Study Strategies for Exams- By Tajeshwar Singh Khara ( BM Faculty)

 

I’ve just been through the ordeal of handing back graded assessments to my 10^th grade students.  I had to witness the anguished look on their faces as they looked at their marks in disbelief.  The lower-than-expected marks that these students received are partly due to a transition to a more DP-style stringent standard of grading and partly due to some gaps in the existing skill set of these students.  I would classify these gaps in the following categories: writing, expression, business vocabulary, and study strategies for exams.

 Let me cover a few tips here that I shared with my students in class.  The first is to get in the habit of reading and writing.  Writing can start in the classroom.  In this age of information overwhelm, shut down your laptops and iPads and pull out a plain notebook and pen to take notes.  Experiment with mind maps, linear/traditional note-taking, and any other note-taking strategy that you may like (check out the Cornell notes template).

A quick digression here.  Why is writing so powerful?  Do we ever stop to realize that human civilization would not have progressed to its current level of evolution were it not for the magical art of writing?  As eloquently put by Neil Postman, writing is the freezing of thought.  Once you freeze a thought, you can come back and analyze it, criticize it, and reflect on it.  You can also go over a “written thought” again and again till it sediments itself in your mind.  Writing is key to refining your ideas.  Reflection, memorization of key ideas (yes you still need to do this to some extent), and a logical exposition is only possible through writing.

 Second, you need to read.  Reading is the gunpowder for thought.  When you read you are in direct connection with the great minds across times.  This is your one-on-one “conversation” with the author.  Reading gives you vocabulary, which is the pallet of colors that you can use in your writing.  You can express yourself with nuance and accuracy.  Having the ideas in your mind is not enough, you need to be able to articulate yourself and express those ideas as well.   This is pretty much the standard exam format that you will find today – despite the rapid evolution in technology.  Please ask your parents to get you a subscription to the Deccan Herald, the Economic Times, the Business Standard, and the Economist.  If you want to get to a top college in India, the US, or anywhere in the world, you need to do this.  You just don’t want to reach college but be able to do really well there.  You need to be able to read and write very well, as dated and as cliched as that may sound.

 You will also do yourself a great favor by reading hardcopy books.  Give the Kindle and the PDFs a rest.  Request your parents to order you a few good books.  If you like fiction, start there.  Do not let the art of reading and writing, which has been honed by our ancestors for thousands of years, go down in dust.  Start building your library.  Like the Lord of the Rings?  Read that.  I love the Hobbit books as well.  That is some really good writing.

 Watching Netflix shows will not help you with developing a critical mind.  That comes with working on your craft of reading and writing.  I went to the number one accounting school at the time in the U.S. Do you know what the main focus of the accounting program was?  Writing.  They made us write memos day in and day out.  Do not underestimate this at any cost.  Start small with the 5-pages-a-day strategy. Pick up any book and read 5 pages every day.  Read it slowly, and deliberately, and make sure you understand every word.  But only 5 pages.  Before you know it, your efforts will have compounded, and you will have read whole books and series of books.  You will see yourself writing better.  You will find the exact words to express yourself like an artist who has the right color to create his masterpiece.

 Third, you need to have a strategy to revise the material covered in class (your notes), the notes you’ve made while studying the textbook, right before the exam.  This is called the recency effect.  You may know a concept really well when you study it, but to know it for an exam you need to study it right before the exam.  Plan for this.  This is purely a test-taking strategy.

 Fourth, when you write your exam, write the highest priority points first.  For example, for an answer to what are some problems in starting a business, I would go with financing first.  That is a major problem.  Get that out of the way and then move on to things like finding the right people (HR), marketing, etc.