Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about exams. Working for LEADS, I have spoken with a lot of students already concerned about how to prepare for their exams when their likely online format seems so different from what most people are used to. I can only identify. This summer, I sat my viva, which I came to think of “the last exam” – the culmination of what now felt like a very long university career – but one that felt completely unlike any other that I’d ever prepared for. This got me thinking about what I’d learnt about exams during my own undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees.

Everything still feels quite uncertain just now. Because of the pandemic, many students sitting their first university-level exams did not even get to sit their final school exams. Rest assured that (amidst the turbulence) we all understand how daunting it might be to get prepared – or even think – about the approaching exam season.

So, my tips for exams?

Start revising sooner – rather than later - by making sure you keep as ‘on top’ as possible with coursework reading. I teach history, where exams (in person or online) are usually essay-based. I always advise students to prepare and learn a stash of dates, statistics, and historians’ arguments for each topic they want to revise. That way, they have a ready arsenal of relevant information to build their answer. But its really hard to get this together if you haven’t done any of the necessary reading throughout the term…

Keep track of what you’re doing. File your notes - and make sure that they are filed in a way you can find them again. It is difficult revise something that you can’t actually find and a total waste of your time to spend an hour reading a journal article just to realise that, actually, you’re pretty sure you’ve already read it.

Think quality over quantity. Bear this in mind from the start when you choose which bits of your course to revise, but this also goes for the exam itself too. An exam assesses the application of skills and the construction of arguments using relevant knowledge... not aaaaallll the knowledge. If the person next to you is on their third exam script it’s because their writing is 20cm tall or, like the person who sat next to me in my first-year Classics exam, someone extremely clumsy had knocked a water bottle all over them like a firework. I still feel guilty.

Get the right information. Check the format of your paper near the start of the course and, if you have questions, ask your lecturer or tutor – not your mates. This seemed doubly important during the sudden shift to online, open-book exams at the end of the last academic year, but for any course there are always some rumours going around among students that just aren’t true. And, don’t assume that just because one course has an exam that asks you to answer only one question that all of your courses will follow the same format. As a marker, it’s always disheartening to see too few questions answered on an otherwise great paper. 

Finally, think about how to build what one of my old lecturers used to call “mental clarity and stamina”. We all develop coping techniques and ways to keep calm. Personally, I used to avoid checking my phone. Without fail, my mum would text that it was “only an exam”, which was probably the most annoying thing I could have heard. That said, I think I failed all of my mathematics exams – and here I am with a PhD.  

Come exam season, if you feel that you are struggling, the University of Glasgow has a range of resources designed to help and at the Learning Enhancement and Academic Development Service we are always working hard to help students with aspects of their academic study – including exams.