An exam is always stressful. But what prevents us from coping with it? Preparing for an oral exam is a difficult and important stage. Your assessment will largely depend on what you can remember.
If you have good visual memory, and you prepared well for the exam, then the textbook page itself will pop up in front of your eyes. You just need to concentrate and be sure to calm down. If you are agitated, then close your eyes, relax, remembering for a moment something funny or pleasant.
So, another portion of advice.
- After you get to working condition, read the questions carefully. Do not despair or be alarmed if at first it seems to you that you do not know anything at all. This happens to many. Active recall is a difficult and complex process. Start with what you know. If you know a question well, then start with it. As you prepare to answer it, you will subconsciously recall the rest of the questions. And it’s okay if you can’t remember something at all. In the end, with extensive knowledge of the subject, you can think of a lot on your own.
- Record the essentials. Take notes or plan your response. To ensure that your knowledge is consistent when answering, leave free space for those details that you recall later. If you can’t remember any definition or formula, skip the place and come back to this later. Remember, never answer with a blank slate, even if you are super awesome. Recordings help both you and the examiner in making choices.
- Just the facts. Remember, the answer must contain facts and valuable information. Pouring “water” you risk drowning or “swimming” … It is known that a few specific numbers, details, facts have a much deeper impact on the interlocutor than lengthy reasoning on the entire topic of the answer.
- Observe the examiner. Before you go to answer, you should definitely observe the examiner: what are his reactions and the degree of their manifestation, how friendly he is, or vice versa – annoyed, what kind of person he is. This information will be very useful to you when answering.
- If you have already completed the preparation and firmly know that you will not remember anything else on this issue, then take a rest. Look around, observe how the previous applicant responds. Maybe in his answer you will hear something that may be useful to you. The fact is that the content of the questions, especially on social disciplines, overlaps very strongly, sometimes it is enough to listen to your predecessor in order to significantly enrich your answer.
- I would also like to say about cheat sheets. Of course, you will hardly be able to copy the entire text from the cheat sheet letter by letter, but sometimes it happens that you need to look into it with one eye once. This happens if you are firmly sure that you have not memorized this formula and therefore specially wrote it down on a cheat sheet. Here everyone acts at their own peril and risk, especially since the examiner, as a rule, sees everything. Therefore, just in case, remember: after you look into the cheat sheet with one eye, your hands will shake and everything in your head will mix for at least ten minutes. The fact is that cheating on a cheat sheet is an overly stressful situation. At the same time, the volume of immediate memory decreases sharply, and as a result, you have to rewrite almost every word, every now and then looking at the cheat sheet.
And if the exam is written, for example testing? How to behave in this case? Here are some general recipes for more successful testing tactics.
- Focus! Take your time slowly! Time constraints should not affect the quality of responses.
- Start Easy! Start answering those questions that you have no doubts about. This will release your nervousness and focus all your energy on the more difficult questions.
- Skip it! You need to learn how to skip difficult or incomprehensible tasks: there are always questions in the text that you will surely cope with.
- Read the assignment to the end! Otherwise, you can make annoying mistakes in the easiest questions.
- Think only of the current assignment!
- Exclude! Many tasks can be solved faster if you do not immediately look for the correct answer, but consistently exclude those that are clearly not suitable.
- Leave time to check your work so that you can skim your eyes and notice obvious mistakes.
In any case, no matter how the process of preparing for the exam goes, a positive attitude is important. After all, any peaks are conquered, right? Good luck!
