A Few Exam Tips

The following is an excerpt from my email to a friend who've asked me for a few exam tips:

First let me concede my inability to give you the best of advice to help you through this difficult situation, but please allow me to offer a few still:

First off: Don't be overconfident. I don't see that from your response, which is good. It might even sound strange to you, but it does happen to some people (especially after a few revisions). Sadly, it's always the false sense of security that makes us more vulnerable to failure.

That said, my next advice: Don't panic. Too much panic is always counterproductive. I sometimes do this relaxation technique, which helped me a lot to prevent panic attacks during exam: While I was calm in my room (weeks or days before any test) I close my eyes and imagine I'm in the exam hall. It works best if I actually feel the stress and panic during that meditation. But the trick is then to calm myself down in that simulated exam moment. The desired result is to associate exams with a relaxed, calm and confident feeling. I believe this positive emotional state would help us a lot to focus in exams.

"What about the subject?", you may ask. What to study, how and when? My approach for EOS 5: Revise multiple topics in a day - across different semesters and systems. I believe in the quality of my revision not the quantity, which means I didn't measure how many lecture notes I haven't read, or how many times I've gone through a particular note - which most of my friends did. I simply open a textbook, say Papa Patho, and choose a topic, say Diabetes. After I read about diabetes, I try to recall the anatomy of the pancreas, kidney, or even then continue to read on myocardial infarction because I know diabetes poses a strong risk for MI.

That might have been ineffective, afterall, what if I've read MI before, should I study what I haven't instead? Not at all. The trick is to know what you already know and what you don't. If certain topics like MI keeps on popping up (it's related to various important diseases we learn) it means it is important for exam purposes! But I never forget to go through lecture notes - making sure I haven't overlooked on subtopics or minute details (in the end, the lecturers are the ones forming the exam questions). There is one caveat: Different people have different successful methods of study. I've only suggested one, you must already know many others.

My final tip: Discuss what you've studied, with others. This may in fact be a selfish practice, because you actually benefit more than the person you discuss with if you had the priviledge to quiz others or attempt at other people's questions. Or you might also learn what he/she knows that you didn't.

One bonus tip: Borrow exam-question-sample books from the library. Those have surely helped me and my friends whom I shared those sample questions with.

There was, however, another important tip which I shared with this friend in another email:
 
Most importantly, if I must say, is that at the end of each day, I'd reflect upon the lessons I've learnt [from my revisions] on that day and topics I've covered and test myself if I can recall them - or [see if] I [have] just wasted my time in front of a book (If so, I'd [try to] figure out why)

At the end of the email, I told her this:

It's never too late to work hard.
Hakim J