Exam Tip: Tap the Words

Avoid ‘silly’ mistakes

Students often lose marks from things that seem obvious to them looking back after the exam.

For example:

• Misunderstanding a graph because the shape looks familiar from something else they studied and they thought it was the same thing, even though the axes are labelled differently

• Answering ‘how is tissue fluid returned to the circulatory system’ with the answer for ‘how is tissue fluid formed’

• Missing out the last step when describing a process

But these aren’t ‘silly’ mistakes, they’re just human mistakes.

Why does this happen?

Exams are stressful, and human brains take short-cuts in stressful situations.

When your brain feels overwhelmed in an exam, it skip-reads through, pulls out the main ideas (maybe it was trained to do this in English class), does pattern-recognition, and makes assumptions. It can do this without you even realising it’s happening.

Poor brain, it’s just trying to protect you by simplifying things* to make them manageable.

But this is a huge problem:

• Examiners write exam questions in different ways - it might be slightly different from anything you’ve seen before

• The more assumptions you let your brain make, the harder it will be for you to step back and focus on the real question

(* Here’s a better way to simplify the question when there’s a genuinely confusing one with lots of jargon)

A simple trick

Problem: Your brain will try to skip-read ahead to spot key words

Objective: You need to force it to slow down, to make sure you read every word carefully, in context.

Solution:

Hold your pen and (I know this sounds stupid) tap it word by word along the line as you read each word aloud in your head.

That’s it. Very simple, but effective. Give it a go. Include words that are within graphs/diagrams.

It might feel like this takes longer and is harder than normal reading, but that’s only because you’re now reading it properly rather than skipping through.

And then:

Read the actual question again after you’ve answered it, to make sure you fulfilled all the requirements and didn’t get distracted.