Student Weekly Tips: Surviving Exam Season
This week the student team bring some really helpful tips on helping and getting you through the exam season effectively. Hopefully, these will provide you with some thoughts on how you can help yourself to revise as you need to while looking after yourself too.
Making a Scheduling/How to Plan to study
My best tip is to work backwards from the deadline. I knew that the day before the exam/assessment I do final checks and final revisions and block out that day for that. I then work backwards up to the current week. When working on different modules/courses I’ll tally up the workload (one day as one) to make sure that I generally spend enough time on each. It’s important as well to not work nonstop, and to block out days for your wellbeing, to socialize or to rest. — Salma, Politics and International Relations
Divide and conquer! Split everything up — all your topics and lectures — into the smallest possible units (so that revising each one seems easy/achievable). Then schedule exactly when you’re going to revise them and plan breaks between study sessions to keep your mind working optimally — look after your brain! — Olivia, Psychology
Revising Effectively
When revising, I find the most useful strategy for me is The Pomodoro Technique, where your revision is divided into 25-minute chunks followed by 5-minute breaks. There are many apps that help you implement this technique and promote productivity. Knowing that I have time allocated for a break stops me from checking my phone as often and getting lost watching TikTok! — Iqra, Speech and Language Therapy
Active recall is known to be one of the best revision methods for open-ended exam questions. You can apply this technique by setting yourself your own questions based on, for example, lecture content that you know is going to come up on the exam. We also learn best at the start and end of a revision session, so one thing I do is to create questions at the end based on the lecture notes I’ve revised during the session, and then I start the next session by trying to answer those questions and seeing how many I could answer and get right. — Olivia, Psychology
On The Day of Your Exam
It is easier said than done but try to not panic! Start the day of ensuring you have enough time to eat and feel energised going into the exam, I definitely wouldn’t recommend waking up just before the exam starts, that groggy feeling will impact your performance! Go into the exam with a positive mindset knowing you have prepared to the best of your ability and show off all the knowledge you have worked hard to gain. — Iqra, Speech and Language Therapy
For any morning exams, try to resist the urge to cram any more revision in after you wake up. Focus on getting a good night’s sleep and trust that all your hard work up until that point will pay off. Make sure you prepare everything you need to take with you the night before (and know where you need to be for your exam) so that you’re all ready the next morning and are not stressing more than you have to on exam day! Knock them out with your knowledge! — Olivia, Psychology
Those are the tips this week from our student team. We wish you all the best for your exams and look after yourself.
