You show up to the exam and the first questions look familiar, but then you draw a blank-you’re suffering from test anxiety. As the exam looms closer, you feel your understanding of the material is slipping away. You find yourself staring at the same paragraph in your text over and over again, but you just don’t seem to get it. Learning or remembering it all seems hopeless. You stay up for a couple of nights trying to work through the volumes of material the course has covered. You worry about the exam and what might be on it. And now you hear your instructor say, “Remember the exam next week.”Ī sense of dread takes over. You have completed your reading assignments and compared your reading notes with your class notes. You have summarized what you learned and have looked for opportunities to apply the material. You have invested your time in preparing for class, you have been an active listener in class, and you have asked questions and taken notes. In this chapter, we cover reviewing and applying the material you learn preparing for and taking exams is the practical application of this phase.
Take a look at the learning cycle “The Learning Cycle: Review and Apply”. This is why you need to modify your study habits and your strategies for taking exams in college. Success on high school tests relies much more on memorization than on understanding the material. High school teachers usually look for your ability to repeat precisely what you read in your text or heard in your class. College instructors expect to see much more of you in an exam: your thoughts, your interpretations, your thinking process, your conclusions. They are extraordinary learning opportunities.Īcademic tests in college are different from those you took in high school.They are not a representation of how smart, talented, or skilled we are but rather are a measurement only of what we know about a specific subject at a specific point in time.They help us measure our progress toward mastery of a particular skill.In reality, however, academic tests are similar to real-life tests in the following ways: But when these opportunities are part of our academic life, we often dread them and rarely feel any sense of fun. We welcome these opportunities for both work and fun. Many of our daily activities are measurements of progress toward mastery of skills or knowledge.
We can learn from how we have performed, and we can think about how to apply what we have learned to do even better next time. They alone are not good measurements about how smart or gifted you are-they show only how much you know or can do at that moment. Have you ever participated in an athletic event? Completed a crossword puzzle? Acted in a play? Cooked dinner? Answered a child’s question? Prepared a cost estimate? All of these common life situations are forms of tests because they measure how much we know about a specific subject at a single point in time.