To all our beautiful readers with January exams looming, HCX wishes you the best of luck! To help you out a bit, we have searched for our top revision/exam tips to try and keep you sane…
1. Allow yourself time for breaks – breaks are so important to allow your brain to process everything and commit the information to your memory, we suggest at least 10 minutes for every 50-60 minutes of studying.
2. Meet up with study friends – this can help refocus yourself, and talking through the different topics is a great way to see how much you can recall and whether you need to recap the subject again. Just remember not to freak out if they appear to know more than you, look over your notes again and it will all be fine.
3. Leave your phone alone – we all know that your phone can be a big distraction, so we suggest putting it on silent and leaving it face down so that you can focus on your studying. This also applies to opening unnecessary tabs on your laptop, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram – we know it is tempting but try to be strict with yourself.
4. Try out different techniques – we all learn in different ways, so do not be scared to vary the way you study to see if you can remember things by using a variety of methods. Using colours and repeating sentences out-loud are two of our favourite techniques.
5. Sleep is important – some of us like to get an early night before the exam to make sure that we feel fresh and ready to go, but some of us prefer to stay up until the early hours, or all night (if our bodies will let us) to make sure that we are using all the available time. To the latter, we suggest getting – at the very least – 3 hours of sleep, as this is classed as one sleep cycle. It is super important for your body to be able to function on exam day.
6. Take time to think – when you get in to the exam it is easy to be overwhelmed by the question(s) and freak out – but take a breath and you’ve got this! It has all been covered in your course so anything you write down is better than nothing.
7. Past papers – although they may freak you out when you first begin revising, looking at the past paper questions is so important. Even if it just gets you thinking about writing for the right style of question, whether it is short answer or essay style, the more practice the better.
So there you have it, our top 7 tips to get you through the exam week – good luck!