Mid-Year Exams: Strategies for Striving

Term 2 exam season is nigh! Usually, this is met with grey skies, frigid winds and evenings that greedily subsume their daytime counterpart. However, as I write this article, the sun stubbornly blazes and the sky is a metallic blue. Currently, the weather does not illustrate what is coming up for our students – exam season, a time of rigour and exactitude. Crucially, if students push themselves, it can be a time of intellectual achievement and hard-won personal growth.

Striving

Now is indeed the time for students to be striving in the classroom and at home. The etymology of the word striving is particularly instructive. The word comes from the French estriver, which means to quarrel, dispute and struggle. It came into the lexicon in the Middle Ages, where there was both a (very) slow rise in individualism and a threat to prosperity in the form of cataclysmic events like the Black Plague. One had both more freedom and more existential disputation – key ingredients for striving. In our context of exam preparation, to strive is more than merely trying hard or giving a good effort – it means to give relentless and unyielding effort. There is discomfort in striving; it often requires physical or emotional sacrifice.

How Do I Actually Strive?

What are the strategies to see striving move from aspiration to action?

Establish routines and manage time effectively

Educationalist Greg Ashman espouses that ‘success leads to personal interest.’ Accordingly, he discounts the role that motivation plays in relation to success – in fact, he claims success actually leads to motivation. To succeed in exam preparation, one needs to establish and implement positive routines. An example of this is sitting down to complete Chemistry questions… and actually finishing them! Another example is submitting a Business Management short answer for feedback. Doing the work leads to success, which, in turn, fuels personal interest. So, the best thing our students can do to get motivated is to actually start work.

Having a distinct place of study helps. A desk, a table – the best option you can find. This can be either at home or at school. Also, having a timetable for lining up study sessions is important. However, the hard work really lies in following the timetable, not creating it. Removing distractions is also important. I have been buoyed to hear of parents who take their son’s phones away in order to reduce distraction during study. This is really good practice.

Making the most of your time is also critical. The Pomodoro Technique is a proven way of doing this:

• Sit down in a quiet place and remove distractions
• Set a timer for 25 minutes
• Work for 25 minutes on one subject
• Have a five-minute break
• Work for another three 25-minute blocks, with five-minute breaks
• Have a longer break of 30 minutes

The above allows for 100 minutes of targeted study to be done in 120 minutes. This is a really effective use of time.

Establish and implement positive in-class behaviours

Study is a lot more enjoyable if you pay attention in the first place. This is the responsibility of the student, not the teacher. Paying attention in class means being invested in your learning, propelling your own success. Being curious and asking questions, seeking feedback, and purposefully collaborating with others are examples of positive classroom behaviours.

Memory Techniques

Leading educationalist Daniel Willingham asserts that ‘knowledge really matters.’ Broadly, knowledge is foundational to quality thinking. For exam purposes, we need to be able to remember content to succeed. In English, one needs to be able to recall quotes and use them to display insight into themes and characters. In History, it’s relevant dates and the names of key historical figures. Songs and rhymes can help us learn and retain such content. Acronyms and acrostics are also useful.

Retrieval Practice

Reading notes is hugely ineffectual in exam preparation. Admittedly, it feels efficacious, but this is illusory. Why does it feel like a good use of time? Because it is quite easy to do, and our minds will be congratulatory because they don’t really want to work hard (strive). We need to overwrite this with more effective practices. For example, it is much better to build flashcards and use them to check for what you know and don’t know.

Early Preparation

Cramming is disastrous. It is beset with panic and leads to shallow memorisation and fragile skill development. Those who cram invariably unravel in an exam. However, those who prepare early tend to hold up in the fulcrum of battle. Ensure that you are preparing for all exams and not just the next one. Chunk your study so that you are providing challenge to your brain but not putting it into cognitive overload (asking it to remember/understand too much in a short period of time). Identify what you need to know, recall key information, re-learn the things that you don’t know, and ask for help. Completing a trial exam to diagnose what you do and don’t know, and then completing another one to check for growth in knowledge and skills, is very positive practice.

Man in the Arena

Theodore Roosevelt promulgates that the man in the arena is someone ‘who strives valiantly… who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows the triumph of high achievement… and if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.’ For our boys, we encourage them to be (young) men in the (exam) arena: giving huge effort to a pursuit which has such intellectual and personal worth. Further, whether this exam season goes well or could have been better, we look forward to students coming back ready to strive when Term 3 commences.

Chris Pye
Dean of Studies