As crunch time arrives, Paul Collins shares strategies and techniques to help improve examination performance.
May and June are the time when many surveying students will spend a lot of hours revising and taking end of year examinations.
Many students typically look at past questions to see what topics have come up in previous years, go away, and revise them. More rarely is time spent on working out what the questions are really asking – and how best to go about answering them.
Taking time to develop effective exam strategies and techniques in advance, by following the 15 steps below, could make the difference between you gaining a 2.1 and a first – or a pass or fail.
1. Practice writing legibly in advance. While some universities, such as Cambridge, are considering allowing students to use laptops or tablets, most of you will be writing by hand. No matter how neatly you write, practice writing fast. If your writing is difficult to read, work hard to improve it. Do not underestimate the sinking feeling examiners experience when confronted with an illegible script. If you think your writing is difficult to read, try writing on every other line. Whatever the case, make sure that important or unusual words are written clearly.
2. Make sure you know where the exam is being held and arrive in good time. The last thing you want is to arrive in a panic and have less time to answer the paper, all the while thinking you are not going to do as well because you were late.
3. Choose your questions carefully by thoroughly reading the whole of the question paper. What on the face of things might seem difficult questions may, on careful scrutiny, turn out to be a very much simpler challenge. However, of course, the converse can be true, so be careful.
4. It is generally advisable to answer your best question first. However, you will need to consider whether it makes sense to first empty your short-term memory bank by jotting down all key memorised facts, figures and ideas for all of your questions before you start. If in doubt, do this in case your brain decides to self-delete while answering the first question.
5. Attempt the full number of questions required. Set yourself target start and finish times for each question. Remember that five minutes on a fresh question can be worth a lot more than five minutes more on a question you have already spent 30 minutes on (the law of diminishing returns), even if you do not feel confident about your second choice questions.
6. Pay attention to the key instruction words. These are: describe, examine, discuss, assess, critically evaluate, compare and contrast, write in the form of a report, etc. Marks will be gained or lost in the way you acknowledge and write responses to these instruction words. Also, respect the subject in which an examination paper is set. In law-based subjects, for example, some students fail to pay particular attention to the simple fact that it is a law paper and not one about the morality, politics or social implications of the subject they are asked to address. Finally, if a question asks you to address a problem from, say, a developer’s point of view, it means exactly that – not a general point of view.
7. Problem-based questions and setting out an answer plan. Before you start, try to see the problem as a whole, then break it in to parts using spider/mind maps or Venn diagrams. This will help you to structure an answer; along with a skeletal essay plan.
8. If you think the question is vague (intentionally or not), make your assumptions explicitly clear. State what you understand the question is asking and/or your interpretation of any word(s) or phrase(s) used. Having done that, explain at the outset what you intend to cover in your answer, the manner in which you intend to do so, and what conclusions you hope to draw. (Answers don’t always have to be a crime novel where everything is revealed at the end!) An alternative strategy is to leave half a page clear at the beginning and write the introduction after you have completed the work – especially if you are unsure what you will write until you have written it. But remember, whatever you do write in that opening paragraph will create an impression in the mind of the marker: try to make it a positive one.
9. If appropriate, try to use support diagrams, sketches and graphs. The ability to illustrate the essence of any object, situation, process, or concept can often be a good signal to an examiner. Illustrations can often be more expeditious than written text in explaining structures, processes and relationships. Finally, do not forget to neatly annotate illustrations.
Also, when presenting any numerically based answer, it is always good to provide a clear rationale for assumptions presented by annotating them. This is especially important for many valuation examinations.
10. Make judicious use of headings and underlining where appropriate. This can be helpful both to yourself in structuring answers, and to examiners in seeing their way through the text. It is also psychologically restful for examiners marking scripts, who are typically faced with pages of unbroken text.
It can also be sensible to leave four or five spare lines at the bottom of each page, to enable you to add footnotes or additions to the text after you have completed the answer. This is better than doing it at the end of the answer, because the examiner can read the additional points within the flow of the text, not after it. Programme yourself to rule off every page before you start writing.
11. Be very careful about being too anecdotal in your answers. Your experiences may be interesting and valid, but they should be balanced with reference to established theory and practice.
Do not, unless there is good reason, use colloquial language or jargon and, if you use acronyms, make sure you spell out what they stand for on first reference.
12. Answer the question, not the generality of the topic. It is so easy to lose the particular direction of the question (or, at worst, ignore it or miss it in the first place). Where appropriate, it may be a good idea to explicitly refer back to the question or particular phrases or words in it, within the body of the answer. This reminds the examiner that you are trying to pay attention to the question. Furthermore, when asked to examine a problem, make sure that you present all major sides to an argument.
If, for example, you are asked to discuss whether “retail investments are better than residential investments”, it is implicit that you also give some consideration to when and if residential investments are better than retail investments. Marks can be gained or lost this way.
13. Don’t waffle. Avoid irrelevant side roads and scenic routes in your answers. Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once said, in his presidential address to the London branch of the Mathematical Association: “The art of reasoning consists in getting hold of the subject at the right end, of seizing on the few general ideas that illuminate the whole, and of persistently organising all subsidiary facts round them. Nobody can be a good reasoner unless by constant practice he has realised the importance of getting hold of the big ideas and hanging on to them like grim death.”
In doing so, always beware of making generalisations and wild assertions, using vacuous terms and selective evidence, and making illogical deductions. It is all too easy to do this when under pressure in exams.
14. Always provide a proper summary and conclusion. Don’t just grind to a halt. It is crucially important to clearly remind the examiner (and yourself) of the main points covered, what your conclusions are and how you arrived there. If you don’t, examiners may think you do not recognise what is important in your answer, or that your thinking is so muddled you can’t come to a conclusion. Remember that most exam answers will only be read carefully once before a mark is given. Just like first impressions, the last things said count.
15. Make good use of any time left after completing the paper. Do not just run out of the room (as much as you might feel like it) or, worse still, just sit there. Always read back through your answers making any corrections and amendments. Ideally, you should plan to allow time to undertake this essential task before you hear those final words: “Time is up everyone, put your pens down, collate your papers with a treasury tag and leave them ready for collection.”
Main image: Juice/Rex/Shutterstock
Mainly for Students is edited by Paul Collins of Nottingham Trent University. He is also an external examiner at other universities and an RICS APC assessor. He welcomes suggestions for the column and can be contacted at paul.collins@ntu.ac.uk