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Tips on How to Prepare for Final Exams :
- Relax. Do activities that help to reduce your stress. Take a break from excessive studying. Read something light and interesting, to relax your mind. A program of physical exercise often helps some students to relieve stress.
- If possible, study no more than 30-40 minutes at a stretch. Many students retain more by studying for short periods with breaks in between.
- Review your notes. If helpful, review notes with a friend and quiz each other.
- Get sufficient rest and sleep. Do not stay up too late the night before an exam. Get a good night’s sleep instead.
- Never study within 30 minutes of going to sleep.
- Review the exercises your teachers have given you. Make short quizzes with a friend.
- Eat healthy food. Fresh fruits and vegetables are often recommended to reduce stress. Stressful foods can include processed foods, artificial sweeteners, carbonated soft drinks, chocolate, eggs, fried foods, junk foods, pork, red meat, sugar, white flour products, chips and similar snack foods, foods containing preservatives or heavy spices.
- Eat a breakfast before coming to school. Taking an exam on an empty stomach (= no breakfast) reduces the amount of energy to your brain.
- Study without distractions. If you prefer to listen to music, choose music that does not take your mind away from your studies. Take a break if you want to listen to music that you like to sing with or dance to!
- Review your lessons with a parent, brother, sister, or friend. The person you review with should have some knowledge and understanding of the subject you are reviewing.
- Preparing for exams is a good opportunity to renew your relationship with your God.
You can’t ask God to take responsibility for what you have to do, but you can pray for God to support you to do your best, to give you courage, and to help you to focus on your studies.
On the Day of a Test
- Arrive early at school, and bring everything you need, including an extra pen and pencil in case pne can't be used.
- Sit comfortably, but don’t “slouch.” (Bersandar ‘dengan malas’! )
- Think positively! Remind yourself that you have tried to do your best. If you become anxious, take several slow, deep breaths to relax.
- Don’t talk with your classmates about the test - if someone is really nervous, the feeling can spread to others easily. Anxiety is contagious!
During the Test
- Review the whole test paper with a quick overview. Sometimes, knowledge in one area of a test is useful in answering a question some place else.
- Read the directions carefully.
- Budget your test taking time.
- First answer the easy questions to build confidence, score points, and mentally orient yourself to vocabulary, concepts, and your studies (it may help you make associations with more difficult questions).
- Then answer difficult questions or those with the most point value.
- Change positions at your desk to help you relax.
- If your mind goes “blank,” skip the question and go on to something else. If you’re taking an essay test, pick a question and start writing. It may trigger the answer in your mind.
- Review: Resist the urge to leave as soon as you have completed all the items.
Review your test to make sure that you have answered all questions, not mis-marked the answer sheet, or made some other simple mistake. Proofread your writing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, decimal points, etc.
- Do not “second-guess” yourself and change your original answers. Research has indicated that your first hunch (“dugaan pertama”) is more likely to be correct. You should only change answers to questions if you originally misread them or if you have encountered information elsewhere in the test that indicates with certainty that your first choice is incorrect.
- Don’t panic when students start handing in their papers. There’s no reward for being
the first done.
Test strategies
- Read the directions carefully
- Know if each question has one or more correct option
- Answer easy questions first
Answering Options
- Improve your odds, on Multiple Choice questions. Think critically!
- Cover the options, read the stem, and try to answer
- Select the option that most closely matches your answer
- Read the stem with each option
- Treat each option as a true-false question, and choose the “most true”
2. Strategies to answer difficult questions
- Eliminate options you know to be incorrect
- Question options that grammatically don’t fit with the stem
- Question options that are totally unfamiliar to you
- Question options that contain negative or absolute words. Try substituting a qualified term for the absolute one, like frequently for always; or typical for every, to see if you can eliminate it.
- “All of the above”: If you know two of three options seem correct, “all of the above” is a strong possibility.
- Number answers: toss out the high and low and consider the middle range numbers.
- “Look alike” options: probably one is correct; choose the best but eliminate choices that mean basically the same thing, and thus cancel each other out.
- “Echo” options: If two options are opposite each other, chances are one of them is correct.
- Favor options that contain qualifiers. The choice is often longer and has more inclusive items that better fill the role of the answer.
- If two alternatives seem correct, compare them for differences, then refer to the stem to find your best answer.
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