How to stop panicking during exams

There is LITERALLY NOTHING WORSE than that feeling of looking at a question and going completely blank. Like you have no idea what’s going on and you start to PANIC. Let’s do a bit of unpacking and try help you avoid that feeling for good.

Okay so firstly, what’s the point of an exam?

In an exam you have one goal, and one goal only: get the most marks in the least time.

This is the ONLY important thing.

You know that you only have a certain amount of time to do that exam, so you need to make sure you get every single mark you can in that time.

How do I get the most most marks in the least time?

By doing all the easy questions first.

Practically what this means is that if you get stuck on a question for more than five minutes and you think you might get it wrong you should move on. You absolutely don’t want to waste half an hour on a tough question you might get wrong and then run out of time for easy questions you could have gotten right.

So when you get stuck, circle a question, move on, and come back at the end when you have time.

What if I still don’t understand when I come back?

While teachers can make exam questions really hard, they can’t test you on stuff that isn’t in the syllabus.

So if you are looking at a question and you have no idea what’s going on you should do three things:

1. Work out what part of the syllabus this question relates to
2. Start writing down everything you can think of related to that section (if your exam has process marks you might even get some points for this – for example in physics you can get a mark for identifying the correct formula)
3. See if you can related the question to any of the things you’ve written down. You might not get the right answer, but you want to at least try and get a few marks. Ideally of course while writing stuff down you’ll actually figure out the correct answer. But if you don’t this process will still help you get the most marks in the least time

Bonus 🤖🤖🤖

If you want to get really good at this technique, do a timed past paper. Get a sibling or parent to be an “invigilator” who makes sure you don’t look at the memo or any textbooks while you practice, and see what marks you get in the allocated time.

This will also help you realise which areas you need to do more practice in, and what you don’t understand. So it should help with studying and with exam technique.

Keep studying, don’t give up, you got this.