Getting exam ready: The essential elements of being well prepared for exams
When exams are only a couple of months away, it’s time to start strategizing for how you’re going to get the best grades possible. Here are my tips on how to get exam ready.
If the reality of needing to start thinking about exams hasn't sunk in for your teen yet, then perhaps you could gently remind them that their exams are probably only 8-12 weeks away from starting... Eeek!
The good news is — there is plenty of time left for them to get EXAM READY.
To that end, I want to make sure that your teen understands the essentials of effective exam study, so here are 4 big-ticket elements of exam study that I strongly attribute my own exam success to:
1. Having a plan is key to organization, motivation, and managed stress levels
Embarking on exam study without a plan for how you're going to approach it is not a good strategy.
A lot of teens don’t prioritise time for planning because they think of it as time that could be spent studying. But this is counterproductive.
Investing a bit of time at the beginning to plan actually results in much more time saved over the course of your teen's exam study. By the time exams are around the corner, your teen has learnt a lot at school that year. Multiple subjects with multiple topics per subject. This means there is a LOT of content to cover to get ready for exams. And a large volume of content is much easier to get through in an organized, systematic and logical order if your teen has given some thought to their study plan before launching in, rather than wading through an enormous mound of material without a head torch.
I can’t exaggerate how much making an Exam Study Timetable before they start studying for exams can help. It will help your teen plan their study days, ensure they cover all topics, keep them accountable, AND keep stress levels down. When I felt the feeling of panic rising up in my throat as exams approached, I found great comfort in my Exam Study Timetable — seeing that in fact there was enough time to fit everything in, I just had to stick to the plan.
2. Focus on the topics that count the most
Another common mistake is to approach studying like an archeological dig — getting bogged down in the detail, and losing sight of the big picture. The big picture being the key topics of each exam. It's these topics that will in all likelihood be the focus of the exam questions, and therefore, the most marks.
Preparing for exams isn't just about being smart or knowing absolutely everything, or even who has studied the hardest. It's about studying smart. And this means focusing your study attention on the topics that matter.
Your teen should know, or at least be able to find out, what the key topics of each of their subjects are, based on what they have spent the most time on in class, and also by their curriculum. They might even have been given a break down of a subject's curriculum at the beginning of the year. This can be super helpful in making Subject Maps too.
3. Studying in a way that works for YOU
If Cram Lab has one goal it's to hammer home the message that the key to achieving consistently good exam grades is to figure out what study techniques and methods work for you and in what order, and to apply that process every time you prepare for exams. We call this your unique Study System.
Every student's Study System will be unique to them. There are some parts of studying that almost all students will benefit from, like writing study notes, but there will be subtleties in each teen's study process that ensure THEY are reaching their academic potential. No two brains are exactly the same after all.
So when your teen sits down at their desk you can encourage them to be thinking about the study techniques they're using. If they're getting really bored, or frustrated, or feel like nothing's going in, there’s a good chance it’s because they're doing something that doesn't work for them. Good students understand how they best process and retain information, and this is the ultimate goal for effective exam study.
4. Putting what you study into practice
If I had to single out one thing that helped me get consistently good grades in exams it would probably be that not only did I revise, read, and make study notes during exam study; I also practised APPLYING what I had studied to practice questions and practice exam papers.
You can study all you want, but if you turn up to the exam and haven't before applied what you know and crafted an exam answer to suit the question being asked, you're highly unlikely to get the marks you otherwise deserve.
Being able to apply knowledge and answer an exam question properly and fully is a separate skill to the act of simply acquiring knowledge during the course of exam study. And like all skills, it must be practised before it can be mastered.
All your teen needs to do is make sure they incorporate answering practice questions and attempting past or practice exams as part of their study process. This is such an important aspect of exam study — so important in fact that I would always recommend allocating time to this rather than studying something peripheral that is unlikely to pull in many extra marks.
Exam success needs not be complex
You can appreciate from this list of must-do exam study techniques that effective exam study does not need to be a mysterious quagmire. Effective exam study is one of those things that is simple but not necessarily easy. I’m not going to pretend that hard work, discipline and an appetite for delayed gratification are not required. BUT, any student can apply the techniques I’ve talked about here, and if they do, they will be well on their way to getting the grades they’re capable of.
Thanks so much for reading.
Clare
Photo credit: Designed by Ijeab
