Exam Tips

Various people with HFA/AS have contributed their tips, techniques, and opinions on the fine art of exam survival.

1. Think about the type of course. Is the emphasis on knowing lots of facts or on understanding a system or being able to reason with the information? You might think that all courses SHOULD be on reasoning, but in actual fact many of the courses are intended to make you conversant with a lot of factual knowledge in a certain field. Only later will the emphasis shift to arguing about theories and models.

2. Try to infer from the type of instruction what to expect from the exam. Instruction can be geared towards understanding structures or models or geared towards learning as many facts as possible. It is often possible to infer from the way the lecturer treats the subject what kind of knowledge she will be asking about in her exam questions. Lots of lecturers actually tell their students what to focus on. If they don't, simply ask them.

3. Try to infer from the study route that offers the course what kind of questions will be likely to appear in the exam. Different subjects or study routes often lead to different type of exam questions.

4. One might infer what to study by the way the lecturer tries to get you to prepare for the classes. For the basic cognitive classes we got a list of questions for each chapter and were told to answer those. They were mostly questions about biological facts, sometimes quite extensive (such as: describe this or that model, or: how do model A and Model B differ from one another). The exam consisted of a selection of 10 of these questions (There were 100 in total, about 10 for each chapter).

5) Find out if there are old exams you can use to prepare for the real thing (student organisations collect them). There often are.

6) Ask older students about the exam.

7) Ask the lecturer to give a 'mock' exam, or at least a few questions of the kind he might be using in the real exam.

"My advice then:

Keep yourself in good health before the exam, get enough sleep, food, and take care that you have not got any problem such as an unattended bad tooth that will affect you on the day.

Determine where your exam is to take place and familiarise yourself with it. Be sure to arrive well in time so you will not panic if anything delays your journey.

Seek whatever accommodations you feel appropriate (separate room, computer, amanuensis or whatever) you are not giving yourself an unfair advantage, you should not be afraid of what other students might think or how professors will react to these requests they are your right and it might make the difference between being able to establish your knowledge or not.

Prioritise anything else that is going on in your life so it will not compete with your time for preparing for and revising for the exam and otherwise stress you out."