Examinations...

Contents

Examinations

Yes, a harsh reality for most students, but if you want the qualifications, you usually have to go through the pain of sitting exams. However, need it be that painful?

The following points demonstrate why perhaps some students do badly under exam conditions.

Can you identify with any of these? If so, perhaps next time, you can take some sort of action or consideration to safe-guard against them.

1. Turning up late and flustered - and so losing time.

2. Not following the examination paper instructions about which and how many questions to answer and so answering questions, which do not count and missing out questions which do count.

3. Budgeting time between questions so badly that not enough questions are answered (e.g. three instead of four, throwing away twenty-five per cent).

4. Misreading or misunderstanding questions through spending too little time deciding what is being asked for - and so answering a question which has not been asked.

5. Reading whatever the question (whether 'Discuss...' , 'Compare and contrast...', 'Evaluate...', or whatever) as: 'List whatever you can think of about this topic in whichever order you can think of it. Making no attempt to organize you answer. Including only unconnected facts.

6. Writing illegibly. This is very common. The more slowly an examiner is forced to read, by poor handwriting, the less chance there is that he or she can work out what an answer is saying.

7. Using opinions and personal experience as a substitute for well-supported arguments. Abandoning all logic and intellectual rigour.

8. Believing that sheet quantity will gain marks. In fact, the reverse can be the case - good points and arguments being lost in a welter of irrelevant detail.

9. Forgetting that the first 50% of marks for an answer are relatively easy to obtain, the next 25% extremely difficult and the last 25% may be almost impossible - and so wasting time elaborating on already good or adequate answers instead of improving poor and inadequate answers.

10. Trying to remember what you know about a topic: select what is relevant to the question, organize it into an answer and formulate sentences to express that answer all at the same time instead of in separate stages - and so producing partly irrelevant, disorganized, incomplete and incoherent answers.

11. Failing to read through finished answers for grossly incoherent and incorrect passages.

12. Panicking.