• When to prepare
• How to prepare
• Before the exam
• During the exam
• After the exam
• Multiple-choice exams
• Open-book exams
• Taking notes into an exam
• Special arrangements for illness or disabilities

Exams at university are a totally different experience from exams at school. For a start, at school your teachers probably trained you for the exam situation with mock exams, revision sheets, homework exercises and so on. At university that doesn’t happen. You have to take responsibility for your own learning and preparation.

Secondly, exams at university generally aim to test how well you understand your subject area. Lecturers are often more interested in whether you can apply the knowledge you have gained rather than in how many facts you have learned. So you need to be able to think analytically rather than simply regurgitate facts.

On this page, we give you some tips about how to approach exams in the university context.

When to prepare

University exams are supposed to test how well you UNDERSTAND your subject, not necessarily how much you know. That’s why cramming in the last week before the exam may help you to pass, but if you want to do well, you should be preparing for the exam from Day One of the semester. If you are reading, thinking and understanding as as you go along through the semester, your need to revise (and to rote learn) will be minimal, your stress level will be minimal, and your pleasure in studying will be maximised. So, the earlier you start the better!

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How to prepare

From day one ...

Be organised right from the beginning. Get into the habit of reviewing your lecture notes, taking notes from your reading, discussing the topics with fellow-students, making a note of questions you need to ask in tutorials, reorganising your notes and so on. In short, be an active student.

Later ...

Find out what the exam entails. You need to know:

• what topics will be covered
• what types of questions to expect
• how many questions you have to answer
• how the marks will be distributed
• how long the exam will be
• what equipment to take.

Sometimes it is possible to predict questions from the subject guide or from the lecturer’s particular emphasis. NB Lecturers often give tips on the exam in the later lectures of the course—so make sure you don’t miss any classes.

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Make a plan

Schedule times for revising your various topics:

1. How many topics do you need to cover?
2. Will some of them take more time to revise?
3. How many days have you got for revision?
4. So how many topics will you need to cover each day?

Make sure you allow time to come back to each topic before the exam. (Revise your revision!)

Be active!

Your learning needs to be highly interactive. Revision does not mean just reading through your notes (or worse ‘looking’ through your notes). It means using your highlighter (not in library books!), making notes of your notes, drawing diagrams, testing yourself. You can try writing summaries of the main points; covering up the diagrams and charts and trying to reproduce them; making your own visual cues and concept maps (sometimes it’s easier to remember the way something looks). In the stressful situation of the exam it will help you to have as many memory cues as possible. So reconstructing your notes into lists, charts and diagrams will really help.

Being active also means practising questions from former papers—not just looking at them, but actually planning your answers and even writing them out. You can make up your own questions too, and practise on those.

Be analytical!

University exams are usually designed to test more than how much you know. Your lecturer wants to know how well you can apply your knowledge—how well you can think. So, above all, revising means thinking analytically. That means thinking around and about your topic and asking yourself questions like:

• How does this topic relate to others in this subject?
• What are the similarities and differences between this topic (or theory, or point of view, or ...) and others?
• What examples can I think of to illustrate this?
• What if ... happened, how would that affect the topic?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of ... ?
• What are the problems involved, and how could they be solved?
• Why does ... happen? (What are the causes and effects?)
• Where can ... be applied, and where not?

The more you think analytically, the more you will understand your topic and the more easily you will be able to answer the questions.

Practise!

Use questions from past exam papers, discussion questions from your textbook, or make up your own mock exam questions. Practise answering these questions in the same timeframe that you will have to stick to in the exam. Practising getting the timing right is really important. Actually practise WRITING in the limited time. It will give you a much better idea of what you can or cannot attempt in the time allowed.

You could show your practise answers to your tutor, or to a study skills adviser to get feedback on whether your answers are appropriate or not.

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Before the exam

Think positive! Remind yourself of all that you have done in preparation for the exam and don’t worry about what you don’t know. Make sure you have a good night’s sleep beforehand (or as good as possible!) and that you are as ‘centred’ as possible. Avoid unnecessary last minute panics. For example, make sure you know where the exam room is and when the exam starts!

If you have prepared well for the exam and have managed your time sensibly, you should not be excessively nervous. It’s good to be keyed up for an exam; a certain amount of anxiety helps you to perform well. Some people, however, suffer from extreme anxiety about exams which inhibits their ability to perform. Anxiety may cause them to see a white blank on the page, for example, or to feel physically ill. If this is the case with you, you should contact the Health and Counselling Centre or the Academic Skills Program. We can help you to develop relaxation techniques, and to get a greater sense of control over your study.

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During the exam

Keep cool! If you can keep calm you will not make any silly mistakes.

1. First scan the entire paper. You can get into serious difficulties if you don’t realise how much (or how little) you are expected to do.
2. Then work out how much time you have for each question (or each section) of the exam. Keep an eye on your watch to make sure you are pacing yourself correctly. You might make a note on your exam paper of the timing you have decided on.
3. Read the question carefully and answer it relevantly. The most common reason students lose marks in exams is that students don't read questions properly and don't focus the answers on what is required.

Questions usually include:

1. a topic
2. limiting words (which tell you what aspect of the topic to address)
3. a direction  (e.g. explain, discuss, gives the reasons why, describe, analyse ...) (see Answering the question)

Students often make the mistake of writing down everything they know about the topic, instead of thinking about the direction word and the limiting words. For example, take the question: ‘Discuss the interrelationship between the three levels of government in Australia.’ Here the topic is ‘three levels of Government in Australia’, but the limiting word is ‘interrelationship’ and the direction word is ‘discuss’. It would be wrong to spend a lot of time listing all the attributes of the three levels of government. What you must do is focus on the interrelationships, not their individual properties, and discuss them (in other words, compare the roles of the three levels, show how they overlap or link together, and write about the problems and advantages of the interrelationships). Remember—detail is important to support ideas, but analytical thinking is more important in forming ideas.

• Plan your answers. Spend about five minutes thinking about your answers before you begin to write. Organise your ideas and jot down an outline. A few minutes spent in this way will help you to write a coherent essay with a good introduction and conclusion, and will save you a lot of time in the end.
• Don't forget a summary and general conclusion.
• Write legibly. It's better to write less, but legibly, than to write a lot, illegibly. Bad handwriting can be very annoying to markers.
• Get the key points down. If you run out of time, use dot-points to get your main points down.

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After the exam

It can be helpful to have a look at your exam paper after it has been marked. What could you do better next time round? You might like to discuss that question with your lecturer or with a study skills adviser. However, university regulations mean that you cannot take your exam paper away or photocopy it.

Take-home exams

You need to prepare for take-home exams too. Take-home exams are often marked more strictly than other exams, taking into consideration presentation (spelling, referencing and so on) as well as content. In particular, you will have to demonstrate analytical thinking. You need to be familiar with the course content and to have done plenty of background reading so that you can answer a take-home exam adequately in the limited time available.

Multiple-choice exams

The most important advice for multiple choice exams is to read the exam paper carefully! Work through the questions at a fairly steady pace. Don’t hurry yourself, but above all do not get stuck. If you are not sure about an answer, have a reasonable guess, put a mark beside that question, and keep going. Don’t spend time agonising over a question you may get wrong anyway! If you have time at the end of the exam, you can go back through the marked questions and double-check your answers.

Multiple choice exams are usually carefully designed to minimise the ‘luck’ factor. So keep a cool head and work steadily through the paper.

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Open-book exams

You need a very particular revision strategy for open-book exams. You need to be absolutely familiar with your textbook(s). It may be a good idea to make concept maps of the relevant chapters, or at least summaries that you can use as a quick prompt. You need to be familiar with using the index and contents so that you can quickly identify the correct place in the book to help you with the exam.

You will have to be particularly careful about plagiarism, too. Remember to use quotation marks for any sentences that you copy from the book. You will need plenty of practice in paraphrasing from the book beforehand.

It is worthwhile practising on previous exam papers before the exam, as timing can be difficult in open-book exams. It can be tempting to spend too much time desperately searching through the book: you need to know exactly where to find what you need.

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Taking notes into the exam

Some lecturers invite you to take and one or two A4 pages of notes into the exam. This is a great strategy to make you revise!

Don’t write out full essay answers on these sheets, because you do not know exactly how the questions will be phrased and your model answers may not answer the question effectively. Instead, use your sheet to summarise main points, and perhaps include some useful quotations (especially for literature exams). Use a clear layout with visual cues such as lay-out, underlining, concept maps and so on. Tiny writing may not be wise, because you will need to refer to your sheet quickly and efficiently.

Special arrangements for illness or disability

In some cases, arrangements can be made for students to have extra time in exams. For example, students who have a disability may be eligible. The Disabilities Officer can tell you more about this.

Also, in special circumstances such as sickness or bereavement, lecturers will arrange for you to take a deferred exam at a later date. If you need help arranging this, talk to the Students' Association or a Study Skills Adviser.

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