Exam times can be very stressful for students, especially if it’s during the final year of study and the results could determine how readily they will proceed to the next level, whether it’s into a higher educational standard or the competitive environs of job-seeking. Performance in these exams will largely boil down to how effectively the person studies.
Studying for exams requires a lot of self-discipline and hard work, but it should not have to require a Herculean effort. We’ve all heard tales of students pulling all-nighters and poring over their books in the early hours of the morning. Don’t be one of those; divide your workload evenly throughout the course of the year, and indeed over the course of your evening. Three or four half-hour intervals of concentrated study are far more effective than a two-hour block where your focus will inevitably wane, no matter how much coffee you knocked back during the day.
Another common studying pitfall is to gaze at textbooks for a prolonged time. Exams are not about regurgitating chunks of text. They are about processing a question, planning how you will answer that question and drawing upon what you learned to provide that answer. That’s why practicing exam questions from previous years is crucial. You will get a sense of the type of questions you can expect to answer in the exam, plus how to structure your answer so that you’re addressing the question being put to you instead of unceremoniously throwing words onto a page.
This infographic from Study Medicine Europe contains several more valuable tips for exam preparation, so that it’s not about counting the hours of study, but making the hours of study count.
An infographic by the team at Study Medicine Europe.
About the contributor: Aris Grigoriou is a Student Recruitment Manager at Study Medicine Europe, and has over ten years of experience as a recruiter. Aris holds an Executive MBA from Imperial College of London and an MSc from Bristol University.
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