How to Prepare for an Exam
How to prepare for an exam whether you have two months, one month or under two weeks left, with a sample reading schedule and an emergency study plan.
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 fail to prepare are preparing to fail. Passing your exams with high marks is not a particularly difficult task. The successful student plans for an exam long before the actual date.
In this guide, we will briefly discuss how to prepare for an exam in a rational and efficient way. To do this, we first need to know where you stand in relation to the exam date, because the best way to handle an upcoming exam depends on how much time you have to study.
For this reason, I have divided the issue into three separate scenarios:
- A: You have 2 months or more to prepare
- B: You have about 1 month to prepare
- C: You have 2 weeks or less to prepare
A: You have 2 months or more to prepare
This is the ideal situation. Start preparing the moment you know the exam has been announced. Don't be fooled by the fact that you have a lot of time left before the test.
That feeling will make you procrastinate and fool yourself into thinking you are going to study tomorrow, when in fact you are only postponing the inevitable.
Step 1. The first day: strategy!
Spend the first day working out your strategy. Make sure you are aware of all the required reading for the course. Skim through the entire textbook and draw up a reading schedule with a preliminary deadline for finishing the book. The deadline is important, so make sure you keep it!
An example of preliminary planning is shown below. Only the first few days are shown, but hopefully it's enough to give you the picture.
| Day | What to do | How much |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Prepare | Create a schedule and decide on a deadline. |
| 2 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 2 practice problems |
| 3 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 2 practice problems |
| 4 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 3 practice problems |
| 5 | Textbook "Name" | 5 pages + 1 practice problem + 1 handout |
| 6 | Review | Review all of the pages you've read this week. |
| 7 | Textbook "Name" | 10 pages + 2 practice problems |
Step 2. The rest of the days: implementation!
In the example above, the required textbook had 208 pages plus a few handouts and practice problems. With an average of 5 pages per day, and one day at the end of each week reserved for review only, you will finish the entire book in about a month and a half. This leaves you about 2 weeks to review everything.
Remember to set a deadline for when all of the reading needs to be completed. If possible, make sure this deadline is at least 1 week before the exam date. This way, you'll have time to revise what you've learned. This is how knowledge sticks. It is through repetition that information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes wisdom.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S. Eliot
You can't know what you haven't internalized, and to internalize something you need to repeat it: out loud, on paper, with your classmates and so forth. The more you discuss the topic you're studying, the easier it becomes to remember. It's the same reason people remember things they've read or watched: they talk about them often.
B: You have about 1 month to prepare
If you have about 1 month to prepare, you can still get great results, depending on how much you already know about the topic, how difficult the exam is and so on. The approach is not much different from the one above. Simply create a schedule in which you work twice as much each day, so that you finish all of your reading, plus any practice problems or 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 spot of having only 2 weeks to prepare for an exam. If your professor planned it this way, it might not be a big deal, since the scope of the exam will be smaller than if you'd had 2 months or more to prepare. However, if the course was meant to run for 2 months or more and you have only just started studying, you are in some deep trouble! Don't worry, though: it is still possible to get decent results with such limited time. It's time to go into emergency mode.
Emergency mode
Emergency mode means putting everything that is less important than passing this exam to the side! You will most likely have to forget about meeting friends, going shopping, leisure activities, sports and so forth. For the next few days, you will need to eat, sweat and breathe the topic you are studying.
As before, begin the first day by planning. This time, however, we plan to cover the most important parts first, knowing full well that we might have to skip some parts. It's survival mode, and in survival mode you think about the essentials first and foremost.
Step 1. Triage!
Triage is the priority system the medical community uses in emergency situations, such as in hospital emergency rooms or during rescue operations and disasters. The people in the direst need of care get treated first, so someone who was in a severe car accident is treated before someone with a minor wrist injury. This is how you need to treat your exam.
Step 2. Important vs. less important
You need to know the following:
- What are the most important chapters?
- Which parts are less important (keeping in mind that less important does not mean unimportant)?
- Which types of problems are most likely to be included?
Step 3. Study, study!
Start studying. Cover all the essential parts first and make sure you have mastered them. Once you have learned these, you are ready to move on to the more advanced examples and chapters. Don't waste any time whatsoever on anything less important than your studies. Until the exam date, you must stay focused on passing that exam.
For more tips, see how to study for exams and why studying the day before is bad.