the issue into 3 separate scenarios:
A – You have 2 months or more to prepare
B – You have 1 month or less to prepare
C – You have 2 weeks or less to prepare
B – You have 1 month or less to prepare
C – You have 2 weeks or less to prepare
A – You have 2 months or more to prepare
This is the optimal situation. You start preparing the moment you
know the exam has been announced. Don’t be fooled with the fact that you
have a lot of time left before the actual writing of the test.
This will make you procrastinate and fool yourself that you are going to study tomorrow when in fact you are only postponing the inevitable.
1
The first day: Strategy!
Spend the first day formulating your strategy. Make sure you are aware of all of the required reading for the course. Skim through the entire textbook and try to produce a reading schedule and a preliminary deadline for when you need to be finished with the reading of the book. The deadline is important, make sure you keep it!An example of preliminary planning is shown below. In this example, only the first few days are show, hopefully it’s enough to get the picture.
| Day | What To Do | How Much |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prepare | Create a schedule and decide on a deadline. |
| 2 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 2 practice problems |
| 3 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 2 practice problems |
| 4 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 3 practice problems |
| 5 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 1 practice problem + 1 handout |
| 6 | Review | Review all of the pages you've read this week. |
| 7 | Textbook "Name" | 10 pages + 2 practice problems |
Showing 1 to 7 of 7 entries
2
The rest of the days: Implementation!
In the case above, the required textbook had 208 pages + a few handouts and practice problems. With an average of 5 pages per day + day at the end of the week reserved for repetition only, one will conclude the entire book in about one and a half month. This leaves you about 2 weeks to review everything.Remember to specify a deadline for when all of the reading needs to have been completed. Make sure this deadline is – if possible – at least 1 week before the exam date. This way, you’ll have time to revise what you’ve learned. This is how knowledge sticks. It is through the medium of repetition in which information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes wisdom.
B – You have 1 month or less to prepare
If you have about 1 month to prepare you can still produce great
results, depending on how much you know about the topic, the difficulty
of the exam etc. The modus operandi is not much different from the case
above. What you need to do is simply create a schedule where you would
need to work twice as much on a daily basis to finish all of your
reading + eventual practice problems/old exams before the exam date.
If you have less than 1 month to prepare, it is still possible to get good results but you have to start studying immediately!
C – You have 2 weeks or less to prepare
So it happened. You are in the tight situation of having only 2 weeks
to prepare for an exam. If this was intended by your professor it might
not be a big of deal since the scope of the exam will not be as big as
if you had had 2 months or more to prepare. However, if the course was
indeed intended to go on for 2 months or more and you have only started
studying right now, you are in some deep trouble! Don’t worry though; it
is still possible to produce decent results even though you have such
limited time. It’s time to go into emergency mode.
EMERGENCY MODE
Emergency mode means that you will have to put anything that is not
as important as passing this exam to the side! That means that you will
most likely have to forget about meetings friends, going out for
shopping, leisure activities, sport and so forth. For the next few days,
you will need to eat, sweat and breath the topic that you are studying.
As before, begin the first day by planning. This time however, we are
planning to cover the most important parts first, knowing well enough
that we might have to skip some parts. It’s survival mode and in
survival mode you think about the essentials first and foremost.
1
Triage!
Triage is what they in the medical community call the priority system that is used in emergency situations in ER rooms in hospitals and similar places (such as during rescue operations, disasters such as floods etc). The people who are in the direst need of medical service are those who get served first so for example the person who was in a severe car accident gets to be treated before someone who had a minor wrist injury. This is how you need to treat your exam.
2
Important vs Less important
You need to know the following:– What are the most important chapters?
– Which parts are less important (keeping in mind that less important does not mean unimportant)?
– Which types of problems are in the most likelihood going to be included?
3
Study, Study!
Start studying, cover all the essential parts first and make sure you have mastered them. Once you have learned these, you are ready to move on to the more advanced examples/chapters. Don’t waste any time what so ever doing anything that is deemed less important than your studies. Until the exam date, you must be focused on passing that exam.http://www.study-habits.com/
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