Taking a Test does not have to be anxiety inducing. Here are five strategies to help you do your best work:
- Move your focus away from exam time and place logistics issues to a concentration on using study/self-testing time to do the following each day (and these are written into your calendar):
- Prep for the next day (assignments or reading);
- Review top priority issues/themes or most important content from the day’s lectures in testing bursts of 20 minutes (read, put away, retell yourself the content, pause on words and spell them out);
- Review material for the Monday exam.
- Move away from rewriting EVERYTHING to knowing you have the content at your fingertips and mastering concepts and vocabulary through repeated review.
- Get selective assistance from peers or peer tutors who may have experienced some academic challenges in the courses you are taking but have succeeded.
- Refocus visits with faculty on assistance identifying test-taking or study strategies or topics on which to concentrate.
- Approach tests questions as follows:
Level 1: Questions you know and answer during the first round. (No review)
Level 2: Questions you feel fairly secure about but are not completely sure. Identify two choices and make a selection between the two on a second pass. (May be reviewed but not extensively.)
Level 3: WAG questions are those for which your guess is as good as mine. Use the test-taking strategies on the handout I just sent to select an answer. (No review)
When you complete the exam, you complete the exam. No additional time should be spent second guessing. The key is to avoid spending excessive and non-productive hours on any exam.
Reminders:
Concentrate on the experience and making the experience better as opposed to a numerical score. How did the test go? The experience was better this time. (That’s the win.)
Break up long days of study/self-testing time on the weekends. Bursts of sprints versus marathons. Each day, there will be one “fun” thing to do. Meal times are scheduled in and do not include review.
Using DiBart’s true, false, true, true approach to emphasize selection of answers on multiple choice questions that are worded in the negative (which are NOT true).