Here are our top ten tips to help you avoid exam stress and maximise your remaining revision time.
Tip 1 - Revision Timetable
Put together a revision timetable as early as possible before the start of study leave.
Just do it. Don’t argue. Don’t procrastinate. Just do the thing. And do it first. Do it on the first day, and once you’ve done it, agree it with your parents. There is a reason for this…
Try our revision timetable tool here
If you get your parents to agree to the schedule, you can write break/relaxation periods into it. You can explain to your parents that you need all day off on Saturday and Wednesday evenings too. They’ll be so chuffed that you’ve got a revision schedule together they’ll agree to anything. Another advantage is that when you are taking a timetabled relaxation/rest break and they go, “What do you think you’re doing watching the telly? Haven’t you got revision to do?” You can point at the timetabled break session on your revision timetable, raise your eyebrows and give them a smug smile. They will back down and you will have won.
Tip 2 - Revise the subjects you hate in the morning
Think of double maths, RS – whatever it is you hate. Now think of doing this for the first two lessons in the morning. Yeuch! There’s worse though! Think of doing it last two lessons on a Friday afternoon as you gaze at the minute hand of the clock as it stubbornly refuses to move. Beyond double yeuch!!
It is easier to stomach the stuff you don’t much like in the morning.
Successful people in all walks of life attribute their success to one simple technique: if you have a set of jobs to do, you do the most difficult thing, the thing you hate, first. This means when you’ve just got up. Don’t save up the stuff you hate. It’ll haunt you if you do, and make your life miserable.
Tip 3 - Reading is Useless
You can’t do decent revision through sitting with a boring textbook willing the information to go into your head. It will sit stubbornly, remaining in the textbook, refusing to make the jump into your bonce.
You have to do something with the information. Take notes, underline stuff, invest in a set of highlighters and colour code everything that moves, do drawings and put pieces of information into table form. If you do something with the information it will stay in your head way better than if you just sat there reading.
Tip 4 - Exam Time Management
This is the most vital of all techniques. The people who write the exam papers, sit in drafty attics devising fresh new exam tortures are nothing if not clever. They have loads of different ways of tripping you up. The one they use most often is to make you spend way too much time on the first question. Be wary of this! Many very clever students blow their chances by spending an hour on the first question when it is only worth two marks.
Make sure you spend the most time on the questions that have the most marks. Often these are the last ones, and there is a very solid argument for looking at the paper first, seeing which questions carry the fat marks, and doing these first.
Tip 5 - Take your time
When the examiner says, “You may turn your papers over now,” everyone else in the room will try and do so at the pace an Olympic sprinter leaves the blocks. Don’t do this. It puts you in a stressful state right at the beginning, and saves you exactly 0.41 seconds, (which is a useless amount of time to save). When the examiner says to turn your paper over, don’t. Take a breath, count to ten, then do it. You are the one in control of your destiny. Stay calm and focused.
Tip 6 - Plan your answer
Think about a wedding. If it wasn’t planned properly, then the bride and the groom would turn up at different churches, the priest would have taken the day off in any case, and there’d tears before bedtime.
The same thing applies to any essay work you have to write in an exam. Fail to plan and you plan to fail.
Brainstorm your ideas, mark each idea with the paragraph number they go in, and only then should you go about writing the essay. Make sure your plan is on the exam paper, where the examiner can see it. As a math’s teacher might say, “Always show your workings.”
Tip 7 - Check your paper
If an exam is one-and-a-half hours long, you have exactly one-and-a-half hours to squeeze every mark you can out of it. If you find yourself towards the end of an exam, lounging in your chair trying to catch your mate’s attention in the next row, wake up! You are sabotaging your own chances. There is only one mark’s difference between a ‘4’ and a ‘3’, an ‘8’ and an ‘9’. Checking your paper at the end could be the thing that gives you that one, crucial mark.
Tip 8 - Use positive self-talk
People who tell themselves they can’t do things invariably find that they are right. People who tell themselves they can are right too. During your revision and during the exam itself, keep telling yourself, “I can do this.” You’ll find you can.
Tip 9 - Answer the question
The answer to the question, ‘Who won the World Cup in 2006?’ is not, and will never be, ‘My mum.’ ‘My mum’ may well be an answer, but it is an answer to a completely different question. (‘Who buys all your clothes?’)
Make sure you answer the question in front of you, not some other question you’ve made up, because that question is asking you for things you know. Do this by underlining three key words per question and checking with yourself that you know – exactly - what is being asked for.
Tip 10 - Do your best
That’s all you should ask of yourself. If, at the end of the day, you are able to honestly say to yourself that have done your best, you have a right to be happy with yourself no matter what the grade. No one has any right to ask any more of you. Nor will they.
