As is also true for most activities, attitude is very important to your performance on an exam. īAn apprehensive, positive attitudeļ will help you do your best....and your best is all that you or anyone else can reasonably expect. Get a full night's sleep, get up in time to be fully alert, prime your mind with relevant ideas, and expect to show what you know. Survey the exam so you can decide how to allot your time (writing "time" because you couldn't finish gets no credit, just a low mark for poor planning). Then follow the instructions!
As you read an item, try to figure out what the professor had in mind when s/he wrote it. Each item is intended to find out whether you understand some idea covered in the course. If you see what the item is trying to get at, you usually know how to answer it. In the process, don't commit academic suicide! Answer the item the way the professor wants, even if you think it is wrong. It is much like not stepping into a crosswalk when a speeding car is headed your way; it is better to be wrong than to be dead right. Always try to give the answer that the professor wants. Carelessness is a major cause for doing poorly on exams. It is easy to misread material in any stressful situation, and it is also easy to mis-mark an answer sheet or mis-write an answer. Good test(tm)taking habits include underlining the key words in an item, paraphrasing items, and saving time to re-check the answer sheet and re-read your essays, More generally, an exam is a context in which haste can make waste because it requires careful, thoughtful behavior. Deliberately be deliberate when taking an exam. Multiple-choice and true-false exams require you to īrecognizeļ the correct answer and to īdiscriminateļ it from wrong answers. They are called "objective" because they can be scored by any person or even a machine. No real judgment is involved in counting how many of your answers match those considered by the professor to be correct. No one can accuse the grader of being biased in scoring an objective exam, but it takes a great deal of time and effort to write good multiple-choice or true-false exams.
In contrast, essay exams require you to īrecallļ the correct answer and some subjective judgment is involved in deciding how closely your answer to an essay item corresponds to what the professor wanted. The essence of writing good essay answers is to be "reader friendly." Essays that are organized, concise, pertinent, and neat are more likely to elicit a positive subjective response in the grader and a good grade.
Because recognition is generally easier than recall (you recognize a person you have seen before but you can't recall her/his name), some people think that multiple-choice exams should be easier than essay exams. This is not necessarily true. The difficulty of a multiple-choice exam depends on how plausible the foils are. Especially if you have not studied negatives, the multiple-choice exam may be much more difficult than recall aided by mnemonics.
Remember that you do best on a test if you have rehearsed the material in the test environment. If you are having some difficulty recalling something while you are taking a test, try to imagine yourself back in the place where you studied. Close your eyes and conjure up the study environment. The answer may come to you in that context.
Let me end with a by-now-familiar story. It is about two men who were fishing near the shore of a lake. They hear a noise, and see a bear coming at them across the meadow. One man stoops down and begins to take off his wading boots. The other man says, fearfully, "Why are you doing that? Don't you know you can't outrun a bear!" The first man replies, "I figure I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun YOU!" Similarly, when taking an exam, outrunning the bear would be having to know everything. You can't do that. All you have to do is know more than most of the other students. That's the way to survive in college.