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Staying Focussed During Exams

Whether you’re writing a 2-hour exam in a hall on-campus or a 23-hour exam at home, staying focussed can be challenging. We’re so used to being distracted by phones, TV, or other people, that getting our brains “in the zone” takes a bit of work.

In this blog we’ll discuss four strategies to improve your focus in your next exam.

Have an Exam Plan

Before your exam, make a plan for managing your time. Figure out how many questions there are in the exam and how much time you’ll have for each of them. Make sure to factor in time for reading all the questions at the beginning, choosing which questions you’ll answer (if you get a choice), and checking everything over at the end. For example, if you have a 2-hour exam with two questions of your choice, you might allocate 10 minutes at the start to choose your questions, 50 minutes per question, and 10 minutes at the end to check everything over.

If your exam is essay-style, it’s also helpful to spend time planning each answer. Out of those 50 minutes, maybe take 10 minutes to brainstorm your main points, then the remaining 40 minutes to write your answer. Taking a few minutes to create an outline will give you a structure to follow for the rest of the exam, which will help your mind stay focussed.

Prepare Your Environment

If you’re writing your exam at home, prep your environment beforehand. Find a quiet place, if you can, and clear it of all distractions. Gather any materials you’ll need, like books, notes, paper, or pens, and arrange them  so you’ll be able to find everything when you need it.

It’s also good to have a plan for your phone. It may be enough to put it on silent, but if you know you’ll keep pulling it out for a quick check, it’s probably best to remove the temptation. Try leaving it in another room, or uninstall your favourite apps during exam season. If you think an important call might come through, give your phone to a friend or family member so they can keep an eye on it for you.

Stay Healthy

If you want your brain to do its best work, you need to keep your body healthy. Before an exam, it’s important to get good sleep and eat healthy food. Taking poor care of your body, like cramming all night or relying on caffeine to keep you going, will make you lose focus and crash during the exam.

It’s also helpful to get healthy food and drink to enjoy during the exam itself. If you’re writing in an exam hall, you’ll be restricted in what you can bring, but a bottle of water is always a good idea. If you’re writing at home, make sure to have some of your favourite healthy snacks on hand, like fruit or nuts.

Practice Focus

Finally, if we want to improve our ability to focus, it’s a good idea to practice. The best thing is to consistently work on building up your focus, little by little. At first, just try short bursts, perhaps as little as five or ten minutes of focussed work, uninterrupted by distractions. As time goes on, try building up the time to 30 or 45 minutes, or maybe over an hour.

If you don’t have time to work properly on your focus, you can still try a practice run before the exam. Set a timer for the length of your exam and find a concrete task to work on for that time. This is especially effective if you have a past paper to try, but you can also use the time for other revision strategies, such as writing summaries of your notes or doing a “brain dump” on several topics. Whatever task you choose, it will help get your brain used to focussing for the length of time you need for the exam.

Conclusion

Focus can be challenging, but just because we live in the age of the smartphone doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We do have to be intentional in our preparation and how we fuel our mind and bodies, but a little effort will go a long way to making your exam experience as seamless as possible.

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How do I Know My Revision is Working?

Imagine this: you’re working hard, revising for your exam. Every morning you wake up early and spend all day in the library, reading your textbooks and going over lectures. You copy out pages and pages of notes and highlight all the key concepts. But finally, when you get to the exam, you can’t remember a thing.

Unfortunately, this scenario happens all too often. The problem is that many revision strategies that seem useful at the time don’t actually help us remember information long term.

One easy way to improve is to make our revision more active. Using active revision techniques is the best way to ensure we’re spending our study time in a way that will actually improve our exam results.

Even if you are using active techniques, though, it’s still good to check how your learning is progressing. Here are three ways to ensure your revision is effective, as well as a few potential pitfalls to avoid.

Past Papers

The obvious way to test yourself is by using past papers or practice questions. Sometimes these will be provided by your tutor, or you might be able to find them online.

One great way to use past papers is to give yourself a mini exam. Set a timer for the length your exam will be, then work through the past paper, just like you would in a real exam. Answer all the questions as thoroughly and accurately as possible, without referring to your notes.

Afterwards, go through and “grade” your exam. Think about the parts that you knew really well, and write down the areas where you struggled. Go back to your notes and fill in any gaps, and spend more time revising the difficult areas.

Potential Pitfall: Make sure you use other revision techniques, not just past papers. If you don’t supplement past papers with other techniques, you’ll end up learning all about last year’s exam, but you won’t know how to answer this year’s questions!

Brain Dump

This strategy helps you see what information you’ve fully retained. Choose a topic, pull out a blank sheet of paper, and write down everything you can remember. Then, compare with your notes to see what information you forgot to include. Everything on your brain dump paper is stuff you know, and everything that’s missing could probably do with some more revision.

Potential Pitfall: After doing a brain dump, it’s essential to go back and revise the information you missed. It can be tempting to look back at your notes and think, “oh, I actually know that,” but if you didn’t include it in the brain dump, chances are it could do with a little reinforcement.

Quiz Your Friends

Working with others is a great way to test your own revision and ensure you don’t miss anything. Creating a quiz for your friends is a helpful active learning strategy, and seeing how they do on your quiz will give you a sense of if you’re asking the right questions. Similarly, having a friend create a quiz for you will help you test your knowledge. You can also discuss the answers with your friends and work through the content together.

If you don’t have any friends on your course, you can still use this strategy. Simply give your notes to a friend or family member and ask them to pick out bits of information and ask you questions. They don’t need to be a subject expert; in fact, it might actually be helpful for you to provide simple answers that a layperson can understand.

Potential Pitfall: Whenever you’re working with coursemates, watch out for imposter syndrome. Revision can be stressful, and it’s all too easy to compare ourselves with others and feel like we’re falling behind. While our peers can give us a good benchmark for our revision, it’s important to remember that just because someone else sounds like they know everything, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not as good.

Conclusion

As exams approach, it’s important to test ourselves to see if our revision is working. By using past papers, trying the brain dump strategy, and quizzing our friends, we can get a much more accurate idea of what we know and what we still need to learn.

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How do I make my revision more active?

When we think about revision, what strategies come to mind? Often, we think of strategies like highlighting textbooks, watching lectures, or rewriting our notes. These techniques are all good ways to start, but they’re fundamentally passive; they don’t require much thought. To do really well at our exams, it’s essential to spend the majority of our time on more active techniques.

Passive Revision

Passive revision is when we engage with the material on a surface level, without thinking deeply about it. Even though passive revision techniques aren’t very useful, they can be tempting because they’re easier than active techniques. They also make us feel productive, even when we aren’t actually learning anything.

Common passive techniques include:

  • Reading notes/textbooks
  • Copying notes/textbooks
  • Collating notes from different sources
  • Highlighting
  • Rewatching lectures

Active Revision

Active revision, on the other hand, makes us think. When we revise actively, we consider information in new ways and make connections between concepts. We also practice retrieving that information from our brains, ensuring we don’t just recognise information but we also recall it.

Active revision is much more work than passive revision, but it’s far more effective. Just a few hours spent on active revision can be as valuable as a full day of passive revision. This is great news because it means, if we revise actively, we can actually spend less time working and have more time left for fun!

Active Techniques

  • Create diagrams/mindmaps. Taking information and representing it in a new format helps us think things through and understand it more deeply. This strategy is particularly effective for visual learners.
  • Connect course concepts. Don’t always revise just one lecture at a time. Instead, ask yourself how the lectures connect to each other. How does what we learned in Week 1, for instance, impact on Week 10’s lectures?
  • Brain dump. Choose a topic/lecture, then take a blank piece of paper and write down everything you can remember. Afterwards, compare with your notes and check what you’ve forgotten.
  • Flashcards. Whether you make your own deck or use someone else’s, flashcards can be a great way to test yourself on key concepts. Just make sure you really are testing yourself, not flipping over the card before you’ve had time to answer.
  • Practice questions. If your module has practice questions or past papers, these are great ways to test your learning. If not, why not write some of your own questions?
  • Group study. Working with others can be a great way to learn. Try teaching a key concept to your peers, or quizzing each other on tough facts. Just remember to focus on your own progress, though, and not get caught up in comparing yourself with others.

Conclusion

Next time you’re revising, try switching out some passive techniques and replacing them with active ones. It may take more brainpower at first, but using active learning strategies will help you revise much more effectively in much less time.

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Revising for Essay Exams

Across the university, many exams are now at least partially in essay format. Rather than being asked for a basic fact, such as “What year was the battle of Waterloo?” you’re likely to face a more complicated analytical question, such as “What factors contributed to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo?” These exam questions can sound very similar to the essays we write during term, but with one key difference: we have far less time to write them.

In an essay exam, we don’t have time to go down rabbit trails or to go off-topic. Instead, it’s essential to focus our revision on the key aspects of the module. In this blog post, we’ll cover three things markers look for in essay exams: understanding, specificity, and critical analysis.

Understanding vs. Knowledge

The most important element of essay-based exams is that they focus on understanding, rather than knowledge. It isn’t enough to simply memorise a few key facts. Instead, we need to demonstrate we understand the meaning and significance of all the knowledge we’ve learned.

Two revision techniques that can help improve your understanding:

  1. Teach a friend about the topic. This can be a coursemate or someone who knows nothing about your subject. Teaching someone else (especially someone who isn’t an expert) will force you to put the ideas into simple language and help you identify what you know and what you still need to revise.
  2. Summarise the big ideas. Take a chunk of the course (perhaps a lecture, or a key reading) and spend a few minutes writing out a summary. What are the main points? How do these points fit together? Why do these ideas matter?

Specific vs. General

Even though the focus in essay exams is on knowledge rather than understanding, it’s still important to back up our understanding with specific points. For example, you could say “In 2008, the Bank of England lowered interest rates” but it would be better if you could provide the specific interest rate: 0.5%. To make your answer even stronger, you could put this number in context by describing how the rates dropped from 5.75% to 0.5%, which was the lowest the rates had ever been in the 300 years since the Bank of England began! (Source: House of Commons Library)

As you revise, look out for key bits of information, particularly ones that could be useful in a variety of essay questions. These might include:

  • Facts and figures (dates, statistics, numbers)
  • Quotes from primary sources (literature or historical documents)
  • Evidence from secondary sources (books or journal articles)

When you include these facts, it’s important to show you understand them. You can do this by:

  • Providing contextual information (how does this fact relate to others?)
  • Explaining their significance (why is this information relevant?)

Essentially, good revision will involve some memorisation of facts, but you should always make sure to keep these facts in context and remember their significance.

Analysis vs. Description

One of the main things your markers look for in essay exams is critical analysis. They don’t simply want you to copy information from lectures; no, they want you to use that information to say something interesting.

A few revision strategies to help you improve your analysis:

  1. Compare and contrast topics across the module. Many exam questions will ask you to relate different parts of the course to each other, so it’s good to practice during revision. Choose two parts of the module and identify the similarities and differences, or pick one key theme and see how it applies in different segments of the module.
  2. Read and critique an article. Find an article (your module reading list a good place to start) and work out its main ideas. Do you agree or disagree? What evidence does the author use to back up their points? How does the article fit with (or contradict) what you learned in the module?
  3. What’s your opinion? Choose an area of the module you’re particularly passionate about, or maybe one where you disagree with your peers or the tutor. What’s your opinion of the topic? How does your opinion differ from other people’s opinions? Identify the reasons (and the evidence!) why you think the way you do.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve discussed three things markers look for in an essay exam and identified revision strategies that will help you improve in these areas. Essay exams can be challenging, but if you focus on understanding, using specific information, and critical analysis, you’ll be most of the way there to a brilliant exam answer!