Exam Stress
It’s that time of the year when many learners, especially matrics, are frantically preparing for their final journey through their school life. However, it is near the end of the year and many learners will confront the final examination for 2019 in a month or so’s time.
The best tip that can be given to any learner in order to equip them to deal with examinations in a relaxed fashion is the old Boy Scout motto of ’be prepared’.
Leaving your studies to the last minute is always going to create a huge amount of stress and will almost ensure that the results that you achieve will not be a true reflection of your ability. Here are some tips in order to try and make the looming exams as stress-free as possible:
- Organise an exam timetable at least six weeks or a month before you start writing.
- Don’t study more than one hour in one stretch. That hour should be divided up as follows: 40 minutes of study, a 10-minute break, and 10 minutes revising what you have just studied.
- Do not study one subject per day. If you allocate three hours to studying a day, study your worst subject first, then your second worst and then your favourite subject.
- Make sure that you have a 30 or 40-minute break between subjects that you plan to study for the day.
- Subjects like mathematics and accounting should be practised for at least half an hour every day.
- During the week do not attempt to study for more than three hours a day if you had school in the morning.
- On the weekends before the looming exam, study for five or six hours, alternating subjects and, giving yourself plenty of time to rest in between studying.
- Reading is the key to studying efficiently and the volume of work to be studied increases quite dramatically as you reach grades 10, 11 and 12. A matriculant should be reading at a speed of 250 words a minute with 75% comprehension.
- When studying a subject such as history, headings and subheadings are very important and should be well-numbered. So before you study a particular section, take out the main headings, and draw a mind map with the topic in the middle and sub-headings in a spiral arm around the topic. You are then able to see just by reading the subheadings how it connects with the main theme (mind-mapping).
- Keywords are very important and with each paragraph that you study, highlight the keywords. Do not highlight many words, as by reducing the content to a few keywords you will have an idea as to what that paragraph is about by just reading the keywords.
- Your brain is only able to efficiently concentrate for a period of around 40 minutes. To sit for an hour and a half is not an efficient way to study. Refer to point 2 above.
- Revision is important but you need to understand how to revise efficiently. As suggested above who should revise after a 10-minute break the work that you have just learnt.
The next day you should revise that same work which should only take you about 15 minutes to half an hour.
You then only need to revise that same piece of work a week or two later, and then three or four weeks after that.
- Cramming is not a good idea and neither is spotting certain sections only. All this does is aggravate your anxiety.
- Sleep is important so you should ensure that you are able to sleep between seven and eight hours a day during and before the exams.
- 15. Do not revive your work by rewriting what you learn. This is inefficient and takes up far too much time.
For more practical guidance, or if you would like to find out how to set up a study timetable which will make studying less stressful, send us a message!
