How to Prepare for an Exam

You go into an important mid-term or exam, and everything goes wrong. You're late, the room (which took you three or four tries to find) is freezing cold, and the questions are blindsiding you as if they were being dropped in from outer space. You're distracted because you had burnt breakfast, and your car ran out of gasoline on the way over. Then at the end of the test you leave the room, you walk out in a daze, because you think yoiu did badly. "How can this be", you think, "when I went to the library yesterday to study all night?"

The following are a list of details that don't look test-related, but they are very much so. One or two might sound counter-intuitive to you, but do try to add these things to your usual test preparation routine, if you already have one.

1) Tie Your Shoes - And do the laundry. And clean the room. And stock up on groceries. And do the dishes. And fill up the car with gas. And so on and so forth. As early as one week (or more, sometimes) before the big test, you have to get as many of these little errands out of the way as possible. You would be surprised how many of these small emergencies will pile up as you approach the last minute, and seriously cut into your study time. Before you know it, you're cramming the day (or night!) before, worrying if all the information will stick, because you didn't have time to review due to all the errand-running that took up all your time. Plus, if you follow this tip, your house or apartment will at least be in better order for it.

2) Don't go to the library - Sounds strange, doesn't it? Unless you can take over a soundproof booth for a very focused study group session, you really should avoid the library, in the last three or four days before an exam. Why? Because as the days approach finals or mid-term exams, these places create pockets of madness formed by students stressing out over their last-minute studying. As a student, I have seen libraries that were mostly empty during the term, suddenly fill up like nightclubs on a Saturday night, with fellow students sneaking in food, coffee, and even beer to the tables! The noise can be unbearable. What was a quiet haven of studying and academic contemplation became a pub, buzzing and chattering with tense, caffeine-drugged students counting down the hours to exam-time.

Bottom Line: Go to a 24-hour restaurant, like Denny's, with one or two classmates if necessary. People having dinner tend to want to be left alone, and few students go there, hence less school-related chatter and more quiet-time for you. Surprisingly, you will have less ambient noise and can focus better. Tip the server well, though, even if you only order coffee.

3) But don't travel too far, either - More than once, on the day of the test, I have gotten stuck with a flat tire while driving from a friend's place thirty miles away, and had to reschedule; I only got away with it through the kindness of my professors. True, you can try to beg and plead as a last ditch effort, but how sure are you the teacher will take kindly to taking on extra work near the end of the term because you messed up? If you stay in town (or at least within your normal traveling distance) within a few miles of the school, it's a lot easier to come up with alternate transportation arrangements in case of an emergency.
If you have to leave town, tell your professor well ahead of time, ideally a week or more, so they are not too stressed out on making arrangements, either (yes, teachers get stressed out, too; I know because both my parents were college teachers). If you had to leave on a very real emergency, calll your teacher's office and if possible, the department secretary to make sure they got the message. Also, be prepared to come back to school with valid proof of the emergency.

4) No last-minute study groups - Again, a sane-sounding idea gone wrong. Much like the library, this so-called study tool creates more stress and tension than it was meant to solve. A good study group is actually formed early in the term, and meant to go over material that some students understand, but others don't. Over time you will get used to different classmates' styles of explaining, as well as their ways of understanding your explanations in turn. Rapport will be built, and a good supportive chemistry starts to develop in the group as you click together several times a week. This simply doesn't happen with an ad hoc study group. What does tend to happen is that instead of getting some serious, focused studying together, it becomes what I call the Gripe Club. The intended study venue turns into a table of people complaining about the professor, or the material or the textbooks, and how little time they have for anything. Not only does this social-visit-in-disguise waste your personal time, it makes you even more stressed and tense for the coming test. When someone invites you to a study group before the test, just politely decline.

5) No cramming - There is a reason the term is a few months long, and that's to assimilate the subject matter slowly and surely over time. Cramming just proves that you have neglected to read the material regularly (deliberately and otherwise), and are (metaphorically) running a hundred miles in a single night, when you were supposed to have started walking months ago! It's a losing race, both in the short and long term. Not only are you rushing to learn and comprehend new material hours before a test, you are gambling on there being no emergencies to halt your progress until the following morning. These are times that, because you are in a huge hurry, you will start to feel desperate and want to try anything from coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, energy drinks, or anything your friends might offer you. None of this guarantees you will retain any material, nor does it ensure you'll not be so exhausted that you'll oversleep and miss the test entirely (it's happened to me before).
Don't put your health in danger, and don't gamble with your grades. Start memorizing the material early and often. Do this throughout the term. It will give you time to absorb and understand the topics more thoroughly, in smaller bites. That way, when you do study for the big test, it's just a simple review session to make sure you can recall the specific items come test-time.

6) Know the test - Or rather, know all you can about the test. There are many ethical ways of finding out what's going to be in the test. Is it going to be a mutliple-choice exam? Better focus on straight facts and figures, ennumerating and ID-type tidbits in your book. List or highlight the Who, What, and When items that look important. Is it more of an essay test? Make sure you focus on answering How and Why-type questions that involve explaining, comparing and describing. No wonder why so many students always ask, "What kind of test is it going to be?"-- they're gathering as much information as they can, to adjust their study strategy.
And make sure you find out where the exam is going to be held, in case teachers like to hold their finals in different rooms from the normal classroom. You'll usually be told this information a week or two before the exam, although last-minute changes will still happen. Your best defense is simply to show up to your assigned testing room early.
As for finding out what material is going to be on the test, you may have been given a syllabus at the begining of the term. Imagine my surprise to learn that profs actually give you this information long before the test date actually arrives! I stopped throwing away such a "useless" piece of paper, and started carrying it around, once I learned that this valuable outline would list which material was covered in every quiz, every section test and every final. If you already threw yours away, ask a classmate or the teacher for a copy immediately. Teachers will make some minor changes during the course of the term, so make notes on that syllabus. The Syllabus is Your Friend!

7) The Forty-Minute Rule - it works, I don't know exactly why it does. The rule is that for every forty minutes of studying, you take a break of five to ten minutes. Regardless of your own mental stamina, using these breaks seems to benefit almost everyone, as opposed to piling hours upon hours of tense reading with little or no rest. The benefit appears to be (acording to actualy studies done) is that recall of material is kept consistently high using breaks at forty minutes, while the brute-force method actually shows a steady decay of recall due to fatigue. So set an alarm clock or timer to go off every forty minutes. When it rings, go on a break-- take a walk, check out the sports scores on television, have a small snack. When you come back after a few minutes, restart the timer, and do another forty minutes of studying. You'll find you'll be less tired that way, without depriving yourself of much-needed rest.

8) Drill and Drill - You won't buy a car without test-driving it, so why come to an exam without a practice test? This is where a good study partner might come in handy, by brainstorming possible questions that might appear on the test, and making flashcards to practice with, discussing complicated material and so forth. You think you already memorized the first ten elements of the periodic table, but haven't tried writing them down? "Oh, I'll remember it for sure. It'll come to me at test-time," you might think. Think again: Try writing out the material, or reciting it out loud, and that usually proves to be an acid test of what you'll remember on test day. Better miss the questions now in practice, and correct your mistakes, instead of risking unpredictable slip-ups. Be very sure come test-time!
The best time to do this is approximately three days before the exam, give or take (because I've had success with just two). Not only will this give you time to cover lots of material, you can reserve the last day before the exam to quickly going over what you've already worked to memorize, and not have to cram everything in the last minute.

It may have come as a surprise to some of you (as it did to me when I was a student) that the whole test preparation process actually begins weeks before the test-date (not just the night before!), and includes having to perform some tasks that don't seem relevant to the exam, like doing household chores. Ideally, you should do the "hard" reviewing about three to five days before the exam, which leaves the night before (or morning of ) the exam for a quick, relaxed once-over of everything that's going to be on the test. Instead of rushing to the exam worrying if you'll remember everything, or distraught over an emergency you had neglected, you are now more likely to arrive at the testing room with your bases covered, and confident you have more than adequately prepared yourself from weeks, if not months, ago. Giving yourself lots of prep time is half the battle. The other half is from using it wisely.