Preparing For A Test

To avoid cramming for exams, you should plan to begin studying well in advance of the test date. In theory, this sounds good; however, very often students get so busy with other assignments, papers, and deadlines that they believe they can put off studying for their exams until the last minute. Some people actually believe that they work much better under pressure!

Cramming is like going on vacation. When you get ready to go on vacation, you generally start planning at least several weeks beforehand. You know where you are going, what you will be doing, what the weather will be like, etc. You probably even start making lists of things you don't want to forget, and you probably start putting things aside to take along. As the departure date nears, you begin to pack your suitcase. Most of the things are folded neatly and arranged in an organized fashion. However, as the time to leave gets closer and closer, you may find yourself putting an extra blouse or shirt in, or taking along an extra skirt or pants. The closer the time gets, the more you are tempted to pack because you want to be prepared for any occurrence. When it's time to leave, you may have a hard time closing your suitcase, and you may find that little pieces of material are sticking out of it once it is closed. When you reach your destination and open the suitcase, everything that was tossed in at the last minute spills out onto the bed; everything that was packed in an orderly, organized fashion is still that way.

The same is true of cramming. When you know a test is approaching, you may start to think about what you will need to know for the test several weeks in advance. You may even make a list of things you want to be sure to study. As the time draws closer, however, many other things begin eating away at your time, like other class assignments or projects, and you may find yourself down to the wire, leaving all of your studying until the night before the exam. By that time, you feel you need to learn as much as possible, so you try to memorize as much as you can. Very often, when you walk into the classroom the next day, you almost feel that if someone accidentally bumped you, everything you learned would tumble right out of your head through your ear canal! Nothing seems to make sense, and lots of concepts and ideas look familiar, but you have a hard time connecting all the ideas together. Material you learned early on is fairly easy to remember, but the newer material, especially the material from the night before, is more difficult to remember because your brain hasn't had enough time to organize the material into various schemas.

To beat the cramming monster at its own game, you need to plan ahead and organize your studying. Starting well in advance of the test date is critical; the very best day to start studying for a test is the first day of class, or the first day after an exam in the class. Most students, however, can be successful by starting at least a week before a scheduled exam. Here's a plan that seems to work for most students.

Four days before an exam: Get ready to study. Collect notes, blank pieces of paper, pens, pencils, calculators, etc., and a stack of 3x5 notecards. This activity serves as a psychological block breaker by separating actually studying from getting ready to study. Many students spend a lot of time in preparation for study, and because they've been "busy," their brain believes it has started studying. So, take some time, and do the prep work.

Three days before an exam: Schedule 2 two-hour blocks of time. Begin the first session by finishing any last-minute preparations, such as reading the last part of the chapter or expanding the last of your lecture notes. This could take the entire two hours, but if you have been keeping up with your reading and class attendance, it should probably take about an hour.

The remainder of the first block, and all of the second block, should be spent organizing the information you need to know. For any exam, you must learn two types of information: facts and trends. You can get the facts you will need to know from your notes and underlined portions of your text. This may amount to 100 or more facts for a major exam. Simply listing the facts or definitions to be learned on a sheet of paper may not be the best way to learn them. If your mind learns the facts in a fixed order, you may have trouble recalling these facts on the exam because the exam will probably not test you on the facts in the order in which you learned them. One way to remedy this is to write each separate fact on the front of a 3x5 note card and write several key ideas for each fact on the reverse. You can save yourself time by doing this step as you are reading your text assignments during the course of the semester instead of leaving it go til three days before the exam.

As you study the cards, shuffle them so as to destroy learning them in a fixed order. This is a good method for True/False tests, multiple choice tests, or matching tests. For essay tests or short answer or fill-in-the-blank tests, learn the information on the back of the card and try to come up with the word on the front. When you know these cards forwards and backwards, you should be able to pass any exam which tests you on the facts.

Two days before the exam: Schedule two more 2-hour study sessions. Choose three or four large topics which have been emphasized in class or in the text. Then, predict possible essay questions. Comb your notes and make an outline for each question. Change your writing media (using pen, pencil, colored inks, etc.). This will help you to remember what you have written because each medium makes the material look fresh to your mind. Then write the outline several times, making each outline shorter. Finally, write an essay answer using the amount of time you would use in class during the actual testing situation. Read your practice essay and underline key words and terms. Copy these key words and terms in order, so that you have formed a word outline by which you can reproduce the essay at will. Memorize this outline so you can write it in 20 seconds. Finish this study session by going through your flashcards again. During the second session, rewrite your essay questions and study your flashcards one more time.

You may find that predicting essay questions for the first exam in a course is a challenge. First of all, you don't know exactly how an instructor likes to word an exam. Some instructors lecture using very understandable vocabulary, but on exams, they are more likely to be more formal, so you might want to talk to students who have had this instructor before and see how he or she phrases questions. Also, you might be concerned that you haven't "hit" the right question. Most of the time, if you have predicted a question, you have included information that would be appropriate to answer any question on that topic area, with slight modifications. But it is far better to predict a question and practice answering it than to go into the testing situation "cold."

The day before the exam: Flip through your fact cards and go through your word outlines. You may want to practice your essays one last time, especially if you have one which is particularly troublesome. This session should only take 1-1 1/2 hours of study time. Then you should relax. You have done all of your preparation and should concentrate on getting a good night's sleep.

On the day of the exam, spend about 10 or 15 minutes going over your cards and outlines. You have spent between 7-15 hours of study; you are prepared to take this exam.

Why is this method so effective? One reason is that it gives you the opportunity to think about what you are studying. The two-hour blocks of time let your brain organize information and make connections to information you already know. Another positive feature of this method is the variety of senses used. Since everything we know comes to us through our senses, it would only follow that the more senses we involve in the learning process, the better able we are to remember the information. Writing involves the kinesthetic sense, and using different colors brings the visual sense into play. When you study your fact cards, reciting them out loud involves the ear and the mouth. In addition, if you recite out loud, your ear tends to recognize areas that you're not sure of. Finally, this method helps fight test anxiety. One of the causes of test anxiety is underpreparedness. If you have followed this plan, and if you've put in between 7 and 15 hours of study, there is no logical reason to think that you are underprepared. Another cause of test anxiety is fear of the unknown question. However, this method gives you plenty of opportunities to predict questions.

If you really give this method a fair try, you should see some very positive results on your test scores.  

Remember! Anxiety directs thoughts inward to think about discomfort; good test-taking methods direct thoughts outward to think about answering questions correctly.