Five Tips to do Well on Exams
Today's schools are getting more competitive, and it is important for students to get good grades on exams. The quality of your education can be really improved if you learn how to do well in exams. We present ten tips that can help you to master your study material and get excellent grades.
Getting good grades is not so hard as most people believe. With a little of effort, one can quickly master most topics taught on school and achieve great success. It is mostly a matter of application than properly intelligence or natural skills. Here are are some ideas that can help you master any topic in school:
1. Clarify the topics with the instructor: One of the first things you need to do when studying for an exam is to clarify with the professor the topics that will be covered in the exam. This is a natural question that most students do, but surprisingly few professors are clear about contents of exams. This is an important step because it clarifies what you are supposed to study for an exam.
Remember that one of the number one time wasters in school is to spend time studying topics that will not be in an exam. Even if the topic is very interesting personally, it might not help you to get a good grade, so it should be better postpone to some time later when you have your work done.
2. Create a summary of study: A summary of study is a guide to which you can refer to when studying a topic. It say what is the sequence of topics you need to study, and how much progress you have made. Students get quickly lost in school because they don't have a plan of learning activities. It is simply too easy to spend a few hours doing some homework, for example, and then discovering that you didn't study even ten percent of the topics for an exam.
You can start from the topics given by the professor, from your book, or from a separate study guide. However, you must do your separate summary of study because only you know about your current situation. For example, annotate what you think is not well understood, or topics that you need to practice more. Be thorough and write down everything you need to read and/or practice.
3. Create a study schedule: Another problem that many students have is that they don't know how to divide their time in a proper way. This way they spend way too much time on just a small part of the topics in an exam.
The best way to do this is to divide your study in sessions, and then create different tasks that can be accomplished individually. These study tasks should cover the whole material that you are trying to master.
Each day do some of the tasks in your schedule and check them off. Be realistic but spend time on your tasks. You will see that it becomes much easier to track your progress. This also helps to avoid the problem of trying to do everything in the previous day. If you have an idea of how much time it takes to do a task, you have a better chance to accomplish it on time.
4. Study with a friend: Studying alone can be boring at times. Try to avoid this situation with the help of a collage. Studying in group can help you for several reasons:
Different people know different things, so in combination you have a better chance of learning everything. In a group it is easier to maintain the concentration on a topic. Explaining to another person what you think of a topic is an excellent way of mastering the material.
5. Use flash cards: Depending on the topic that you are trying to learn, flash cards can be an excellent technique of study. They can be useful not only for language learning, but also for more complex topics.
For examples, flash cards can be useful in topics such as History, Geography, Biology, and Sciences in general. Even in math is sometimes useful to learn the basic formulas and concepts with flash cards.
Maintain always a deck of blank cards that you can fill with information for your exam. They are really easy to manipulate and can help you in the process of recollection necessary to master a school topic.
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