Pass that examination looming in the Horizon without any Hassle

Its almost the end of the academic year, and if you were one of those students who have put off their preparation for the exam until the last minute, dont you worry. Help is at hand. I will give you a few tips (and tricks) that will help you sail through the examination. This can be applied to examinations at all levels, be it a Primary school examination, or an examination at a professional level. Feeling a bit curious, are you? If you are then read on.....

Most examinations, whether they be school-leaving examinations or professional examinations, are unfortunately still based on the principle of 'regurgitation'. What this means simply is that if you learn ''by heart'' (rote) a few topics, and keep your fingers crossed that the same topic is asked in the examination and there is a question on it, you should pass. This situation though is rapidly changing especially for professional-level examinations.


So her are a few tips for your exam success:

a) What do you think is the first thing you need to do to pass an exam? Buy a good (text)book, did you say? A good tutor? Preparing in advance?

No, the answer to that question is simple: The first thing you need to do to pass an examination is to SIT the exam!! Silly though it may seem, there are many students out there who for one reason or anotther do not go to the exam. If you do not go to the exam, you would be an absentee and hence fail the exam summarily-its as simple as that. Hence, on the day of the exam, make sure that you start early form home. It would be wise to physically travel to the exam centre from the place where you stay a day before the exam as a 'trial run' just to familiarise yourself with the route all the more so if the exam centre is not within an area familiar to you. You would not want a taxi driver to figuratively 'take you on a ride' on the day of your exam, would you?
b) Much before you can sit the exam though, you need to make sure that you are ready to pass the exam. This applies more so to Entrance exams to professional courses etc. I know that most of the times you will have no choice and that either peer pressure, 'social pressure' or just the curriculum would expect you to be sitting and passing that particular exam. But ask yourself this honest question before you decide to sit the exam: ''Would I pass this exam with my current level of preparation if I sat this exam?'' If the answer to that question is ''no'', then have a rethink. You have to be careful though- dont be too harsh on yourself. There are many good students out there who postpone sitting the exams only because they lack self-confidence. It is wise to ask one of your tutors/teachers if THEY think you are ready for the exam- if the answer is ''Hmmm.... perhaps so...'' or something as vague as that, pin them down to be honest. After all, it is you who is sitting the exam, and you have to re-sit the exam ( and pay the whole exam fee again) if you were to fail, so please ask them to be honest and frank- and dont forget to thank them for it. Some of you may not have a good relation with all your tutors or indeed the one to who you have put the question to. In that case, take a second opinion, perhaps even a third. The bottomline is : Be SURE to PASS the exam when you sit it!!
c) So you have decided to sit the exam, and to go to the exam in time-that's excellent!
Now, you will have to ensure that you will pass the exam at this sitting. How do you do it?
I want you to do a small task for me ( actually for yourself)- call it 'homework' if you may.
For exams that have a standard syllabus ( like the ones in schools or the Board exams):

I want you to take out your standard textbook ( the one that is prescribed by the 'authorities') and go through the index, and mark each and every chapter that YOU think is important- remember to include the sub-topics of the chapter too. Make sure you mark them with a pencil ( I will tell you why in a moment). After you have done so for each chapter and for each subject, take a break. That's right, take a breather- you dont want to get too tired right away, do you?
Now, I want you to get hold of previous question papers for that exam, and I want you to go through each question paper for the past 10 years- thats right, the past 10 years. That is because researchers will tell you that there is a likely possibility of some standard questions from past question papers being repeated.
You may now be thinking, ''Where can I get hold of past question papers?'' You have a few options: Try your school or college library-it may have a collection of old question papers. Some Boards also sell previous question papers ( for a fee, of course). The internet may be a good place to look at too. Just Google it. If you cannot find them, then go for the second-best, and look at model question papers. There must be tons of those readily available, and examiners have been known in the past to just 'copy and paste' a few questions from these model papers. The reason you need to go through the previous years' question papers is not only to familiarise yourself with the questions but also to see a pattern of those topics which the examiners have been setting questions on. For example, if you are sitting a Math exam, and there has been a question on Quadratic equations at least 8 times in the last 10 years, there may be a hint there that the Board and the examiners think that it is an important topic that they need to test you on. Another easy method to do that is to go through your class notes- everytime your teacher/tutor said ''and this is an important topic...'', it probably is, so dig out your classwork too.
Once you have got hold of the previous exam papers/model questions/important topics as told by your teacher, I want you to do one more thing. Go back to your textbook on that subject ( in which you would have hopefully marked the topics that YOU thought were important), and mark all the topics on which the previous questions were based- I mean all of them. Preferably, use a different-coloured pencil. You would have now seen that a pattern is emerging- there are some topics that the examiners have rarely set a question on... and there are others which have been examined quite frequently. Once you can see this pattern, may I offer my congratulations- you are half-way through passing your examination.
More tommorow......