Getting exam ready: The essential elements of being well prepared for exams

What does being ready for high school exams entail? Here are what I think are the 4 pillars of getting exam-ready.

Hi there,

When exams are only a couple of months away, it’s a good idea to start strategising how you’re going to get the best grades possible.

To that end, I want to make sure that your teen understands the essentials of effective exam study, so here are what I think are the 4 big-ticket elements of exam study, and the techniques that I strongly attribute my own exam success to.

1. Having a plan is key to organization, motivation, and managed stress levels

Embarking on exam study without a plan for how you're going to approach it is not a good strategy.

A lot of teens do not prioritise time for planning because they think of it as time that could be spent studying. But this is counterproductive.

Investing a bit of time at the beginning to plan actually results in much more time saved over the course of your teen's exam study.

By the time exams are around the corner, your teen has (or should have…) learnt a lot at school that year. Multiple subjects with multiple topics per subject. This means there is a LOT of content to cover to get ready for exams. And a large volume of content is much easier to get through in an organised, systematic and logical order if your teen has given some thought to their study plan before launching in, rather than wading through an enormous mound of material without a head torch.

To that end, I cannot exaggerate the benefits of making an Exam Study Timetable before they start studying for exams. It will help your teen plan their study days, ensure they cover all topics, keep them accountable, AND keep stress levels down.

When I felt the feeling of panic rising up in my throat as exams approached, I found great comfort in my Exam Study Timetable — seeing that in fact there was enough time to fit everything in, I just had to stick to the plan.

2. Focus on the topics that count the most

Another common mistake is to approach studying like an archeological dig — getting bogged down in the detail, and losing sight of the big picture. The big picture being the key topics of each exam. It's these topics that will in all likelihood be the focus of the exam questions, and therefore, the most marks.

Preparing for exams isn't just about being smart or knowing absolutely everything, or even who has studied the hardest. It's about studying smart. And this means focusing your study attention on the topics that matter.

Your teen should know, or at least be able to find out, what the key topics of each of their subjects are, based on what they have spent the most time on in class, and also by their curriculum. They might even have been given a breakdown of a subject's curriculum at the beginning of the year. (This can be super helpful for making Subject Maps too.)

3. Studying in a way that works for YOU

If I have one goal for Cram Lab it is to hammer home the message that the key to achieving consistently good exam grades is to figure out what study techniques and methods work for you, and to apply that process every time you prepare for exams. I call this your teen’s Study System.

Every student's Study System is, at least to some extent, unique to them. There are some parts of studying that almost all students will benefit from, like writing study notes, but there will likely be subtleties in your teen’s study process that ensure THEY are getting the grades they are capable of. No two brains are exactly the same after all.

So when your teen sits down at their desk you can encourage them to be thinking about the study techniques they're using. If they're getting really bored, or frustrated, or feel like nothing's going in, there is a good chance it’s because they're doing something that doesn't work for them.

Students who get the grades they are capable of understand how they best process and retain information, and this is the ultimate goal for effective exam study.

4. Putting what you study into practice

If I had to single out one thing that helped me get consistently good grades in exams it would probably be that not only did I revise, read, and make study notes during exam study, I also practised APPLYING what I had studied to practice questions and practice exam papers.

Your teen can study all they want, but if they turn up to the exam and haven't before applied they know and crafted an exam answer to suit the question being asked, they will be quite unlikely to get the marks they otherwise deserve.

Being able to apply knowledge and answer an exam question properly and fully is a separate skill to the act of simply acquiring knowledge during the course of exam study.

All your teen needs to do is make sure they incorporate answering practice questions and attempting past or practice exams as part of their study process. This is such an important aspect of exam study — so important in fact that I would always recommend allocating time to this rather than studying something peripheral that is unlikely to pull in many extra marks.

Exam success needs not be complex

You can appreciate from this list of must-do exam study techniques that effective exam study does not need to be a mystery. Effective exam study is one of those things that is simple but not necessarily easy.

I’m not going to pretend that hard work, discipline and an appetite for delayed gratification aren’t required. BUT, any student can apply the techniques I’ve talked about here, and if they do, they will be well on their way to getting the grades they’re capable of. 

Thanks so much for reading.

Clare