Le Exams: How to Pass them (Tips and Stuff)

Hmm...

Let’s be honest: exams are bulls**t. On its own merits, a three-hour exam is a pointless waste of your time. Exams are not a test of intelligence, or learning, or recall. Exams are a test of how good you are at passing exams. 

The only reason written exams are still there is because there is no sustainable, cheaper alternative to test candidates and advance them to the next level of education on a mass scale.

With that being said. Here is what you came here for:

PANIC. (DON'T!) 

DON'T!
SERIOUSLY, DO NOT PROCARSTINATE

Le Exams are here! Students lock themselves away in airless libraries rather than having dramatic love affairs or plotting to bring down the government.
Exams are a measure of how well you can play the system. Some of the smartest people might get poor grades at crunch-time because as soon as they hear “You may now open your papers and start writing”, they panic. The knowledge is there, but the format in which to transfer the knowledge onto a 30 page booklet is lacking (and that's what exams are, really)

PRACTICE.
As they say: 

"Practice makes perfect" 

It does. Go through notes and past papers. Even if you have finished them all, just go through them again to polish on the areas you are weak in and to correct your mistakes.

PLAN.

STUFF STUDENTS SAY

Most of us start complaining to our colleagues, "Ah me I don't know anything; I'm going to fail; I just started revising yesterday night". It's all because of poor planning! Thinking they still have alot of time and will randomly revise each subject. Plan beforehand what you intend to do and how much time you are going to allocate.

LEARN THE FORMAT OF THE PAPER.
No amount of revision is going to help if you don't know exactly how the paper is going to be structured, and how long you’ll have to answer each separate part of it. You may spend the whole exam writing a Nobel prize-worthy answer to a question about dark matter (Physics stuff), but since it's just 10 marks of of the 100, guess what: YOU FAIL (the exam). 

BE DIFFERENT.
Everyone is different. We all have our own way of understanding and visualizing events and knowledge. Some of us can revise at night only. Some of us walk while revising. Some of us can only revise in a group. Don't copy the revision style of another student (no matter how clever they might be). Revise the way YOU are comfortable. 

And finally; 

CHILL  (DON'T OVERDO IT).
Don't be afraid to take breaks (not too long). Be confident once you have revised sufficiently, don't start reading books outside the examination hall knowing the paper starts in 2 minutes. Having a discussion with your friends on some topics before the exam is perfectly fine. Whatever you revised will be counteracted if you turn up to your test sleepy and confused. Pack your bag early and get a good night’s rest.


Once you have learned how to pass exams, you must learn how not to pass exams. Exams are a pernicious, awful hazing ritual designed to produce compliant drones who can give answers on cue, but not doing your best at them only hurts you, so if you really want to beat the system, you have to remember that your real education takes place outside the exam hall. It’s about reading widely, thinking deeply, asking hard questions rather than simply giving the right answers with a smile. 

Hope this helped.

Best of luck in your exams!