28 Top Tips For Exams and Tests

Practical Exam Tips

1) Pens and Pencils

Some exams require the use of PENS, while others have to be completed in PENCIL. Make sure you know what you should be using in every paper before you go in.

2) Websites

All the major examination boards have websites these days, usually with sample papers and examiners' reports that you can download. These sites are well worth a visit as they may offer a lot of sound advice. The examiners' report, for instance, can give you an idea of exactly what it is that they are looking for.

3) Take Spares

Take spare pens and pencils just in case the one you are using stops working.

4) On time not In time

Allow for problems, hold-ups and traffic jams on the way and make sure you arrive with time to spare so that you can go in calmy rather than in a frantic rush.

5) It may sound stupid, but ...

Don't forget to read the instructions and make sure you know what you are being asked to do. You should go into the exam well aware of what is expected of you, but you should always check. Don't, however, waste a lot of time on this.

6) Honesty- 1

A language exam is not a test of honesty and you will not be penalised if you tell the examiners that you are CANCER rather than SAGITTARIUS in a written question simply because you are sure of how to spell it. Language Tests are quite simply that; they are designed to test your language and not your honesty- don't worry about lying or being economical with the truth in order to show off your accurate language use.

7) Zzzzz

Try to get a good night's sleep the night before any exam.

8) Hangovers

Try to avoid alcohol the night before an exam, especially in quantity, as a bad hangover is among the very worst things to be suffering from in an exam room.

Writing Tips

9) Writing- 1

Don't carried away and overload your writing with too many obvious connectives and contrastives; if every sentence has two or three such words or expressions, then the writing can seem strained and artificial. Remember- you can try too hard as well as not hard enough.

10) Writing- 2

Write on alternate lines (leaving every second line blank) so that you have space to make changes when checking through your work.

11) Writing- 3

Always credit your sources in academic writing, even when you are referring to ideas rather than actually quoting.

Multiple Choice Tips

12) Psychological Warfare

Examiners can choose the same letter successively for the correct answer. After three consecutive answers with the same letter, many students may well start to feel confused and worried. Eventually, many candidates will start changing their answers simple because they don't believe that examiners would have half a dozen of more questions with the same letter one after the other. They can and sometimes do; this is a real test of your comprehension and reduces the possibility of scoring by guessing.

13) Right word, wrong answer

With multiple choice comprehension questions based on a text, a simple trick is to take obvious and prominent words from the text and put them in an incorrect option. Seeing a word or phrase from the text is not enough; these questions are designed to test comprehension not recognition of a word from the passage.

Speaking Tips

14) Speaking- 1

Don't bother learning speeches and trying to say them verbatim (word-for-word) in interviews; examiners will usually spot this without too much difficulty and mark you down for it. It is very hard to do this and sound natural.

15) Speaking- 2

Do think over your answers to common questions about yourself. This an opportunity for examiners to get a general picture of your language level, especially your ability to talk about past, present and future experiences, so run these thing over in your mind and try to include corresponding verb forms accordingly.

16) Speaking- 3

If you are asked to talk about or describe a photograph, don't get too hung up on describing every visible detail. Instead, be prepared to speak in general terms about it and how the theme it illustrates affects you.

Listening Tips

17) Listening- 1

You are often given false information first that sounds as if it could be the answer to the question. An instance of this is where the information given matches one of the answers, but does not fit the criterion given in the question- the person could be talking about last week, say, when the question asks about next week. The correct information usually, but not always, comes afterwards.

18) Listening- 2

Nearly right is not the same thing as right; examiners often give information that sounds more or less correct, but is in some way unsatifactory. Adverbs and modals are often used to send you the wrong way; the listening text might use 'She may well be late' and the question 'She will be late'- this is not an exact match and consequently could easily be the wrong answer. It has to be 100% accurate to be right.

19) Listening- 3

In longer listening passages, they often try to lull you into losing concentration by having quite long sections where no information relevant to the exercise is given, then out of the blue they hit you with a couple of answers in quick succession.

20) Listening- 4

Although most longer listening passages begin with an introduction that lets you get into the flow before they start testing you, you cannot depend on this; the first word could in theory be the answer to the first question.

21) Listening- 5

Examiners will often place a word directly from the passage in a wrong answer and use a synonym *[syn.] in the correct answer; check the meaning and do not rely on word recognition to get the right answer.

Examiners & Exam Myths

22) Examiners- 1

Examiners are, by and large, sadistic so-and-sos. Their sole aim in life is to trap you and catch you out.

23) Examiners- 2

In multiple choice exercises, examiners have been known to use the same letter for the correct answer several times in succession (a, a, a, a, a, etc). This is unsettling and can make students worry that their answers must be wrong; it does not. I once gave a Cambridge Proficiency group an entire Reading Comprehension exercise (25 questions) with the same answer for all. The students started changing their answers and choosing wrong ones because they couldn't believe that this was possible. While I have never seen it, there is nothing to stop them doing it. They are there to test your understanding and will play psychological games to make you doubt yourself, and this is one little trick they use. It also has the advantage of reducing the possibly of inaccurate scores achieved by guessing, as few would guess in a regular pattern, but would try to vary their answers across the range of possibilities. From their perspective, grouping a few consecutive answers with the same letter makes sense.

24) Examiners- 3

Many students and teachers try to analyse exams and work out patterns. In one Cambridge First Certificate exercise, there were usually between four and six correct sentences. Then one year there were only two. Patterns may help, but beware of relying on them; examiners will change them without warning.

25) Exam Myth 1

Apparently, a philosophy student got a first class grade for a paper which had "Is this a question?" as an essay title. Instead of going into the nature of questions, etc, he or she simply wrote "Yes, if this is an answer." Perhaps you should read Exam Myth 2 before feeling encouraged to do likewise.

26) Exam Myth 2

When asked "What is courage?", another philosphy student wrote "This." He or she failed; even though it was, indeed, courageous to stake their degree on such an answer, it was not held to have answered the question. The answer was an example and not an explanation.

27) Exam Myth 3

An Oxford undergraduate, or so the story goes, discovered an ancient regulation that allowed a gentleman to send the invigilator to buy a quart (Two pints or 1.14 litres) of ale (beer) during the exam for the student's refreshment. He duly ordered it and produced his evidence and was bought the beer. The following day, the invigilator approached him with a hat, gown and sword, which another old regulation stipulated had to be worn at all times. So, the student had to to sit through the exam in a stuffy hall on a hot day in a heavy hat, etc.

28) Exam Myth 4

A student used amphetamines (a chemical stimulant) to stay awake to study all night in the days leading up to an exam, hoping to make up for lost time. Feeling shattered on the morning of the exam, they took a huge dose to make sure they were bright and alert and didn't fall asleep halfway through. Throughout the exam, they scribbled away frantically; writing page after page. Unfortunately, they'd taken so much of the stimulant that they failed to notice that they had written everything on the same side of paper, which meant that instead of handing in a dozen sheets of paper, they had one so covered in writing that it had turned black.

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Tips to get Success in Exam

Ten key steps to examination success

1. Prepare for the examination. There is little time for formal revision at the end of teaching in Semester 1, so you must revise as you go along!
2. Look at past papers. This prepares you for the types of question you will be asked, and the time you will have to answer each question. If there has been any major change in the format of the examination, then you will have been told about this in the course literature.
3. Never try to 'spot' questions and never revise selectively. This is a recipe for disaster. Even if your predicted topics do come up in the exam, there is no guarantee that you will be able to answer the specific questions that were set on these topics. Instead, you should go into the exam with enough knowledge to answer questions on any of the major topics in a course.
4. During the examination, organise your time effectively. N.B. This is the single most common cause of under-achievement in exams.
   For example, if you have a 3-hour exam in which you must answer 4 essay-style questions, then that means 45 minutes per question. BUT you should allow yourself 5 minutes at the start (to read the questions and decide on the ones you will attempt) AND 15 minutes at the end - see below. That leaves you 40 minutes per question.
   Now start on the first question, but stop immediately when the 40 minutes has passed. Don't worry if you have not finished the question - you have left 15 minutes at the end, so you can come back to this question and any others that you need to finish off.
   Tackle your second question, and again stop after 40 minutes, and similarly for the third and fourth questions.
   If you always adhere rigidly to this approach you will maximise your chances of success. You will never run out of time for all the questions because you have kept some time in reserve. Equally important, you will have scored the highest overall mark that you possibly can get, because exam marks follow the rule of "diminishing returns" - you get most of the marks for a question early on (in the first 20-30 minutes), and after that you have to work harder and harder for the remaining marks. In fact, the last 10% of marks for a question is almost impossible to get - very few examiners will give a mark above 80 or 90%. [The reason is simple: however good your answer might be, it could always be better, so a marker is reluctant to give full marks. Perhaps it shouldn't be that way. But that's life.]
5. Always answer the full number of questions.
   You would be surprised at the number of students who miss out questions and therefore fail an exam or obtain a lower degree class than they deserve. The reason is obvious - they cannot answer all the questions (usually because they didn't revise) and so they decide to spend all their time on the questions they can answer.
   This is foolish. For example, if you can answer only 3 of the required 4 questions then you cannot possibly get more than 75% of the marks for the whole exam. But it even worse than that - even if you get three first-class marks (70%) for your three questions, this is still only 210 marks out of the possible 400. That's 53%, which is only just above the D/C borderline (or the third/ lower second class borderline).
   Even if you think you know nothing about a topic, you can always get a few marks by making some sensible comments, and that can make the difference of a grade.
   The same advice applies to questions that require you to answer several parts - each part of a question has marks allocated to it, and if you miss out a part then you cannot get the marks for it.
6. Read the question carefully, underline all the relevant words, and stick rigidly to the question as set. Again this might seem obvious, but again many students fail to follow this advice. Remember that examiners think very carefully about the wording of every question, and expect your answer to be directly on that topic. No examiner asks you to "Write everything you know about a subject"!
   For example, if you are asked to write about the wall structure of bacteria then you will get no marks at all for mentioning the other features of bacteria - the membrane, the genome, etc. You get marks only for the wall. The moment that you start to write about other things, the examiner will write "irrelevant" in the margin of your answer book, and will only start giving marks again when you get back onto the subject. In short, you are wasting your own valuable time, and getting no marks for it.
7. For every question, stop writing after the first few minutes and re-read the question, then stop again to recheck before your time is up. Be absolutely honest with yourself, and ask 'Have I drifted off the subject?' This is surprisingly easy to do, and if you don't stop to check periodically then you drift into "irrelevant".
8. Make rough notes at the start of a question, so as to organise your thoughts. Then start your proper answer.
   You almost certainly will be told to cross out the rough notes. But my advice is NEVER CROSS THEM OUT. Remember that anything you cross out cannot be marked, but if you leave your rough notes then the examiner should look through them (if only briefly). Perhaps you made a point in your notes that you forgot to put into your proper answer. That can count in your favour.
9. Never answer more questions than required. You can only get marks for the required number of questions. Every marker sticks rigidly to this rule, because we have to be fair to all the candidates - including those who did exactly what was required.
10. Put yourself in an examiner's shoes and ask 'What impresses an examiner?'
    Imagine that you are spending your evenings and weekends ploughing through 400 exam answers - because that's what examiners do!
    • The examiner will get frustrated if he cannot read your writing. A badly written answer takes a long time to read, and by the time the examiner has ploughed through it he will have forgotten half of what you said. That's bad news for you! And don't try to obscure your lack of knowledge (e.g. a scientific name or a technical term) by illegible writing. We have seen this hundreds of times. If it cannot be read, it cannot get marks.
    • Underline key words or phrases. After reading through the whole answer, an examiner looks back at the number of ticks he/she has made, or the number of key words or phrases that you have identified. If you highlight these then the impression is favourable - the main points covered, so you will get good marks.
    • Never repeat things, even in a concluding paragraph. You can only get the marks once, no matter how many times you repeat the same point.
    • Learn the Latin names of organisms and other technical terms. It might be a pain, but it impresses examiners and shows your competence. A chemist would not get marks for saying "some chemical (I forget the name) combines with some other chemical to produce a tetrazolium compound". So why should a biologist get marks for saying "some fungus (I think it begins with M) parasitises wheat plants by producing cellulase enzymes"? We read that sort of thing all the time. And it doesn't impress.

How to tackle different types of exam question

Essay-style questions

In a few Honours examinations you might be asked to write 'long essays' (time allocation of 1.5 hours or even 3 hours). However, this does not mean that you have to write for 1.5 or 3 hours. Instead, it means that you have enough time to assemble your thoughts and construct your answer carefully. The answer itself might not take more than 1 hour or 1.5 hours to write.

In all other examinations the essay-style questions are shorter. For example, you might be asked to answer four essay-style questions in a 3-hour exam (see the Microbiology 3m examination papers, for example). These essay-style questions require a large amount of relevant factual information, and understanding of the subject. However, you would not be expected to produce a polished and grammatically correct essay. The important thing is to write down as much relevant information as possible, while sticking rigidly to the question that was set.

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