How to Plan, Be Prepared, and Study for Semester Exams

In high school and in college, and sometimes even middle school now, exams are a huge part of your grade and are definitely something that are causing a lot of stress to the students who either need the exams to pass the class or to maintain their high grade point average.

You might need to aim for a certain grade for your semester grade. You're going to at least want to pass, so do some calculations and just look at the numbers in a few different scores, most of the time you're going to see that the exam doesn't have nearly the weight on your grade that you believe it does.

Let's say that your exam is weighted for 20% of your total grade. Both first term 1 and term 2 grades (to make up your semester grade) will also need to be incorporated. Therefore, term 1 is worth 40% of your total semester grade, and so is term 2. Therefore, all you need to do to calculate out your grade is multiply your term one grade by .4, your term 2 grade by .4, and your exam by .2, and add up all of the numbers. To see what would happen to your grade if you didn't even take the exam, just multiply by .4 both of your term grades, and add them together. You can try out different percentages on the exam as well, just to see what may happen depending on the grade you get on the exam.

Even though the exam does count for 20% of your total grade, this does not mean that the exam can raise or lower your grade by 20%. Of course, if you had a 100% or a 0% in the class, it could, because of the way it's weighted. But lets say you were safely in the C range for your semester grade without exams. If you completely failed the exam with a 50%, your grade wouldn't move down 10%, but merely, somewhere around 4-5%.

Now, on to how to study and avoid these terrible grades. The best way to study in most cases is to look over all of your old tests and quizzes and learn from whatever mistakes you might have made previously, as well as relearn most of the major concepts. Most exams are made up of content extremely similar if not the same questions from previous tests and quizzes, since it's what you covered throughout the semester.

Also, looking through your book and the chapters you have done in that class is a great idea as well. Textbooks are boring and difficult to read through in massive amounts, so just skim and hit the core concepts, and bold words. You'll eventually get really good at doing this.

If your teacher has provided you with an exam review guide, use it! If not, you might want to ask your teacher exactly what types of questions you might find on the exam. This can really narrow down study time and make it much more possible to do well on the exam. If your teacher will not tell you what is on the exam, however, just rely on the methods I've given you previously and hope it works! Flash cards from vocab terms are also an excellent way to study, however not so efficient if you don't already have them made before exam day, because you're going to spend a long time making flash cards from an entire semester of work.

Most of all, just be confident when it comes time to take the exam. Don't worry much about your grade, as it can't affect it nearly enough to make you fail the class if you're getting a C. And if you're in the D range, you're going to have to do terrible in order to not get credit for the class, still. The lower the grade you have in the class, the less the exam is actually going to drop your grade. And the higher, the opposite, so don't plan on accing it and going from a B- to an A.