Final Exam Preparations

Is your student worrying about preparing for final exams? Here's a plan for spacing study time across four days. Stick to this plan and your student should see positive results on his or her test scores. Keep in mind that the time blocks apply to studying for one course. Adjust studying according to the number of courses in which your student has final exams and the degree of difficulty of each course. Good luck to all on final exams!

Four days before an exam:

• Get ready to study. Collect notes, blank pieces of paper, pens, pencils, calculators, etc., and a stack of 3x5 note cards.
• Make a study schedule listing how many hours of study time are available before the exam and what you will study each day leading up to the exam. This activity serves as a psychological block breaker by separating actually studying from getting ready to study. Many students spend a lot of time in preparation for study and because they've been "busy," their mind believes it has started studying.

Three days before an exam:

• Schedule two-hour blocks of time. Begin the first session by finishing any last-minute preparations, such as reading the last part of the chapter or expanding the last of the lecture notes. This could take the entire two hours, but if your student has been keeping up with his or her reading and class attendance, it should probably take about an hour.
• Make summary sheets and/or index cards in order to condense the information. As your student studies the cards, he or she should shuffle them so as to destroy learning them in a fixed order. This a good method for True/False tests, multiple-choice tests, or matching tests.
• For essay tests, short answer tests, or fill-in-the-blank tests, learn the information on the back of the card and try to come up with the word on the front. When your student knows these cards forwards and backwards, he or she should be able to pass any exam that tests on the facts.

Two days before the exam:

• Choose three or four large topics that have been emphasized in class or in the text and predict possible essay questions. Make an outline for each question.
• Change the writing media (using pen, pencil, colored inks, etc.) for each question. This will help your student to remember what he or she has written because each medium makes the material look fresh to the mind.
• Write the outline several times, making each outline shorter.
• Write an essay answer using the amount of time you would use in class during the actual testing situation. Read your practice essay and underline key words and terms. Copy these key words and terms in order, so that you have formed a word outline by which you can reproduce the essay at will. Memorize this outline so you can write it in 20 seconds.
• Finish this study session by going through the flashcards again.

The day before the exam:

• Flip through the flashcards and go through the outlines.
• Your student may want to practice his or her essays one last time, especially if he or she has one that is particularly troublesome.
• This session should only take 1-1 ½ hours of study time.
• Your student should relax. He or she has done all of the preparation and should concentrate on getting a good night's sleep.

On the day of the exam:

• Spend about 10 or 15 minutes going over the flashcards and outlines.
• Your student will have spent between 7-15 hours of study; he or she is prepared to take this exam.

Why is this method so effective?

• One reason is that it gives your student the opportunity to think about what he or she is studying. The two-hour blocks of time let your student's brain organize the information and make connections to information he or she already knows.
• Another positive feature of this method is the variety of senses used. Since everything we know comes to us through our senses, it would only follow that the more senses we involve in the learning process, the better able we are to remember the information. Writing involves the kinesthetic sense, and using different colors brings the visual sense into play. When your student studies his or her flashcards, reciting them out loud involves hearing and speaking.
• Finally, this method helps fight test anxiety. One of the causes of test anxiety is under-preparedness. If your student has followed this plan, and if he or she has put in between 7 and 15 hours of study, there is no logical reason to think that he or she is underprepared.