Many people experience pressure, stress and anxiety when it comes to exams. Whilst a certain amount of pressure is good for us and helps us to perform well, it is important to keep some balance and perspective, especially to help manage any exam stress.
There are lots of practical activities you can do to help stay calm such as plan your time, set reminders for regular breaks, enjoy some exercise and practise mindfulness or talk to a friend about how you're feeling. If you prefer not to talk directly to a person you know, the Student Assistance Programme is a free 24-hour confidential helpline - call on 0800 028 3766 to speak to an experienced adviser who will offer support in a friendly, non-judgemental manner. You can also contact the service through a call back request, email or manned live chat within the ‘My Healthy Advantage’ mobile app, available on IOS or Android.
Our preparing for exams web pages also offer some great practical tips for revision - including reading past papers, being realistic about what you can achieve in each revision session and giving yourself some small reward goals - as well as for during your exams.
SUBU Advice offer support to help you stay calm during the exams - read their guide to managing exam stress to help you prepare.
Revision tips
BU’s Dr Andy Johnson, is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, and he's shared some insights to help your memory and the effectiveness of your revision.
1. Test yourself
There's a concept called the 'student illusion’ which refers to a false belief that simply reading over your notes will be an adequate revision strategy. In fact, this is a very poor strategy. Memory is affected by how deeply you process the to-be-remembered information. Simply reading over the information is shallow, or superficial, processing and will result in weak memory. A far better strategy is to test yourself - perhaps, create some revision cue-cards and repeatedly test yourself on that information. Research has shown that testing yourself results in far more items being remembered - just make sure the information is correct first or you might memorise the wrong content.
It's also been shown that revision improves when you include a gap between repetitions - so rather than cram all your revision into a single session, space out your revision schedule so that you are self-testing the same content over a number of revision sessions.
2. Pre-sleep revision
Information learnt before sleep has been shown to be remembered better. When you're asleep, you are not being exposed to new information/new memories, so there's less opportunity for the stuff you've just learnt to be interfered with by new memories, so your most recent memories become stronger. It may be useful to re-cap on the information you've revised that day just before going to bed to help consolidate those memories.
3. Re-create your revision environment
When we learn information, we do not do this in a vacuum, and your memories become associated with the environment in which information is being learnt. Since those two things are linked, re-creating elements of your revision environment can act as a cue for the revised information. For example, if you always eat mints when revising, take some mints into the exam.
If you need a space to study, you can view the building opening times on campus webpage. Remember, if you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious, you can always contact the Student Wellbeing team or the Achieve@BU team.
