How to
succeed in examinations
[This
page was produced by Jim Deacon]
The site
provides guidance on examination technique - how to
maximise your chances of success, so that you get the
grades and the class of degree that you deserve.
I STRONGLY
ADVISE YOU TO READ THIS PAGE, and especially the summary
section:
Ten key steps to examination success.
On a separate
page you can find guidance on:
You can also
find Past Exam Papers on the course web-sites (and/or the library)
Guidance
Who
could be better to advise you than an
examiner? - someone who has marked
thousands and thousands of exam papers; someone who sets
questions and therefore knows exactly what examiners look
for in your answers; someone
who has seen all the errors that students make, time and
time again.
There is no
secret in any of this. The key to success can be
summarised in one word: method or (if
you prefer) technique. If you adopt the
right method - the right approach - it can make all the
difference between a B or a C grade, etc. and ultimately
a difference between a Class 2.I or a Class 2.II.
So,
please read this guidance time and time again. And
please follow it. We want you to do well, but
YOU have to put the guidance into practice.
Ten key
steps to examination success
Prepare
for the examination. There is little time for formal revision at the end of teaching in Semester 1, so you must revise as you go along!
Look
at past papers. This prepares you for
the types of question you will be asked, and the
time you will have to answer each question. If
there has been any major change in the format of
the examination, then you will have been told
about this in the course literature.
Never
try to 'spot' questions and never revise
selectively. This is a recipe for
disaster. Even if your predicted topics do come
up in the exam, there is no guarantee that you
will be able to answer the specific questions
that were set on these topics. Instead, you
should go into the exam with enough knowledge to
answer questions on any of the major topics in a
course.
During
the examination, organise your time effectively.
N.B. This is the single most
common cause of under-achievement in exams.
For
example, if you have a 3-hour exam in which you
must answer 4 essay-style questions, then that
means 45 minutes per question. BUT
you should allow yourself 5 minutes at
the start (to read the questions and
decide on the ones you will attempt) AND
15 minutes at the end - see below. That
leaves you 40 minutes per question.
Now
start on the first question, but stop
immediately when the 40 minutes has passed.
Don't worry if you have not finished the question
- you have left 15 minutes at the end, so you can
come back to this question and any others that
you need to finish off.
Tackle
your second question, and again stop after 40
minutes, and similarly for the third and fourth
questions.
If
you always adhere rigidly to this approach you
will maximise your chances of success.
You will never run out of time for all the
questions because you have kept some time in
reserve. Equally important, you will have scored
the highest overall mark that you possibly can
get, because exam marks follow the rule of
"diminishing returns" - you get most of
the marks for a question early on (in the first
20-30 minutes), and after that you have to work
harder and harder for the remaining marks. In
fact, the last 10% of marks for a question is
almost impossible to get - very few examiners
will give a mark above 80 or 90%. [The reason is
simple: however good your answer might be, it
could always be better, so a marker is reluctant
to give full marks. Perhaps it shouldn't be that
way. But that's life.]
Always
answer the full number of questions.
You
would be surprised at the number of students who
miss out questions and therefore fail an exam or
obtain a lower degree class than they deserve.
The reason is obvious - they cannot answer all
the questions (usually because they didn't
revise) and so they decide to spend all their
time on the questions they can answer.
This
is foolish. For example, if you can answer only 3
of the required 4 questions then you cannot
possibly get more than 75% of the marks for the
whole exam. But it even worse than that - even if
you get three first-class marks (70%)
for your three questions, this is still only 210
marks out of the possible 400. That's 53%, which
is only just above the D/C borderline (or the
third/ lower second class borderline).
Even
if you think you know nothing about a topic, you
can always get a few marks by making some
sensible comments, and that can make the
difference of a grade.
The
same advice applies to questions that require you
to answer several parts - each part of a question
has marks allocated to it, and if you miss out a
part then you cannot get the marks for it.
Read
the question carefully, underline all the
relevant words, and stick rigidly to the question
as set. Again this might seem obvious,
but again many students fail to follow this
advice. Remember that examiners think very
carefully about the wording of every question,
and expect your answer to be directly on that
topic. No examiner asks you to "Write
everything you know about a subject"!
For
example, if you are asked to write about the wall
structure of bacteria then you will get
no marks at all for mentioning the other features
of bacteria - the membrane, the genome, etc. You
get marks only for the wall. The
moment that you start to write about other
things, the examiner will write "irrelevant"
in the margin of your answer book, and will only
start giving marks again when you get back onto
the subject. In short, you are wasting your own
valuable time, and getting no marks for it.
For
every question, stop writing after the
first few minutes and re-read the question,
then stop again to recheck before your
time is up. Be absolutely honest with
yourself, and ask 'Have I drifted off the
subject?' This is surprisingly easy to do, and if
you don't stop to check periodically then you
drift into "irrelevant".
Make
rough notes at the start of a question, so as to
organise your thoughts. Then start your
proper answer.
You
almost certainly will be told to cross out the
rough notes. But my advice is NEVER CROSS THEM
OUT. Remember that anything you cross out
cannot be marked, but if you leave your
rough notes then the examiner should look through
them (if only briefly). Perhaps you made a point
in your notes that you forgot to put into your
proper answer. That can count in your favour.
Never
answer more questions than required. You
can only get marks for the required number of
questions. Every marker sticks rigidly to this
rule, because we have to be fair to all the
candidates - including those who did exactly what
was required.
Put
yourself in an examiner's shoes and ask 'What
impresses an examiner?'
Imagine
that you are spending your
evenings and weekends ploughing through 400 exam
answers - because that's what examiners do!
The examiner will get
frustrated if he cannot read your
writing. A badly written answer takes a
long time to read, and by the time the
examiner has ploughed through it he will
have forgotten half of what you said.
That's bad news for you! And don't try to
obscure your lack of knowledge (e.g. a
scientific name or a technical term) by
illegible writing. We have seen this
hundreds of times. If it cannot be read,
it cannot get marks.
Underline key words or
phrases. After reading through the whole
answer, an examiner looks back at the
number of ticks he/she has made, or the
number of key words or phrases that you
have identified. If you highlight these
then the impression is favourable - the
main points covered, so you will get good
marks.
Never repeat things, even in
a concluding paragraph. You can only get
the marks once, no matter how many times
you repeat the same point.
Learn the Latin names of
organisms and other technical terms. It
might be a pain, but it impresses
examiners and shows your competence.
A chemist would not get marks for saying
"some chemical (I forget the name)
combines with some other chemical to
produce a tetrazolium compound". So
why should a biologist get marks for
saying "some fungus (I think it
begins with M) parasitises wheat plants
by producing cellulase enzymes"? We
read that sort of thing all the time. And
it doesn't impress.
How to tackle different types of
exam question
Essay-style
questions
In a few
Honours examinations you might be asked to write 'long
essays' (time allocation of 1.5 hours or even 3 hours).
However, this does not mean that you
have to write for 1.5 or 3 hours. Instead, it means that
you have enough time to assemble your thoughts and
construct your answer carefully. The answer itself might
not take more than 1 hour or 1.5 hours to write.
In all other
examinations the essay-style questions are shorter. For
example, you might be asked to answer four essay-style
questions in a 3-hour exam (see the Microbiology 3m
examination papers, for example). These essay-style
questions require a large amount of relevant factual
information, and understanding of the subject. However,
you would not be expected to produce a
polished and grammatically correct essay. The important
thing is to write down as much relevant information as
possible, while sticking rigidly to the question that was
set.
Short-answer
questions (SAQs)
SAQs
typically have 8-10 minutes time allocation (but check
this carefully, because the time allocation does vary).
The best approach to these questions is to produce short
notes, with as much relevant information as possible in
the time allowed. If you really know the material you
should get full marks for these questions.
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