Exam Strategy: How to get into 'the zone' in an exam

A super simple and super effective strategy for your teen to use in their actual exams

Hi there,

We often focus so much on the study leading up to exams that we don’t give the exam itself the attention it deserves.

Your teen needs strategies to make sure the exam goes as well as possible. Today I want to share one of my favourites.

When it comes to sitting an exam I like to think of our brains like muscles when we exercise.

If you’re anything like me, you don’t start off a run at a neck-bracking pace.

When we exercise, it takes a wee while to get warmed up. To override the niggly little discomforts and to come into our stride.

Sitting an exam is very similar.

For the first 15-30 minutes of an exam your teen’s brain is probably just warming up. It’s only jogging, not quite ready to get into a full sprint.

This is important to understand because it should feed into your teen’s exam strategy.

Come back to the hard questions

At the beginning of their exam, if your teen expects to be firing on all cylinders immediately, they might squander precious minutes (and therefore marks) pondering a hard question that they should actually leave and come back to once they’re ‘warmed up’.

Whereas if they leave that hard question and came back to it later once their brain is in ‘exam-mode’ they might find they are able to answer it more easily and to a higher standard.

I used this strategy often. I would try and get through the easier questions first and come back to the harder ones later.

It is such a shame when students don’t finish their exam because they spent too much time pondering hard questions, when they could have earned more marks by moving on and answering easier questions.

Not answering every question

Getting a good grade in an exam is not necessarily about answering every single question.

It’s about getting the most number of marks possible.

Generally exams are designed to have some easy, some medium, and some hard questions. They’re not designed for every student to get an A+, and not even the top students will answer every question perfectly, that’s just not a thing.

Your teen’s strategy should revolve around the idea that they need to answer as much of the exam as best they can — this is not the same as answering all of the exam if they’re running short on time.

Don’t complete the exam from front to back

Similarly, it’s not necessarily smart to work through the exam paper from start to finish.

As I said above, if your teen is sitting in an exam racking their brains over a question they’re not quite sure about, that’s time they might not get back to use on questions they could answer more easily.

The last thing you want for your teen is for them to run out of time in an exam having not answered a whole bunch of easy questions because they spent 10 minutes desperately trying to remember the answer to a harder question. In that same time, they might have been able to answer 10 easier questions.

How to get ‘in the zone’

These study tips really helped my brain get into the zone in exams.

I vividly remember struggling through the first bit of an exam. Exam nerves haven’t yet settled. You feel overwhelmed. You don’t know what lies ahead.

But by the last half of an exam my brain would be fired up. I would hit peak concentration and be operating at maximum efficiency. Even the person sniffing annoyling next to me couldn’t distract me.

And it was during this ‘in the zone’ time that I found I would be able to pluck the harder answers out of my brain. Things I couldn’t remember at the beginning of the exam would suddenly come back to me.

Also, I did not always finish an exam (I didn’t have Cram Lab to help me!), but overall I still got consistently good grades. Perfection was not required.

I hope your teen can learn from the mistakes of so many students, including myself, who came before them.

Thanks so much for reading.

Clare