How to prepare for your Exam

Planning and Time management.

A well-known saying is “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Planning and time management is a key to success. It helps you to complete your course in time and save time for revision. If you don’t plan and study haphazardly, there are more chances that you may not be able to complete your course before exam.
How a student can plan properly? It is easy. First of all, see that how many subjects are included in your course. How many chapters, lessons and exercises are there in each subject? How much time is available for completing your course? For instance, you are a student of semester system, you have six months for preparation exam. Make a plan for your study, how to complete the entire course in the available time. Divide the total time (months, days or hours) on the contents of each subject. Do exclude a month (better the last month of session) for final revision for exam. Write down this plan on a sheet. Such plan is called schedule or syllabus. Make a time table having time for each subject on daily basis. Paste your plan and time table on wall in front of your study chair or study place. Start to follow it.
          Frankly speaking, you can study a book having 15 chapters in a single week if you have the strong determination. I mean to say, always be particular about your precious resource, the time, and have strong determination, if you want to be a successful student.

Regular classes and studies.

            Regularity and perseverance are basic elements of effective study and signs of successful student. Study should always be kept maintained. Study for a day and giving up it for some days and then starting again, is not a good way. You must study regularly (without pauses of days) in order to succeed. Regular study helps you in two ways. First it relieves you from wastage of time and second, the most important one, you have food for thought in your mind from previous lesson or topic which helps you in learning the next lesson or topic easily. All the lessons are inter-related. You should study regularly so that you have your previous learning fresh in your mind which helps in learning next lesson with perfection and in less time comparatively.
Similar is the case of attending classes.

Making Good Notes.

Making useful and helpful notes is important part of your preparation for Examination. It helps in fast learning and fast revision. It saves your time when you read it in future. Notes can be made from many sources but the main two sources are as follows,
      • Teacher’s lecture
      • Books and guides
Be alert while sitting in classroom. Listen to the lecture with full heed. Extract from the lecture, the important and helpful information, and main ideas which teacher want to convey to you. Write it down on a paper.
Similarly be focused on ideas of your lesson while you study. Read each sentence with full heed and extract from them, the important and helpful information, and main ideas. Write it on a paper. Finally shape your notes in a good way so that it can be effectively used in future for re-learning and revision.

 Revision is must.

        Revision is an indispensable part of preparation for exam. Revision helps learning to mature. You complete your course and you learn well but it is not the end of it. You should revise it again and again. It is a fact, if you study a chapter well and don’t revise it, the learning you have in your mind from first study will vanish with the passage of time. If you don’t revise for a month, it is more likely you may forget it after a month or two. It needs to revise it again and again for keeping it in mind for a long time.
          Revision does not take much time because you have already learnt it but you revise to refresh your learning.
          Another advantage, each time you revise you learn more and you get new ideas. You should have a month (usually last month) in your schedule for final revision for exam, if you want to score really. Final revision is very much important.

Study all – Avoid selective study.

Selective study is a risk-taking activity for a student. Sometimes, student thinks that some topics are more important than the others. He usually consider those questions important which were frequently repeated in the previous exams. He prepares those topics only which he thinks are important and skip the others. As a consequence, he gets low grades in exam because he is also asked those question which he skipped thinking them not important.
          Remember, exam is given in entire course not in selected areas of your course. Every lesson and every topic is equally important. You should be fully prepared. It is the will of test-maker that he can select any part of the course for giving question in exam.