The Student's Guide to Passing Exams

Richard Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135366452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In a lively style, this text shows how anyone can improve their chances of exam success by following a few simple rules. It contains tips for exam preparation and for improving performance in the exam itself.

---

1. Laying the Foundations

---

Motivation

Learning, real learning, is founded on a need to know – on the motivation to discover information essential to some aspect of your life. The problem faced by many school and tertiary students is that they don't need to know much of what is being thrust upon them. How you overcome this fundamental difficulty, in the long run, will determine your level of academic attainment.

Confront a young person with a particular problem, or a personal difficulty, and they will soak up information like a sponge. More to the point they will retain that knowledge, probably for life.

Think of someone you know who speaks a second language, particularly a language learnt in the country where it is spoken. A decade, two decades, after they last spoke that tongue they still retain the ability to communicate with a surprisingly large vocabulary. Compare this retention with those who had an unwanted language forced on them at school. One was a live language based on a pressing need to communicate. The other was a ‘dead’ exercise lacking any real motivation to impose the self-discipline necessary.

There is another element here, however, which involves the teachers. The school subjects in which I excelled were in major part taught by outstanding teachers who fired my imagination and interest and gave me a lifelong appreciation of their discipline. To achieve good exam results or write effective essays about these topics was never a problem for me – the material just flowed from my subconscious mind in an ordered and compelling form.

Other competitive or personal forms of motivation may spur success, too. I had a geography teacher who was rude, sarcastic and so bored with his subject that he inspired no interest in it at all. In the final year of school, I withdrew from his course. This made him angry and even more bitingly sarcastic.

‘Whether you attend my lessons or not, I'm going to enter you for the matriculation exam. If you don't sit for it, you'll simply get a failure recorded on your university entrance certificate,’ was his response.

This was as unreasonable as it was unjust. However, the last thing I needed on my matriculation certificate was a ‘Fail’ so, unbeknown to the teacher, I did some reading on my own account. That year the topics were Australia and New Zealand and, coincidentally, my family was moving to Australia later that year. Even with this motive that weary teacher could not inspire any interest in me. But for some reason I retained everything I could discover about the country and flew through the final exam with good marks. The geography teacher never forgave me for this wicked breach of educational integrity, but I have always savoured my victory.

Motivation takes many forms. Some students may want to better the efforts of peers or siblings, others may be driven to fulfil the ambitions of parents, or even show contempt by succeeding where failure was endlessly predicted. Some may be fired by personal ambition, others may try to compensate for shortcomings on the sports field or their inability to relate to the opposite sex. Strange forces drive us powerfully at some periods of our lives and the years of adolescence are particularly prone to intentions that may be understood only in part.

Whatever fires you up, value the advantage because it is the key to learning and retention. This is the basis of intelligent learning, the need to know.

Where you are able to choose the subjects you study, select those that have this essential foundation and you will gain a head start. If, however, you are compelled to take, say, a maths subject or study a language to gain appropriate qualifications, and neither of these subjects inspires any interest, the first step is to build a direct link with your personal motivations.

If, for example, you were required to learn another language, try at an early stage to visit the country and develop a feeling for the people and their language. This will give you an invaluable appreciation of the pronunciation, the sounds, which are the structural basis of that language. If a visit is impossible, find photographs of the country in the library, watch TV films about it, follow the news and political events, talk with native speakers, involve yourself with the culture of that people to the widest possible extent.

As you encounter the subtleties of the language, you will have a greater breadth of understanding and interest. Learning any language, even a ‘close’ European tongue, is a labour of love, and you need to be motivated. The best motivation of all is a real prospect of having to use that language to communicate.

A student compelled to take a maths subject, particularly if he or she is not numerate, has a harder task. Again, you need to have a motive for learning. One way is to look for a holiday job or gain work experience in a commercial setting such as a shop where you have to handle money and use mathematical processes like calculating percentages. Any function in the real world using maths will round out your potential interest by creating a need for that skill.

You could look for computer games that make use of maths ability, or set about building a boat or even draw up rough plans for a home extension – anything that demands mathematical skill. Once you begin to relate the theory to the practice you will begin to change your attitude to the subject and break down some of that initial resistance.

Study techniques

Let us assume you have crossed these bridges, the school term is about to start, and you have to consider the day-to-day realities of study technique.

Avoid red herrings

In my experience, too many students lose the track and wander off into the hinterland of a subject. Though not sufficiently motivated to learn, they nevertheless chase irrelevant and often useless information to the detriment of the central aim of the course. As a consequence, when essay or exam times come, they present information which may be comprehensive but is not to the point.

Timetable your studying

Learning is a gradual process, like building a house. Brick on brick of information is built on the foundations until you are ready to put on the roof and tie the whole structure together. If you only start laying foundations four weeks from an important exam you have little chance of doing justice to the topic.

Allocate your workload in the light of all your commitments

Sport, your social life, peer relationships, parental and extended family demands, recreation and relaxation all have an important part to play in your life. If you can form an overall picture of what must be achieved by the end of the school or academic year, and distribute that work across the total time available, the study process will be much more effective. And you are much more likely to retain what you have learned.

Choose your subject topics carefully

You may have the option to choose specific topics within your subject, and you should focus on those that for you have relevance, strong interest and practical application. The age-old question, ‘What do you want to do (or be) in the future?’ can be difficult to answer when you are still at school, or even when you get to university. Often the things that motivated you as a teenager will be cast aside when you reach your mid-twenties, so the idea is to keep as many doors open as possible.

Seek advice

Parents, older siblings, friends, teachers, tutors and careers advisers may be all too eager to drench you in advice, much of it specious. If you go looking for help, make sure the adviser is qualified to give sound advice. Some people may very well make you aware of facts, views and options you had not considered.

Develop a positive attitude to studying

The key to effective study is organising both yourself and the various learning tasks to attain the best long-term benefit. Some people are disorganised, haphazard and thrive on chaos; but somehow out of all this confusion there emerges a coherent pattern of work. In others chaos always reigns and nothing worthwhile ever emerges, despite the latent abilities of the student. A degree of personal order is part of the self-discipline necessary for success. A muddled mind too often produces messy arguments.

Keep your study materials in order

Know where your books are and how to find information without wasting time on a tedious search. For example, tick off index references you may need again so you don't have to check each entry repeatedly. If you have access to a personal computer in the home, and you are computer literate, consider how you might use this powerful tool to make study easier. (More on this later.)

Set aside places where you can concentrate

You need to study away from distractions like younger siblings or TV so you can focus your mind on the task you have set yourself. It helps to aid concentration if you can study somewhere set aside for the purpose, whether this is part of your bedroom or the library. Sustained concentration is important in retaining information, but the attention span of some individuals is often quite short. So be aware of your limitations and work within your capacity to be effective.

Set yourself reasonable and realisable goals

Such goals are more easily achievable. If you are not making out, restructure your study practices until you get the good results you expect.

Health and well-being

The study demands of the final years of school and tertiary education are akin to training for a major sporting event. In this case, however, you not only have to develop intellectual fitness but maintain the physical condition and stamina necessary to stay the course. Health concerns – diet, exercise, not burning too much midnight oil, avoiding the byways of drugs or smoking or the many other routes to debilitation – are as important for academic achievement as for athletic prowess.

This need to get yourself into shape physically and intellectually, and even emotionally, is part of your academic workload. Mind and body are part of the whole living organism – you neglect one at the expense of the other. A dumb athlete will seldom achieve much, an unfit student who lacks the staying power to handle the demands of study will also find the going hard.

That is not to say people who are handicapped or at some physical disadvantage cannot succeed. Rather, it means that they have to invest more effort in the intellectual process to make the grade.

Planning for exercise and recreation is an important part of organising your study comprehensively to allocate time for everything, especially adequate sleep and relaxation. It has always seemed to me unfair that an adult can go to work, complete the tasks demanded of him or her during the working day and return home with time to put their feet up in the evenings or on weekends. But the unfortunate school or university student must do homework or extend on the educational institution's contact hours by home study, and this sharply reduces the time available for socialising, keeping fit or just flopping out in front of the TV. Yet these activities are as vital as a good diet for health and well-being and will often determine the overall capacity of the student.

Trusting your own mind

We will assume you have considered all this background and are facing the first term with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. Where do you start? The first point to digest concerns your computer – not the hardware sitting in the spare bedroom but your mind, you own personal computer (PC). Trusted and used with confidence, it is a remarkable organ. It has possibilities of which you are probably unaware and which you may never use unless you learn to draw on its computing power.

Think about that other and grossly inferior piece of electronic hardware in the spare bedroom. Unless you know how to make the best use of the software installed on a computer you will not be able to maximise its resources. With experience, however, you will be able to play tunes on the machine and produce some surprising results. The mind is different.

You don't have to be trained to use it, rather you have to teach yourself to trust it and then get out of the way. The moment you start intruding into the computing process by dragging everything ‘onto the screen’ – into consciousness – you slow down the processing and mess up the result. However, when you sit down to write an essay or, more to the point, take an exam, you must be able to find the right files and open them in order. And, in the case of your mind, there's no file manager to search through the archives for you to locate the right bit.

Civilisation can be seen as a result of the human mind developing consciousness beyond that of the spontaneity of an animal on all fours. The ability to reason – to use one's head rather than one's heart – has lifted the human animal to higher ability and attainment.

Yet it is often the case that intuition (just ‘knowing’) comes up with the right answer, while the conscious mind flounders in a sea of contradictions and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Laying the foundations
• 2 Defining the workload
• 3 Essay writing technique
• 4 Secrets of effective communication
• 5 Developing an exam mentality
• 6 The science of swotting
• 7 The big day
• 8 Getting better at what you do
• Conclusion
• Index