May 2019

Clever exam hacks for students

(Part 1)

1. Look after your eyes:

You will be doing plenty of reading from textbooks, summary notes, post-its, flashcards and the likes over the next few months, so it is important to look after your eyes during this period. The expert’s advice on reducing eye strain is to apply the twenty-twenty-twenty rule. That is to take twenty seconds to look at something twenty feet away and repeat this every twenty minutes. Going outside on your breaks will get some fresh air to the eyes. Another good exercise is to simply rest your eyes in the palm of your hands for a few minutes, making sure that no light gets through. Too much time on devices wouldn’t be great for keeping your eyes fresh around exam time students. Just saying!

2. Write your notes by hand:

With a lot of schools switching to iPad’s and tablets as a mode of education, the debate rages about which type of notes is best to have from a classroom lecture i.e. typed or handwritten ones. I still think there is a question mark about doing some subjects in digital format. From listening to students, I think many of them still like to have a hard copy book in their hand. Even as an ICT teacher myself, I believe that the old fashioned way of taking notes by hand is best for the following reasons:

♣ Since we now can type faster than we write, students are tending to type notes verbatim (exactly to the word) as they try to keep up with their teacher/lecturer. We are copying down a lot of the teacher’s language directly. There would be more of our own language than the teacher’s used in a handwritten set of notes, which makes them easier to understand and ultimately, of better quality.

♣ With handwritten notes, we spend more time thinking about the Information before the actual physical act of writing occurs. If we are attempting to type everything exactly as spoken, there is less thinking time about that same information. In essence, I believe that slightly more learning takes place during the actual handwriting process.

♣ Keywords are valuable in any content. When you are taking down notes by hand in a lecture/class, you are listening out for the keywords to ensure you are grasping the bones of the sentence. Again, while typing you are trying to get everything down and so your brain misses out on this ‘essential keyword focus’.

♣ When handwriting notes, you are putting your own special stamp on them, making it easier to recall information you have translated into your own words.