Stress can negatively impact your test scores. If you don’t deal with exam anxiety beforehand, the following might happen to you:
- Having reduced attention span and not reading instructions correctly
- Getting flustered and forgetting all the answers
- Doubting all your answers and not finishing the exam on time.
To help the students who stress out often, we gathered helpful and easy tips that you utilize. Here’s how you can avoid getting overly anxious and failing the exam as a result:
Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
One of the more obvious tips, but the one that gets disregarded the most. Many young learners think that they can sail through the exams with their natural “talent.”
However, it’s often isn’t the case, and as the exam inches closer, the students realize that they don’t know anything. You need to prepare for the exam sufficiently— that’s a pre-requisite for feeling confident about the exam.
Fill Yourself With Energy
Unhealthy eating habits negatively affect mental health, and it’s a well-known fact. Eat healthy to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your study sessions and have less stress overall. Fresh food, not junk food, cook yourself not eating out, and water, not fizzy drinks — it’s that easy.
Study in Groups
Reading through the learning material and solving the handbook problems will only get you so far. To successfully remember everything before the exam, it’s best to create a study group. In a group, you’ll discuss complex questions and explain to each other the parts of what you’ve learned. Such a learning method has one of the highest rates for information retention.
Take Strolls After Long Study Sessions
Don’t leave the exam preparations for the two days before it’ll be conducted. By cramming all the information over a short period, you only make it harder for yourself to recall information successfully. Additionally, this doesn’t do any good for your stress levels because you see how little time you left yourself.
Practice Time Management for the Exam
To be sure that you can write the exam within the given time, you can do a mock exam for yourself. Just look through the past years’ exams and analyze how much each section would optimally need time. Of course, don’t forget to leave in some time for revising too! Then, try to complete it according to your plan and see how you fare! Exercise to Improve Your Memory
Another thing outside of studying that you can do to improve your memory and reduce stress is exercising. Even a small 30-minute daily exercise routine can easily steer you clear of any stress, especially combined with comprehensive studying.
Get Help With Your Academic Load If You Need It
Using personal statement editing services to help with your school assignments might be a great idea. Quite often in college, you won’t have the time to prepare for the exam and your assignments. This is when such services come in handy — they take off the academic load while you prepare for the exam.
Don’t Pull an All-Nighter Before the Exam
Pulling an all-nighter before the exam is a horrible idea because it affects your body in the following ways:
- You become less attentive the next day
- You actively damage your brain by not getting enough sleep
- Your memory retention lowers due to exhaustion
- Negative hormones will prevail in you, stimulating the feeling of stress.
Healthy seven-hour sleep is a minimum before an exam. By staying up too late before the exam, you’re not helping yourself excel at the exam, and you’re damaging your health. So, why do it?
Prepare Everything You Need for the Exam in Advance
You don’t want to hectically gather everything you need in the morning before the exam. You’ll only make yourself nervous and anxious. Don’t try to remember what you need to put in your backpack —do it in the evening the day before.
Exclude the Possibility of Being Late
How not to oversleep? It’s easy — don’t use the snooze button as soon as you start reaching for that button, your chances of oversleeping increase significantly. Instead, stand up when you hear the alarm: even if you’re extremely sleepy, you won’t fall back to sleep standing up. Practice this technique a week before, and you’ll see just how effective it is.
Don’t Spiral Into Defeatist Thought Pattern
As you’ll be waiting for the exam to begin, your mind may start racing with several negative throughs. “You don’t know anything,””You’ll fail,””There’s no way that you can do it”— it’s just your inner saboteur talking. Whatever you do, don’t listen to it! Use deep breathing and silently counting to take hold of your emotions.
Don’t Look to Others, Focus on Yourself
When the exam starts, concentrate on it and yourself, and that’s it. No matter what other students will be doing, don’t pay any attention to them. They have their test, and you have your own — that’s the most important thing. If you start looking at others, you might get insecure and stressed out how everybody is working, and you’re not.
Pay Attention to the Time
Outside of the test, the only thing you need to pay attention to is the clock. Keep count in the back of your mind how many questions you have left and compare it to the time left. This way, you’ll stay on top of things rather than stress out (because you’ll be just too busy to do that).
Don’t Worry — You’ll Do Just Fine
If you apply all of the tips we included in the article, then there’s no way that you’ll fail. So, start preparing, get yourself a study group, eat healthily, take breaks, and you’ll feel just fine before the exam.