Do you have an exam coming up? Waste no more time, start preparing right now.

There’s an old but true saying that those who do not prepare for success are preparing for failure. Passing your exams with high marks is not a particularly difficult task. The successful student plans his/her exam long before the actual due date.

In this post, we will briefly discuss how to prepare for an exam in a rational and efficient manner. To do this, we first need to know where you stand in terms of the exam date. The best way to handle an upcoming exam differs depending on how much time you have to study.

For this reason, I have therefore divided the issue into 3 separate scenarios:

A – You have 2 months or more to prepare
B – You have 1 month or less to prepare
C – You have 2 weeks or less to prepare

A – You have 2 months or more to prepare

This is the optimal situation. You start preparing the moment you know the exam has been announced. Don’t be fooled with the fact that you have a lot of time left before the actual writing of the test.

This will make you procrastinate and fool yourself that you are going to study tomorrow when in fact you are only postponing the inevitable.

B – You have 1 month or less to prepare

If you have about 1 month to prepare you can still produce great results, depending on how much you know about the topic, the difficulty of the exam etc. The modus operandi is not much different from the case above. What you need to do is simply create a schedule where you would need to work twice as much on a daily basis to finish all of your reading + eventual practice problems/old exams before the exam date.

If you have less than 1 month to prepare, it is still possible to get good results but you have to start studying immediately!

C – You have 2 weeks or less to prepare

So it happened. You are in the tight situation of having only 2 weeks to prepare for an exam. If this was intended by your professor it might not be a big of deal since the scope of the exam will not be as big as if you had had 2 months or more to prepare. However, if the course was indeed intended to go on for 2 months or more and you have only started studying right now, you are in some deep trouble! Don’t worry though; it is still possible to produce decent results even though you have such limited time. It’s time to go into emergency mode.

EMERGENCY MODE

Emergency mode means that you will have to put anything that is not as important as passing this exam to the side! That means that you will most likely have to forget about meetings friends, going out for shopping, leisure activities, sport and so forth. For the next few days, you will need to eat, sweat and breath the topic that you are studying.

As before, begin the first day by planning. This time however, we are planning to cover the most important parts first, knowing well enough that we might have to skip some parts. It’s survival mode and in survival mode you think about the essentials first and foremost.

When you sit down and begin studying for a test, you likely lay out all your notes, lectures, quizzes and homework assignments in front of you and – in doing so – realize that there’s a lot of material you’re going to need to cover. When faced with this realization, some students crack down and power through the material, in the process insuring that no details are left unexamined. If you can effectively study this way, that’s great, you’ll probably show up for the exam knowledgeable and highly prepared.

But most students will not learn well when they attempt to study every single detail. Sometimes this is because they get tired and distracted and never make it all the way through the material. Sometimes they do make it through, but the sheer amount of information crammed into their heads inevitably leaks out before the actual test has been administered. For these students it is far more beneficial to take a targeted approach – to separate out what’s important to study from what’s not, and in doing so create a list of topics from which they can prepare.

Whether you’re a high schooler, a graduate student, or are getting an online degree through the College Network, it’s consequently always important to be able to recognize key material and focus most of your energies there. Here are a few tips for differentiating between materials of different values:

Interested in knowing how to study for upcoming exams? In this post, we’ll go through the most important parts of the process which unfortunately tends to be overlooked far too often.

1. The urgency of NOW!

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon pertaining to studying. For some reason, when it comes to exams, people tend to worry a lot more about their exams than they they do actually preparing. If you are currently worried about an upcoming exam, why not harness that negative energy into something positive instead? Whenever you start getting worried again it becomes time to hit the books. Do not succumb to procrastination. Do your studying and do it now!

2. A road map helps a long way

Always keep your exam date near to heart. Time tends to go by pretty fast, you may be surprised that 3 weeks left have all of sudden turned into 5 days left. Don’t let this happen to you. Organize your studies and memorize all of your test dates. Put them up on the wall if necessary.

A good way of constructing your road map is to first set the date for your upcoming exam, then outline all the major topics that you would need to have covered until then. Finally, you can divide these topics into smaller tasks, describing the everyday tedious “on the ground” “getting your hands dirty” work that simply has to be done. This could be something like reading chapter 3 or solving problem 5a.

3. Compile an I Don’t Know Paper (IDKP)

This is something that I personally like to do. Whenever you begin a new course, start out by getting a piece of paper or a text document and then start recording all of the things that you need to understand before the test date. These are the things that we intend to ask our professors but instead we put it up and thus forget about it until it’s already to late. By collecting all of the I Don’t Know’s in a IDKP, you can then, at the end of each week seek out the answers to these questions either by asking a colleague or your professor or by simply going to your local library and/or the internet.

Either way, don’t let it go unanswered or you will regret it later on when sitting during the exam only to have realized that your intended inquiry is now an exam question. The the motto is: Answer your own questions before they become exam questions!

4. Are you on track?

It’s easy to neglect work, even easier when it comes to education. That’s why you should appoint one day at the end of the week for the sole purpose of tracking your progress. Are you on track? Have you finished the tasks that you’ve outlined in your road map? Have you answered all the questions that you have been thinking about? If not, then no play for you until you’re back on chart.

Sure, missing out on one day isn’t that bad. The problem my friend, is when one day becomes two days and two turn into three and so on. Days tend to accumulate pretty quickly. If you’re behind schedule you should strive to get back on schedule as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will become to get back on track.

Understanding difficult subjects

If you want to learn how to pass difficult exams you need to first revisit your definition of the word ‘difficult’. Don’t be deluded by the word difficult. How many students haven’t had their dreams shattered by this word. How many a men have not lost themselves in the wilderness of their own self delusion merely because the believed that things have an inherent difficulty in them. Too many, that’s for sure.

Difficult words

What makes the word accolade anymore difficult than the word acceptance? Is it the number of letters used? Nope, in this case the latter word has more letters than the former but is viewed as more difficult. Why?

Simply because we have a wrong understanding, that’s why. I had a teacher once who correctly stated: “There are no difficult words – only words you haven’t heard of”. We tend to call the unknown difficult while in reality it is no more or less difficult than that we already know. This is the mindset you need to have before learning new terminology.

Memorize the words and their meaning and then try to use those words in their appropriate setting. Once you’ve used a word or phrase continuously you’ll stop to perceive it as difficult and even worthy of an explanation.

Difficult subject

Now before I dismiss the notion of there not being difficult subjects I do need to state that there are indeed subjects that are perceived as more difficult than others. This we all know from experience. However it is important to understand that although we may view it as difficult someone else sees it as easy. The difference between us and this other person is that the latter has understood the concept and thus finds it easy. If you want to be able to transform a difficult subject to become easy you’ll need to first understand it.

That’s why you should invest a lot of time to pose questions to the teacher in the beginning of such a course. As soon as you don’t understand a word, phrase or concept you need to investigate it further. Don’t leave it to the future because chances are that you will never look into what that particular thing meant and will only later find yourself to be troubled when it shows up on an exam or in a real life scenario.

Do your homework, learn first and it will help you out later.

As far as I’m concerned, bringing fruit & snacks to the exam has both positive as well as negative consequences. The obvious pros are.

Pros

Eating is good. We all know that. The reason that I feel so ambivalent on this issue has to do with the following.

Cons