Despite the effort and time many students diligently put in, many of them blow up on exam day and simply don’t perform. They are unable to showcase the hard work they have put in and find themselves unable to recognise what the question is asking for. They freeze and are unable to answer and too often begin to make answers up on the spot that have nothing to do with the question. Repeatedly experiencing this failure to perform on test day can then lead to an increase in anxiety about future tests and the failure to perform can become self-sustaining.
It is important to realise that the solution to this problem often lies in learning a system of exam management. It seems counter intuitive, but the best students should be doing very little creative thinking in the typical academic exam. The exam is not the time to be coming up with new information. Instead, for the majority of questions, the task presented by the exam is to determine what learned knowledge or understanding best ‘fits’ the questions being asked. A lot of this decision making can be prepared for.
Students must have a strategy for exam management. They must go into the exam and answer the questions in an order that suits them. For example, it might be more beneficial to answer all calculation questions first in a Physics exam, no matter what order they come in. It might suit to answer explanation type questions at the end. Either way, you must have made this decision before exam day. In most cases, it is not beneficial to the student to answer the questions in the order set out by the examiner.
Students must also be confident in interpreting the language of exam questions. They need to appreciate the type of answer that is required if the question uses words like ‘state’ , ‘explain’ or ‘discuss’ and have a strategy for structuring the answers they give to each.
Students must be prepared correctly to perform in the very artificial experience of an examination. The material student must go into the exam with a deep resilient understanding of the course content and a strategy for answering the questions. It is this preparation over the months leading up to the exam that results in a confident and relaxed student who is fit to perform at a high level on exam day.
To sum up, it is not enough to have learnt the information required for a test. You must also have a strategy in place for the task of answering the test paper. When students have a plan for how they will approach the paper, this removes the crippling anxiety that can occur as even if the exam throws up difficult questions, they have the problem solving process to deal with that.
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