Testing Times – How to Beat Stress During Exams

Sarah Scrafford has very kindly submitted this post to Brain Milk to discuss how to control that exam beast, stress. Thanks very much Sarah; here you go ladies and gents:

No matter how many lessons you take, how much advice you receive, and how well you’ve studied, stress and exams are a pair that go hand in hand. One is never seen without the other. While a small amount of tension is needed to boost your adrenaline and make you want to do your best, you have to be careful of letting panic take over and making a mess of all the good work you’ve done over the year. So if you’re looking for ways to stay calm and collected when you’re preparing for or writing an exam, here’s what you need to do:

Study throughout the year: No amount of cramming a week or even a month before the exams will prepare you as well as a slow but steady process of studying throughout the year. Most of us have the tendency to study only when exam dates loom large, but if we were to adopt a routine of setting our own test schedules as and when each lesson is completed, you’ll find that preparing for your finals at the end of a term is a breeze.

Understand your lectures: If you don’t understand what you’re supposed to learn, you’re facing an uphill climb when you attempt to recollect the answers during an exam. Take the time to understand your lectures much before the exams. The ideal time would be a few days after your lecture’s over, the one that went over your head and seemed more of Greek and Latin to you. Seek the help of your classmates or your professors, much before your exams are due.

Set time limits: Whether you’re preparing for or writing your exams, you need to set time limits for finishing each portion. Set schedules for revising your topics, and when writing your exams, try and finish each question in the time you’ve set to answer it. This kind of forward planning helps you eliminate last-minute jitters and panic cramming (or writing), factors that don’t help your scores in the least.

Do things in the right order: You need to read the questions properly before you attempt to answer them and understand them properly. If you rush through your paper, there’s a high probability that you’re going to mix up your answers. When you think you don’t know an answer, take time to compose yourself and think back to your revision without freaking out. Panic is your worst enemy when you’re looking to score good marks.

Don’t discuss your answers: It’s not wise to rehash your exam and go over it question by question once you’re outside. If you realize that you’ve made a mistake, it’s going to weigh heavily on your mind and ruin your preparation for the next exam too. You can’t do anything about the answer you got wrong, but you certainly can avoid the stress of knowing you were wrong. So just focus on preparing for the next exam at hand, or if it’s your last paper, on relaxing and letting your hair down.

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the topic of radiography technician schools. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

More sharing

ryanr @ Flickr

So, you asked. I looked. And now I am happy to say, I've found. Here is one of last year's Level 3 online hubs, now integrated into MediaMax. Apparently there were others but they have since been deleted.

Well done to everyone from Level 3 who has uploaded their stuff: excellent work. And for the people using it without uploading anything: tut. (Note, this is classic evo psych thing going on here: there's a group dependent on resources, givers are rewarded and cheaters get punished.)

To the Level 2 people: where are you? There are about 150 people visiting Brain Milk each day, so some of you have got to be Level 2. Upload people.

The online hub

bfionline @ Flickr

You will have spent a long time on your essays, familiarising yourself with an area to exam-level detail. Fortunately, you only have to do an essay per course for coursework. Unfortunately, for exams you need to know lots more. One shortcut to familiarising yourself with all this other material is to read each others essays.

Last year many of the Level 3 psychologists compiled their essays on an online hub. Essays were uploaded along with the mark they got, any important comments made by the marker and without any identifying information.

The beauty of this is that you can quickly use the legwork done by others to get to a good level of understanding. In addition, you should be able to improve your own communication skills by noting in others what is effortless to read and what is horrible.

It's a great little resource and last year's was very successful but its power rests on you lot uploading your essays. To do this, first, remove your name from the doc, add your mark in a nice fat font size at the top (plus any marker comments you deem necessary), make sure the document is saved with the essay question in the file name and then head here to MediaMax and enter these details :

username: brain_milk
password: i/l/i/k/e/s/h/a/r/i/n/g
[remove all the "/" - this is to avoid bots]

After this navigate your way to right folder, or create your own if I have left one out, and upload.

Do make an effort to upload guys and gals, we all found it was a great thing to have last year...

How to note: the review

(ttstam @ Flickr)

A review: the closest thing to a magic potion when revising

If you have done stage 1, you’ll know what a course is about before you dive into it.

I would say next on the agenda is to organise the course up into its different bits, leaving out anything you have decided to jettison. Now you have your work cut out.

Choose an area and head to PubMed (or alternative), type in the area you have settled on, add “+ review” on the end (e.g. “eating disorders + review”) and press 'Search'. Sort the results so as to have the most recent first.

With a bit of luck, what you'll have now is a review paper*. A review paper is an exciting thing; the more recent, the more exciting. It’s exciting because it means less work: someone much more familiar with the material has done all the legwork for you.

So, to carry on with the eating disorders (neuropsychiatry) example here's what I'd do:

One, I'd remind myself of the course blueprint, it’s all in the brain, but the brain isn’t everything. Two, as I read through the review paper, I'd have my senses sharpened to spot 'neural footprints'...it appears there is a lot of evidence showing right hemisphere damage. That’s something to note. But I'm also on the look out for more holistic explanations than this though. What is causing these right hemisphere lesions? There’s a load of stuff on methodology, and its at a grim level of detail. I’ll skim over that. Stuff on DSM-IV and how it’s being a bit behind, blah blah blah; interesting but irrelevant. Ah! A big juicy section on external causes…media effects…introduction of TV in a remote village causes increased incidence of eating disorders, that’s a good one!...both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy seem to have efficacy...and so on.

Hopefully, you get the idea. Find a review, call to mind the course blueprint and allow it be a light. Note what it illuminates and ignore the dark bits.

*If there are no reviews available, find a few recent experimental papers; their introductions should act as mini-reviews. Compare and contrast though because that way you tease out the picture and cancel out the researchers’ selection bias.

How to note: the blueprint

raisindetre @ Flickr
Architects don't plan for every brick, but without their blueprint work cannot begin.

You are a manager putting a team together for a job. There is a budget that restricts you from hiring all candidates. Therefore, you need to be selective.

You could pick names out of a hat. Bad idea: your team’s performance won’t be optimal.

You could hire people with the best grades. Not bad, but how do you know that grades correlate with performance on the job?

You could hire people with the best skills for the job. Very sensible. Of course, this means knowing what the job entails.

So it is with note-taking: you have a surplus of candidates – information – and a budget – limited time. Selection is required - and to do this optimally you need to know what 'the job entails'.

What this means is that before sitting down and even so much as opening a paper, you need to understand the key themes of the course, what it's about, the major idea(s) it's discussing.

Ploughing into your note-taking without this will mean you will be wasting time and memory on information that may be irrelevant.

Before doing anything I used to write this question:

WHAT IS THE POINT?

This isn’t some insight into my bleak emotional state during exams. Rather, asking ‘What is the point’ is a way to program your theoretical sat-nav, restricting access to routes you don’t need to visit and showing you the sorts of things to look out for.

You should be able to pack down a course’s themes into a page of notes, diagrams, photos, and maybe even videos if you are a digital monkey and then further into a few pithy sentences to remember. I called this the course blueprint.

Here are three examples of course themes (as I intuited them) from my final year:

Neuropsychiatry:
1) The brain is everything 2) The brain is not enough.

The metonymical conundrum means everything comes down to the brain (if attended to); all psychiatric disorders can be explained in neural terms (eventually). The second part means this is not enough: these disorders need to be explained holistically (genetic, neural, personal, social, cultural etc) in order to be fully understood and treated optimally.

Human Factors:
1) Know thyself 2) EEEEE

This means if we understand human capabilities and limitations (through psychology) we can design systems and products that are easier to use, easier to learn, more efficient, error-resistant and enjoyable.

Developmental Disorders:
1) Is language is an egg? 2) What flavour is it?

Here I was getting at the question of whether language was innate (an egg) or not. (Language is an omelette – a bit of nature a bit of nurture). The second question was about the flavour of language processing – domain specific or domain general (again, I think probably a bit of both).

So, stage one of note-taking: know what the course is about, don’t just plunge straight in trying to learn all the facts. Write it out. Reduce it down. Once that’s done you are ready to go off and actually do focused, useful, efficient revision.

Mind maps: Bubbl.us

The Beautiful Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman

I just came across this nifty webpage called Bubbl.us. Might be useful to those of you whole like making mind maps in your revision.

The road ahead

Just like the start of any good essay, I'll tell you a little bit about the plan up my sleeve for this blog. It's good to know where we're going.

Broadly speaking, your revision will comprise three steps, which will overlap considerably. They are i) researching, ii) thinking and iii) learning. In the first step, you will need to assemble notes on the entire course. In the second step, you will need to craft these into reasoned critical and original arguments or rough essay plans. In the final step, you will need to ensure all this information is on-board. Much of it will have sunk in from the first two steps but some effortful learning will be needed.

I will take you through each of these steps.

More specifically, I am going to start of with a couple of posts on what my approach to revision was. I think being clever about work and not just clever in your work is important. So I will be giving advice on how to draw up a timetable, work out what you'll need to research, and how to minimize the amount of work you do by doing less work of much greater quality. I will also discuss how you can be more effective if you work in groups both on the small level (3-5) and at the year-wide level in the research stage. In other words, I will talk about how to work smartly and not just work slavishly hard.

I'll also be doing a few things to get you excited about your degree, including some cool books to read and videos to watch. I'll put into perspective just what a good degree it is and how rich and exciting it can be if you give it a chance. If you have a bad relationship with it already, hopefully, I will be able to mend that a bit. It is imperative you start (if you don’t already) enjoying and even loving experimental psychology because it makes the whole revision process less painful. I'll also speak about the 2.1/First divide and how not to get caught on the wrong side of it.

I'll do some stuff on how to take effective notes, how to make researching your notes more enjoyable and memorable, the best conditions and places to work in, question spotting, cherry picking, dealing with a mixed literature and so on.

In the first few weeks of the summer term all this research and noting should come to an end. You'll see in the following posts I suggest creating something called the 'revision bible', a printed, polished and bound version of all your notes. As such, I will be doing a few posts around this time on formatting the bible, organising your material using some advanced features in Word to make it easier to search through and getting it printed.

After this stage, you will enter step (ii), thinking. This will involve you boiling down all your information into thoughtful answers to past and invented questions. I estimate that 90% of all the answers I gave in exams in both years I had already written in some form during my revision. All I did was tweak it to the question being asked. Therefore, I will do a few posts on how to craft your arguments from your notes.

Then as you start writing a few practice essays I will unleash a torrent of posts on how to write because writing well it such a massive part of scoring highly. This will include stuff on your writing style, composing perfect introductions and conclusions, using the right words, describing and evaluating evidence and so on.

At this point I'll probably do a few posts for stragglers on emergency revision techniques. Then for people aiming higher, I give actionable advice about how to operate within First territory by being critical and original.

Then as exams loom I'll take you through the exam day, suggesting ways to get the best out of it, conquer nerves, deal with nightmare scenarios, read the questions, plan your essay, write it and what to do after.

Finally, I am going to suffuse the whole blog with posts on lifestyle during revision, including stuff on sleep, stress, exercise and food. I'll also harness the full power of the Internet to bring you some things like music to listen to and shows to watch because revision should be about relaxing too.

I am going to avoid nostrums and where I can will back up what I say with hard scientific evidence (mostly from our own subject).

So it's a tall order; however, yours is taller. In the next post, I'll talk about that big to-do list of yours and how to approach it.