The winter term is where you take advantage of the most important educational experience in your life so far: the fall term. Remember the fall term? Remember the crush towards the end as everything piled up? Remember how much you there was to study just before the exams? You might even remember swearing you wouldn’t let that happen again next time. Well it’s next time now, and we can use this wisdom to make things easier and more enjoyable.
Start working as if you’ve got an exam right now. Because you do have an exam, and the earlier you start preparing the better you’ll do. The key is starting with that “exam edge”, the focus which comes from preparing for a genuine test, not just the general unfocused effort of getting an assignment done before watching Netflix. Don’t shove all your notes in a binder, leaving them lurking to jump out and surprise you in a few months. Drill through every part in terms of exam questions.
Think of it as maintaining or assembling an engine. Every week your class gives you a new part of the exam. If you throw them all into a rusty box in the corner, come the end of term you’ll have to pull out the whole corroded mess, working to even pull it apart and remember which part does what before you can even begin to put it all together. But if you do even one exam question for each part, each week, nice and relaxed because you’ve got a whole week for that one component, they’ll be well polished by the time you have to put them together. You get all the benefits of exam preparation long before you feel the pressure of the exam timetable.
The best thing is that this strategy is that there’s nothing new. There aren’t any revolutionary procedures, or inspired strategy, it’s just doing what you did last term. You know how much harder your brain worked when it came to the crunch. Now you get to work that well again, earlier, so that you’ll be even better at it. Breaking down the mental barriers between term time and exam season means you won’t feel so much stress when the exams arrive. Instead you’ll be ready, relaxed, and that exam engine will be raring to go.
Start working as if there’s an exam. Because there is.
Start working as if you’ve got an exam right now. Because you do have an exam, and the earlier you start preparing the better you’ll do. The key is starting with that “exam edge”, the focus which comes from preparing for a genuine test, not just the general unfocused effort of getting an assignment done before watching Netflix. Don’t shove all your notes in a binder, leaving them lurking to jump out and surprise you in a few months. Drill through every part in terms of exam questions.
Think of it as maintaining or assembling an engine. Every week your class gives you a new part of the exam. If you throw them all into a rusty box in the corner, come the end of term you’ll have to pull out the whole corroded mess, working to even pull it apart and remember which part does what before you can even begin to put it all together. But if you do even one exam question for each part, each week, nice and relaxed because you’ve got a whole week for that one component, they’ll be well polished by the time you have to put them together. You get all the benefits of exam preparation long before you feel the pressure of the exam timetable.
The best thing is that this strategy is that there’s nothing new. There aren’t any revolutionary procedures, or inspired strategy, it’s just doing what you did last term. You know how much harder your brain worked when it came to the crunch. Now you get to work that well again, earlier, so that you’ll be even better at it. Breaking down the mental barriers between term time and exam season means you won’t feel so much stress when the exams arrive. Instead you’ll be ready, relaxed, and that exam engine will be raring to go.
