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4.7 Taking examinations
If you do not like examinations (and that applies to most of us), it is better to
tackle this issue right from the start. Do not put your head in the sand and hope
they will go away: they will only loom larger as they draw nearer. A little forward
planning will help you to feel more confident and do better. Find out from the
student handbook (or web pages for the course) at what points in the course
the examinations will be, which courses or modules they are associated with, and
how the overall marks are distributed between different assessment tasks. A
common pattern is for a module to have a mixture of assessment, perhaps an
essay and an examination (see pages 91–93). An examination is the only
method (apart from the very rare viva, mainly used at PhD level) for making
sure that the work being assessed is all your own, so they tend to appear at
important points in the course and feed significantly into your overall degree
classification.
What is being tested?
ACHIEVING GOOD OUTPUTS 121
When people think of exams, they tend to think of content rather than skills,
but the content is only material for demonstrating the skills you have learnt, and
it is these transferable, lifelong skills that will serve you well, long after you have
forgotten all you have learnt. Of course, the catch is that you need to know the
material in order to use it to demonstrate your skills.
Tips: Writing exams
➢ Exams are one of the few occasions left where you will have to write
by hand without the benefit of spell check, so it is a good idea to
practise.
➢ Some universities give you the opportunity to practise an unseen examination
essay, perhaps in first-year tutorials. If they do, take advantage of it
and take it seriously, especially if you are offered any feedback. It will pay
off handsomely when it comes to the real thing.
Sadly it is often only after they have really sat down and mastered a topic for an
exam that many students actually start to realize just how interesting it is!
You must be able to demonstrate a certain degree of knowledge in order to
pass exams, but your ability to extract the important points and organize them
to answer the question posed will be a key factor in the mark you receive. If the