Exam strategy 101: Part 1 - The day before

The end of the school term is near, exams are upon us and life is just not sunshine and rainbows right now. The daily ‘going out’ ritual is probably a ‘no-go’ zone. Sad music is constantly playing in the background. And worst of all, you barely studied in the holidays.

But, you’ve come to the right place for your much needed dose of exam wisdom. This is our strategy when it comes to exams. And it comes in three parts.

Part 1: The day before

You’ve probably studied your brains out for the last 3 weeks (fingers crossed) and the content feels like it’s all blurring together. You’re trying to figure out how you’re going to tackle the exam in the morning and you’re reading this blog post for answers. So here they are:

1. Get plenty of sleep

We get it, tomorrow’s exam is scary. It’s a couple of hours long and there’s just so much they can ask you and so much you’ve just jammed into your brain. But pulling an all-nighter is not the smartest way to go about it. The best thing is to get a proper night’s rest.

You’ve heard the expression ‘nothing good happens after 2am,’ the same is true for study. Nothing you try and learn late at night when you’re tired and stressed is going to save you in the morning. Your best chance at this point is to settle down, get at least 7 hours sleep and wake up fresh and at the top of your game. That extra few hours of sleep will serve you better than that extra few hours of frantic cramming.

2. Brief revision

You hear folk stories of people cramming one last topic that ended up being the 20 mark essay question. But that ‘silver bullet’ strategy is incredibly rare. In reality there’s not a lot you’re going to learn now that’s going to be much value to you tomorrow. If you know it, have confidence that you know it and stop studying. If you don’t know it, 1am the night before the exam is probably not going to be the time you get your light-bulb moment, sorry.

The best strategy is to chill out, de-stress and just casually read over your notes (if you want to feel like you’re being productive). Don’t be doing timed past papers, don’t be trying the hardest possible questions and try not to introduce yourself to anything new, strange or out of left field.

Let your brain have the night off, because tomorrow it’s going to war. Roger Federer doesn’t prepare for the Wimbledon final by playing an intense game of tennis.

Think about that.

3. Look at your syllabus

On the eve of any exam you go through stages where the content seems to fuse together. Then suddenly, you forget an entire topic as if it just fell from your brain. It happens to the best of us.

But you must have confidence that the content is in there somewhere. You just need to find it. So the best strategy is not to actually study the content but study where the content fits in the course. The syllabus is the perfect document for that. It’s a light form of study that will really clear up the train wreck of information in your head.

So go through your syllabus and look at each point and (in your head) place the necessary content under each dot point. That way you’ll structure the information, see where is comes up and where it fits in relation to all the other topics.

So that’s our take on what you should be doing the night before any exam. Stay tuned for Part 2 of Exam Strategy 101 when we tackle Game Day.