This is the third part of my article on collected tips and tricks to help you pass a school or university exam. They are called exam techniques and they helped me and they can help you.

Part C) The Exam Itself

11) Planning your campaign
The first thing to do is read over, carefully, the entire exam paper. Spend a good ten minutes reading before you write anything. In this time, work out which questions you are going to answer, which order you are going to answer them in, and plan your time in the exam: how much time you are going to spend answering each question. Take careful note of the marking scheme (see later) when making this plan.  Write down the plan on the back sheet of your answer book – you can always score it out later. It helps you feel in control, and that helps keep you calm.

Don’t be tempted to do a question on subject X just because it’s the subject you know the most about.  It might be a real stinker of a question. Are you sure you can do it?  Which parts can you do? How many marks do you think you could get on the parts of the question you can do? You might find there is another, much easier question on subject Y, which you might not have chosen because you found subject Y is harder, or because one part of the question looks really difficult. Work it out for each part of each question: which question is likely to get you the most marks? Do that one.

Reading the whole question is also important because many questions lead you through a problem – the answer to part a) is used in part b), etc. There might be clues in later parts of the question about what the examiner is expecting. Make sure you spot them.

As an examiner I am constantly amazed by students who set out to do questions that clearly they haven’t got the first clue how to do. Surely there would be another question on the paper that they could have got a few marks on at least?

When working out timescales, try and balance the time spent on a part of the question against the marks you will achieve. If it’s a 90 minute exam, and it’s marked out of 60, then on average you’ve got 1.5 minutes to get each mark. Plan time accordingly. Remember: exam questions are not about writing down everything you know about a topic – if you do this you’ll almost certainly run out of time. You’re trying to get the best mark you can on the whole paper, not just on the question you happen to be doing at the time.

Obviously, the plan (with timescales) is not a rigid one, and going a few minutes over on one question is OK – but try and catch it up if this happens.

12) Do the easiest questions first
There is absolutely no reason to do the questions in the order they are printed in the exam. I would recommend doing the easiest one(s) first.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly, getting one question safely under your belt at the start of an exam is a wonderful boost to confidence, and can help reduce any feelings of panic that might arise when looking at the harder questions.

The second reason is that the easiest question is likely to take less time than the average. That means you’ll be ahead of schedule from the start – another good confidence boost. It also means that when you get round to the most difficult question, you are free to spend all the time you have left on it, without having to drop it half-way through and come back to it later, if time permits – not a good idea if it can be avoided.

13) Look at the marking schemes – there’s lots of useful material there.
We have strict marking schemes these days – it’s part of the drive to be seen to be fair. So, if there are four marks available for the description of XXX, then the marking scheme will probably have four key points. Mention them all, and you get the marks. Often, for a question like this, I will have a list of five or six points, and give one mark for each of them, up to a maximum of four. One thing you can be (reasonably) certain of: if you haven’t made four key points, you’ve missed something.

Don’t spend half-an-hour writing a long essay for two marks. People still do this. It’s a waste of time – better spent on other parts of the question.

To be continued…