Easy Study Skills for Exams
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Easy Study Skills for Exams
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Study skills: do you start reading at one end of your library
and try to read through to the other end?
Of course not. So you already know one effective approach. Be
selective! We can build on that now.
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More Study Skills – what not to study
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Whole books
Your lecturer tells you to read “War and Peace”. If you have
study skills you won’t! Even with perfect memory – how much of
the book can you cover in an exam essay that takes 40 minutes to
write?
Look through the library for abridged versions of your books, or
commentaries… Now you’re using your study skills.
Buy your textbooks 2nd hand. Why do you think they are in
perfect condition? Because the last students hardly opened them!
Why should you buy books that the last student didn’t read? Now
you’re thinking! Now you’re using study skills.
Whole syllabus
One benefit of attending classes is that you get a skeleton
outline to apply your study skills. The skeleton will be
complete for the sake of completeness. But only some parts
matter to your study skills.
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Study yourself – you’re interesting aren’t you?
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Each day write down at what time of day you didn’t mind using
your study skills, and could really get down to work. Write down
the times when you hated to study. I study best early in the
morning. You might study best late at night.
Do you work best in a totally silent room, or with background
music?
Do you work better if you are petting the dog or does it
interfere with your study skills?
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Use your spying study skills
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Find past exam papers in the library. Put them in order by date,
then go through the earliest one, and write down the subjects in
a column at the left of your page. Put the date at the top of
the second column and a tick for each subject. Now put the date
of the next paper and a tick opposite each subject that is
repeated, and write in any new subjects.
Do the same for all the years that you have. Why is the date
important? Look at your table. If a subject appeared every year
from the left, then suddenly stopped appearing it probably means
that the examiner changed. Study all the subjects that appear
every year first. Then study those that appear four years out of
five… you get the idea.
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Important study skills – Make a calendar
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Plan in detail which subjects you’ll study on which days until
the exam.
Don’t be too ambitious. You already know that at some times of
the day you can’t use your study skills. You know that you won’t
want to study on your birthday or Christmas day or… Just be
realistic. A calendar that gives you over a thousand hours of
study isn’t as good as one that gives you 400 hours that you can
stick to.
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Become an expert
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An expert knows more and more about less and less.
You’ve used your study skills to cut out big chunks of your
syllabus. Use the time you save to learn more about the parts
you’ve left than the examiner knows. Use the internet to search
for exciting snippets of information about your shortened
syllabus.
Perhaps your examiner doesn’t know the exact day of the week on
which an important bit of history happened. Perhaps you’ve
forgotten what you read about it, but write down your best
guess. The examiner will be impressed, because he doesn’t know
that you got it wrong!
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Study skills for the day of the exam
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Everyone will tell you that if you don’t know it, it is too late
to learn. They are wrong! They are talking about long-term
memory. You will be using short-term memory.
As you are sitting outside the exam room study your formulae, or
dates, or anything else that you have difficulty remembering.
Whenever the examiner says that you can start writing, write
down all these things on scrap paper. You have managed to
remember them for ten minutes. You can now forget them until you
need them again, which may be never.
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Study skills in the exam
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“That isn’t allowed!” you exclaim. It definitely is allowed. If
you have a multiple choice paper just miss every question that
you don’t know. There is usually another related question
somewhere. When you see it, you will work out the answer to the
question that you didn’t know. That is study isn’t it?
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Conclusion
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Study smart – not longer than everyone else. Start with a free
report on the most powerful exam technique.
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