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Revising for Multiple Choice Exams

During your time at university, it’s likely you’ll encounter at least one multiple choice test. Whether this is a formative quiz during the semester or a 100% exam at the end of the year, multiple choice tests have their own benefits and challenges. For the most part, the same revision techniques will work for both multiple choice exams and essay exams, but in this post we’ll explore a few techniques that will be particularly helpful for MCQs.

Top Tips

  • Focus on understanding, not memorisation. This holds true for any kind of exam, but it’s important to state here because we often assume that multiple choice exams are more focussed on memorisation. If we just store a few key terms in our minds, surely we’ll recognise them on the exam, right? The difficulty is that the exam might use different vocabulary to what we expect, or it might ask us to apply our knowledge. In this case, it’s better to understand the concept, rather than just know a few key terms.
  • Use question banks, but not exclusively. If your course provides question banks or past papers, use those to get a sense of the types of questions that will be asked. You can also use them to test your knowledge, but make sure you supplement this with other methods. Otherwise, you’ll know the material from the questions, but you’ll have significant gaps elsewhere.
  • Create your own questions. This method can be time-consuming, but it works well for focussed study on particularly challenging areas. Spend some time coming up with your own questions and writing answers– including wrong ones! Creating answers that are wrong but plausible will deepen your understanding of the subject.

Single Best Answer

In certain disciplines, such as medicine and dentistry, you’ll come across a particular type of MCQ called “Single Best Answer.” This kind of question is particularly challenging because all the answers are potentially correct, and you need to choose the one that’s best. Here are a few revision techniques that are especially helpful for these questions (though they’ll be valuable for any MCQ exam).

  • Study the wrong answers in question banks. It can be tempting to just answer a question, get it right, and move on. To get the best use out of your question bank, however, you should also explore the “wrong” answers. Since all the answers in a SBA question are technically correct, you can learn a lot by working through each one and asking yourself, “why isn’t this one best?”
  • Focus your revision on recall, not recognition. Recognition is where you recognise something when you see it written down, while recall is where you can pull information out of your head. Recall is essential in SBA questions because every answer will have key words we recognise. We need to be able to pull the correct information from our brains, rather than just choosing the answer that seems familiar. In your revision, then, you should focus on actively testing yourself, rather than just reading or re-writing notes.
  • Explore connections between topics. Particularly in upper years, SBA questions will often ask you to pull together information from various parts of your course. In your revision, then, it’s helpful to create diagrams or mindmaps that show how different topics link together (bonus points if you make this activity recall-focussed by creating the mindmap from memory, then using your notes to fill in the gaps).

Conclusion

This blog post has covered some revision techniques that will be particularly effective for MCQ exams. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out our ASC Guide to Multiple Choice Tests.

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Making a Revision Plan

It’s the beginning of exam season. You’ve got several weeks of revision, then a few more weeks of exams. In just a little while, you’ll be done! But until then, you’ve got so much to do, and weeks of unstructured time stretching ahead of you.

How can we make the best use of this time? A revision plan will help you get everything done, while still having time for rest or time with friends.

Why Plan?

Before we discuss how to plan, we should briefly address why planning is important. After all, planning does take time, and it’s important not to get so caught up in planning your revision that you forget to actually revise!

Here are three reasons why making a revision plan is helpful:

  1. A plan helps us avoid procrastination, which leads to cramming. Research shows that cramming may seem like an effective strategy, as it makes us feel very familiar with the material, but actually it doesn’t help us learn.
  2. A plan helps us make time for fun! Exam weeks will always be busy, but if we plan our revision well, we’ll have time left over to see people we love and do the things we care about.
  3. Planning reduces stress. Studies have shown that adopting planning techniques, like the ones in this post, can significantly reduce our stress and increase our happiness.

Top Tips

Now we’ve covered why planning is important, it’s time to offer our top tips for effective revision plans.

1. Space Things Out

We’ve already heard that cramming is an ineffective revision technique. Instead, we should try Spaced Practice. In this technique, we stretch our revision out over days, weeks, or even months, rather than doing it all at once. This helps us take advantage of the “spacing effect,” which is where revising material in short chunks over a period of time results in better long-term learning than cramming.

A key part of Spaced Practice is giving yourself time to return to material over and over. This is important because, when we learn something new, we’re likely to forget most of it very quickly. The more often we go back to the material, however, the better it sticks in our brains and the longer we’re able to remember it. This phenomenon is called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

When we make our plans, then, we should try to spread our revision out over as long a period as possible. For example, if you budget 20 hours to revise for an upcoming exam, it’s far better to do an hour a day for 20 days, rather than 10 hours a day for 2 days! Whenever you can, take advantage of Spaced Practice and avoid cramming.

2. Break It Down

When we make our plans, it’s important to be specific. Don’t just put, “revise economics” in your calendar for the day. Instead, choose a reasonable length of time (30 minutes to an hour tends to be good) and give yourself a concrete topic to study. Focussing on a small chunk of information will help you retain it better, rather than getting overwhelmed by too much information.

It also helps to be task-oriented in your revision. Instead of just putting, “fluid dynamics” in your plan, think about what you want to do to help you revise. Will you go over your lecture notes? Will you answer questions? Will you create a mindmap? The more active, the better!

Here are a few activities you could do in a 30-60 minute slot:

  • Identify key learning points from one lecture
  • Create a mindmap or diagram of a specific concept
  • Try a past paper or practice question
  • Work through a deck of flash cards
  • Make connections between two lectures/concepts

3. Be Realistic

Finally, we need to ensure our revision plans are realistic. How often have you made a To-Do list, only to find that, at the end of the day, you’d only finished half the tasks? Not finishing what we planned can be incredibly demotivating, and it can mean we’re constantly having to modify our plan to catch up on all the things we didn’t manage to do. In order to plan well, it’s essential to be realistic when managing our workload.

The difficulty is that our brains tend to fall for the Planning Fallacy, where we overestimate how much we’re able to get done, and underestimate how much time a task will take. If we’re aware of this fallacy, though, we can fight against it.

Here are a few ways to create more realistic to-do lists:

  • Make your to-do list half as long as you think. If you get everything done, you can always do more, but it’s better to be too short than too long.
  • Think back and remember how long something took you last time (be honest!)
  • Time yourself completing an activity, then use that time as a guide for your plan.
  • Keep track of what you do every day, for a week. Use this as a rough guide for how much you can realistically accomplish in a week.

Conclusion

In this blog, we’ve discussed why planning is important and identified three strategies for effective revision planning. If you use spaced practice, break down your revision into chunks, and identifying realistic goals, your revision should be much more effective and less stressful!

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ASC Exam Essentials Week 1 – Planning Your Revision

This week on Exam Essentials, we’re focusing on Planning your Revision.

Starting out on the revision process can be a daunting and sometimes overwhelming task. Carefully planning your revision can help you gain control of the situation, but only if that plan is realistic and effective.  

So that’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s workshops, blog posts and resources – how to plan your revision so that it is both effective and manageable.

We’ll unpack that process over the course of the week, but here are a few suggestions to get you started:

  • plan strategically – rather than allocating an equal amount of revision time to every topic, weight the time you allocate according to need and where you’re likely to make the biggest gains
  • plan realistically – there’s not much point in having a detailed revision timetable if there’s no prospect of being able to stick to it, your plan needs to be achievable
  • plan to look after yourself – it’s counterproductive to spend all your time revising, you need to look after yourself by planning for breaks, leisure time and exercise

Why not share your thoughts on these points, as well as any other questions or suggestions you have about planning your revision, in our Padlet? All posts are anonymous and we’ll respond to some of the key issues in a later blog post.

Don’t forget we’ll be running an online workshop on Monday and an on-campus workshop on Wednesday, all about Planning your Revision. The online workshop will be available as a recording later in the week if you can’t make it along to either session.

Be sure to check back here for Wednesday’s post, where we’ll share the recording of the online workshop as well as highlighting some useful resources to help you plan your revision, and again on Friday when we’ll pick up on some of the key themes from the week and respond to some of your questions and suggestions from the Padlet.

Padlet link https://uod.padlet.org/gordonspark/20z7eiko3i9xsc3o