Ex­ams Gillingham

Chapter 7

Ex­ams

Ex­ams suck – we all know that. I looked for­ward to my eigh­teen hours of Fi­nals with about as much ex­cite­ment as an arachno­pho­bic feels about the prospect of get­ting in­to a bath full of taran­tu­las. I was es­pe­cial­ly ap­pre­hen­sive about ap­proach­ing these de­gree-​de­cid­ing ex­ams as, de­spite work­ing hard for my first year ex­ams, I did pret­ty bad­ly in them. I think the rea­son for that was that I’d pre­pared for them a bit like A Lev­els – learn­ing lots of pre­pared an­swers, and de­liv­er­ing them off pat wher­ev­er seemed pru­dent. That ap­proach turned out to do me no favours, but luck­ily the first year ex­ams hadn’t count­ed to­wards my de­gree, and by the time Fi­nals rolled around I’d got used to uni ex­ams.

Since pret­ty much all of us have to do them, it’s best to get on with the re­vi­sion and spend less time moan­ing about them. So here are some tips to face ex­ams head on and win. Oh yes – it’s time for fight­ing talk.

Make a re­vi­sion timetable

When you think about it, ex­ams aren’t that dif­fer­ent from any oth­er kind of learn­ing you do at uni – so, just as it’s a good idea to be or­gan­ised when you’re fac­ing an es­say dead­line, the same is true of ex­ams. Make a re­vi­sion timetable as ear­ly as pos­si­ble so you can spread out your re­vi­sion – but ob­vi­ous­ly don’t start so far in ad­vance that you can’t re­mem­ber any­thing. Tim­ings will dif­fer for ev­ery­one, but for my Fi­nals – which start­ed in mid- May, count­ed for al­most all of my de­gree and took place in the space of a week – I start­ed re­vis­ing at the end of March.

At some unis, not all ex­am pa­pers are worth the same num­ber of points – so make sure you know how im­por­tant a pa­per is when you’re de­cid­ing how much time to spend re­vis­ing for it.

By ex­am time, you should know how long you can keep work­ing on some­thing at peak – for me, it was about an hour, so I sched­uled my timetable to work for hour-​long blocks, then ar­ranged to eat a meal, or meet a friend, or do er­rands. Or­gan­ise your timetable around group learn­ing ac­tiv­ities – so if your tu­tor has set you a mock ex­am on DNA struc­tures, sched­ule DNA re­vi­sion in the days lead­ing up to that mock ex­am.

TIP

‘I would have ap­pre­ci­at­ed know­ing what oth­er stu­dents thought was a nor­mal so­cial life while at uni – I felt there was too much em­pha­sis on par­ty­ing, to the detri­ment of my stud­ies, and re­gret that bal­ance.’

Si­mon, 25, Manch­ester

And think about whether you pre­fer to al­ter­nate be­tween top­ics to avoid bore­dom, or to get whole top­ics done in the same time – take all these is­sues on board when mak­ing your timetable. Don’t go crazy about how long you can re­vise for – even if you can stay sit­ting at a desk for hours on end, you won’t be tak­ing as much in to­wards the end of a ses­sion, so take lots of short breaks.

You should al­so do some group study to pre­vent yo...

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