ERPZ Stop Mugging. Start Learning.

Taking Examinations

Best advice ever

It's slightly more than 12 hours to the first examination I'll be taking in university, at the London School of Economics. I am probably not excited enough about it given that I'm still typing away on my computer and fiddling with my website when I really should be studying. Fact that all student should recognize at this point of time is that you should get rest and be mentally prepared for the papers rather than try to cram more stuff into your mind. It is a time when you start considering the difficulty of the challenge that you are taking on and preparing yourself mentally for it so that you have the capacity to handle it and to accept it when there are areas you simply cannot conquer at the moment. Expectations management is as important as forgetting your expectations altogether and focusing on the moment.

Besides being constantly reminded of the dangers of not panicking during examinations, we are informed that we must expect examinations to be difficult - and that the teaching staff of LSE are proud to say that. I pointed out in my personal blog that LSE includes the following statement in their document on examination procedures:

Please note that examinations are intentionally difficult, and feel more so under the pressure of timed conditions. The cachet of LSE degrees, in the eyes of other universities and employers, is at least in part based on the School’s rigorous academic standards. You should not therefore be surprised when your examinations feel more difficult than the previous years’ papers from which you have been revising. Examinations may contain questions that surprise you and that are unlike past examination questions. This is intentional: the examiners want to test that you have understood the material well enough to cope with new types of problems. Though challenging and difficult, the examination will also be fair. – Examination Procedures for Candidates 2011

Yet, I'm sure every year, the examinations still 'surprise' students in their creativity in terms of design and questioning methods. This is because, for a typical student with experience over the past 15 years or so of examinations have always walked into examination halls having done piles of past year questions. These are often an accurate reflection of the questions that will be coming out in the examination. The scope for creativity in question-setting haven't actually been exploited in those cases. At LSE, we are constantly informed that this will not be the case and we should really all be mentally prepared for that. This is a good thing because it reflects challenges we face in the world. Problems are not exactly problems when you already solved it before and know exactly how to approach it. My Mum says issues always crop up when she is the one using the computer. Fact is, I do often encounter those 'issues' but they are not exactly 'issues' to me - I navigate through them like the waking up ritual (rubbing eyes, folding duvet, checking time, heading to the toilet). A decent university knows that they should not be testing you with how to run through routines (that might even already be second nature to the brilliant students).

And it is these surprises in examinations that can make us proud of ourselves when we manage to overcome them, and when we manage to achieve some decent results out of it. At this point of time just before the paper, for those who feels they are still inadequately prepared: accept that no one is ever perfectly prepared for examinations. Instead, focus on making yourself ready by familiarising yourself with the examination procedures, the things you've to do for the paper and getting enough rest. As our undergraduate tutor advised in her email addressing the undergraduates of the department:

I do urge you, no matter how ill-prepared you might feel - to get really and truly enough sleep, not to try to cram, and to have a rehearsed routine for avoiding panic if you find an exam harder than you have ever faced so far in your life [...]

You actually need more sleep if you have not studied steadily because you will need to be in good control. There is almost nothing you can cram that will compensate for not having good reaction time and that ability not to loose your perspective.

I do find this to be brilliant advice and I'd urge anyone reading this to do the same in the time towards the examination. And life, more often than not, moves on during the moments when you stay calm. Time freezes when you panic. So if there's anything in the paper you realise you don't know, keep calm and carry on.