You want to pay close attention to this one because I’m going to give you my personal exam hacks I used back at school. If you came here thinking I was going to teach you how to cheat in exam, I owe you a sorry.
Now, not that these tips I’m going to give you worked like magic for me, but they’ll work most of the time if you do them right. They also might not, because everyone has what works for them and these might not be it for you.
So here, I’m going to be looking at different scenarios of exam and how to handle them.
Less Time, Huge Syllabus
The issue of exam terrifies most students and it’s mostly not because the student didn’t study, but because they procrastinated so long it’s difficult to be able to cover everything as exam is around the corner. So they’re terrified because even though they studied a little, they’re afraid the question might evade the area they studied and come from the unstudied sections.
This is just one situation how exams can prove intimidating to students.
So for this kind of situation where there’s little time but a lot to cover, what I do mostly is that I take a look at the past questions, and cover the topics I find that most questions come from every time.
This obviously will only work for courses taught by lecturers who are repetitive and predictable. It won’t work if you’re dealing with a flexible lecturer that sets new and fresh questions every semester. But even they will repeat some questions every once a while because no course is not so broad to have might fresh batch of questions forever.
Learning For Difficult Courses
Courses involving formulas and similar concepts are mostly confusing and difficult for students to learn, especially when under the pressure of approaching exam.
Now before I give you a little trick, it’s best to mention that the best thing for you is to try as much as you can to understand the concepts. But if you just can’t understand them, listen up.
Weave complex concepts into acronyms
Using things you’re already familiar with. Take that formula you know you can’t remember and weave into some sort of Acronym. For example, I used Succinate Is Kreb’s Starting Subrate For Making Oxaloacetate to remember the entire intermediates for the Krebs Cycle. This was an acronym I got from the internet, but nonetheless, I’m still able to remember it even today. But you don’t have to use Acronyms from the internet. If you can make up your own, that would be even better, as you’ll know what you designated every acronym to mean.
Chew and pour learning
You remember we agreed the best thing for your studies is to take your time to understand the concepts? Yeah well sometimes, you don’t have enough time to understand the concepts because your procrastinated so damn much you’re at page 23/200 and you need to cram up as many concepts as you can for the exam that starts early morning tomorrow. In that case, understanding goes out the window and the next level of “studenting” is unlocked- Chewing.
Africans are very familiar with this, it’s the Western world I’m not sure about.
What I’m saying basically is that if you have like no time to waste at all, chewing difficult concepts can come in, but only as a last resort. So try to understand the simple concepts, but chew the hell out of complex concepts that want to waste your time. Lol
I write, I remember
This one, I used when the approaching exam was still far away but I wanted to prepare in anticipation(which was almost never the case thanks to my intense procrastination).
So yeah in this case, I study with a book and pen, and as I study, I write to assess whether or not I can recollect what I studied. This works effectively when the exam is not very far away, because since it’s a recollection thing, you probably chewed it and we both know what is chewed evaporates after a while😂. So an exam that is maybe a day or few days away is okay. But one that is a month away, nah you’re better off taking your time.
A little extra thing
People that know me properly know that I chew gum a lot. Most people don’t understand why, but it’s partly for the stake of staying awake and sharp.
I’ve found that chewing gum, contrary to what you’d think it does, not only keeps me awake but for weirdly helps me study better. I know, you’re thinking it rather should be making it difficult to focus, but it on the contrary helped me concentrate my focus.
Maybe I should make a part two of this post. There’s still much to cover. Lol
Cover image is mine and was designed in Canva, and all gifs are from tenor.com
