Lillienne’s Life Lessons in Lists: Exam Preparation

Do get a good eight hours’ of sleep the night before your mid-term, final, or any other exam situation. The exact number of hours should be whatever personally works for you. Even though I almost overslept yesterday, I did get enough sleep and was energetic enough for my Archaeology mid-term. The worst thing to do is to cram and not sleep, because you are not likely to perform very well.

Don’t cram. Sometimes this can’t be helped, if you didn’t really study regularly before, like me. But if you are pushed for time, just read through everything instead of trying to memorise as many details as possible. You are likely to absorb lots of information without putting yourself under undue amounts of stress — and really, if you don’t already know something, a few hours is not going to be enough to commit it to memory for eternity. (This doesn’t apply for those of you lucky things with photographic memories.)

Do go over your notes regularly each week and sum up what you have learned. I prefer looking at a few pages of condensed notes rather than a few hundred. I also mean these numbers in a very literal sense. It is tedious and it is unromantic, but it is quite necessary to prevent breaking the above rule. You also feel a lot less stressed when people are reciting millions of dates and information and you can say, “Oh, I know that too!”

Don’t stress too much. I know I will always feel a little bit of stress in any exam, no matter how well-prepared I am for it. A little stress is good for your exam performance, according to studies, but too much makes you blank out. You are going to do as well as you possibly can do, and you cannot do any better than that, by definition, so don’t beat yourself up over it. If you aren’t ready, you just aren’t, and you’ll have to prepare earlier next time.

Do get comfort foods before and after an exam. If you are allowed to eat candy during the exam, go ahead and eat it. You deserve nice things to eat when you are trying so hard, particularly after an exam — any reason to make up for all that slogging, no? If eating isn’t your thing, do whatever it is that equates to a really nice pat on the back for yourself, and then move on. You can’t change the past; you can only do what you can for the future.