by Cal Newport
Step 6
Provide “A+” Answers
The final step of the straight-A process is actually taking the test. Many students incorrectly believe that preparation is the only thing that counts. To them, taking a test is a simple matter of showing off what they know. This type of thinking is risky. Why? Even the most prepared student can bomb an exam due to poor test-taking skills.
The potential pitfalls during an exam are numerous, but the most common are: (1) running out of time and (2) providing answers that, although detailed, don’t fully answer all parts of the question being asked. In fact, these two dangers work together in a devilish counterbalance, making them particularly hard to conquer. That is, if you try to avoid spending too much time on questions, then you are likely to provide incomplete answers. On the other hand, if you try to provide detailed answers, then you are likely to run out of time.
The situation sounds dire, but it’s not. With the right strategy, you can eliminate these fears and ensure that your grade properly reflects your level of preparation. Straight-A students recognize this point, and when asked about test-taking, they provided detailed responses, proving that for them, this final step is no mere afterthought. They treat the test-taking process with great respect, and this attention is reflected in their consistently high grades.
Their advice has been culled into five key strategies. Together, they provide a comprehensive test-taking system, finely tuned through experience to maximize performance. Follow these rules on every exam, and you’ll be able to transform yourself into a test-taking machine—cool, confident, and ruthlessly efficient as you move from question to question, providing the best possible answers.
Strategy #1: Review First, Answer Questions Later
“I always read through the entire exam first,” explains Robert from Brown. This is good advice—for any exam, your first step should always be to review all of the questions. If it’s an essay exam or a technical exam with a relatively small number of questions, then read each prompt carefully. If the exam is multiple choice or contains many questions, skim through quickly and get a feel for which topics are covered.
This review familiarizes you with the length and relative difficulty of what lies ahead. It also primes your brain for the topics you’ll need to address. “Always scan all the questions,” explains Anna from Dartmouth. “This allows your mind to think about all of them, even while you are focusing on one in particular.” In other words, while you toil away on an early question, another part of your brain, working in the background, will begin to retrieve information relating to the topics still to come. This actually happens, and it helps you answer the later questions more quickly.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, this first step also helps you relax. Stress proliferates in a classroom right before an exam is distributed. It’s a make-or-break situation. Months of effort have led up to this single moment, and you have only a scant hour or two to prove what you know and secure your final grade. You begin to question yourself. Did you study everything you needed to? Have you forgotten important ideas? What if the exam focuses on a subject you know nothing about? If you left it blank, what would happen then? Just thinking about this situation is enough to make most undergrads sweat.
However, by taking the first few minutes to carefully review the exam, you break this mounting tension. It gives you something productive to do that doesn’t involve actually answering questions. Once you complete this task and build a better idea of what to expect, the exam becomes less menacing. You’ve seen the questions, and (hopefully) none seem impossible. You begin to say to yourself: Okay, maybe this isn’t all that bad. Your confidence rises, your heart rate lowers, and your stress begins to dissipate. Now you can turn your full attention to providing standout responses.
Strategy #2: Build a Time Budget
At any given point during an exam, you should know the maximum number of minutes you have to spend on the current question before moving on to the next. As Doris from Harvard puts it: “I lay down very strict time limits for myself on each question.” This strategy goes a long way toward avoiding time trouble; it keeps your attention focused and prevents you from spending too much time on any particular question.
The key to maintaining this keen awareness is to build a time budget. First, take the time allotted for the exam and subtract ten minutes. Next, divide this amount by the number of questions. The result is how long you have to spend on each prompt.
What should you do with this information? For an exam with a small number of questions, mark right on the test pages the time when you should begin and finish each one. For an exam with many questions, divide the exam into equal fourths, then jot down the time you should begin and end each section. In both cases, these recorded times will keep you updated on how close your current progress matches your predetermined schedule.
Why do we subtract ten minutes in the first step? This provides a safety buffer. You want a few extra minutes available here and there to be able to double check your answers when you are finished, or go back and add more insights to questions on which you were rushed.
Strategy #3: Proceed from Easy to Hard
Straight-A students almost never answer exam questions in the order that they are presented. Years of informal experimentation by successful students have demonstrated that the most effective way to tackle an exam is to answer the easiest questions first, and this is exactly what you should do. Start with the most approachable questions before moving on to the more forbidding. Don’t worry if this has you skipping around all over the exam—in most cases the provided order is irrelevant.
The advantage of this approach is that it first focuses your energy on the questions you know the most about, ensuring that you get maximum points on these. It also gives you a better chance of conquering the more difficult ones. “I always skip a question if it does not come to me immediately,” explains Ryan from Dartmouth. “This keeps my mind clear to answer other questions and hopefully something will jog my memory.”
When you come across something hard early on in the exam, your natural instinct is to panic. You have so many more questions to finish, and you can almost feel the minutes ticking away as you stare blankly at this one particular roadblock. It can be tough to get your focus back to wring out as many points as possible from the easier questions that follow.
If, instead, you tackle this same roadblock at the end of the exam, you’ll find that the situation seems less dire. You’ve answered everything else, so all that’s left to do is working out this final puzzler. More often than not, you will find the mental block diminished. Without the pressure of other questions looming in the background, you can take a more relaxed approach. You might not know the best answer, but you can spend some time to devise a reasonable answer. Because you have nothing else left to finish, you can spend the remainder of the time polishing this answer, thinking, and repolishing. The result is the strongest possible outcome given your state of preparation.
Strategy #4: Outline Essays
When facing an essay question, don’t just start writing and see what happens. This approach leads to rambling answers and missed concepts. Instead, your first step should be to jot down a quick outline. This might seem like a waste of time, but in truth it can be invaluable.
First, reread the question carefully. As Matthew from Brown explains: “Usually, you can isolate three or four mini-questions from a single essay question.” Underline each of these mini-questions; this will help you flesh out your outline and avoid an incomplete answer. “Then, outline on paper (not in your head) the way that you will use what you know to answer these mini-questions,” continues Matthew. To do so, use the margin of the exam to jot down all of the points you can recall that are relevant to the question. Record only a few key words for each point to save time and space. For example, if you want to mention an argument made by an author named Robert Caro dealing with Lyndon Johns
on’s views on race relations, you might jot down: “Caro—race.”
Next, go back and check the question parts you underlined in the first step. Make sure each is adequately addressed by the points you just noted in the margin. When you’re sure that you have identified all the relevant information for the essay, number these points in the order that you want to present them.
Only now should you begin writing your essay. Follow your outline, and the writing will proceed smoothly. You should be able to quickly produce a solid response that draws on everything you reviewed and addresses all parts of the question asked.
Strategy #5: Check Your Work
“At the end,” explains Chris from Dartmouth, “I always check my answers.” If you have extra time at the end of the exam (may you be so lucky), then follow Chris’s advice and go back and check your work. You will be surprised by how many times this final review turns up a mistake in a technical problem or an important concept that you forgot to mention in an essay.
If, after your first round of review, you still have time left over, then go through and check again. If there is a problem you feel particularly shaky on, use this time to go over it in detail, augmenting the answer wherever appropriate. Don’t worry about using carets and arrows to add in new phrases and facts to your essays, or to point out added steps in your technical problems. Neatness doesn’t count on exams; it’s the content that matters.
It’s tempting to relax after finishing your exam, perhaps walking proudly to the front of the classroom and handing it in before anyone else. But aside from the wistful stares of your classmates, this strategy is ill conceived. Double checking your work up to the last minute can make the difference between an above-average student and an academic star.
The Plan in Action
Now let’s look at how the steps for Part Two play out in the real world. This section presents two realistic case studies, both demonstrating how a hypothetical student uses straight-A strategies to prepare for an exam. You’ll notice that each student has a couple of curveballs thrown into the mix. For example, Julie has a big paper due the same Monday as her midterm, so she can’t simply cram all weekend. And Michael doesn’t even start his review until a couple of days before the exam.
The key here is to notice the flexibility with which these students apply the advice. This underscores the main lesson of these case studies: A study system is only as useful as your ability to adapt it to your unique situation. Both of our students manage to fit their review into an already busy schedule and do so without ever cramming, pulling all-nighters, or even spending more than a few hours studying on any given day.
Case Study #1—Julie’s History Midterm
The final grade for Julie’s history class is based only on a midterm, a final, and one paper. Therefore, her performance on this upcoming midterm is important. The following timeline of Julie’s preparation will give you a feel for how she spreads out the necessary work for optimal results.
Monday—Two Weeks Before the Midterm
At the beginning of class, the professor issues a quick reminder about the upcoming exam. Taking advantage of the situation, Julie raises her hand to ask what it will cover and in what format. The professor offers the following information:
• The exam will consist mainly of essay questions. The topics will be broad, but the student will need to draw support from the reading assignments.
• There will also be a timeline section that will present a group of historical events covered in the class and then ask the student to rearrange them into chronological order.
Now that Julie has a better feel for what to expect, she can construct a rough study schedule. Her biggest problem is that she has a big paper due for another class on the same day as the midterm! This prevents her from using the weekend before the exam as a big cram session (the strategy used by most students). She’s going have to figure out a way to tackle her preparation in advance.
Julie decides that she will start her review this upcoming weekend (a little more than a week before the exam). Specifically, she will use this weekend to organize the necessary materials, which shouldn’t take long. She will then use the week that follows to actually do the review, spreading the work out into little chunks so she won’t get behind in her other obligations. That’s all the time that she can spare. In particular, notice that she hasn’t scheduled any studying for the Saturday and Sunday right before the big exam—she expects this time to be consumed with paper writing.
To implement this plan, she follows the advice of Part One and records the details on her calendar, writing on each day what work she should accomplish. This will save her a lot of stress—most students spend the week or so before an exam constantly worried about whether they should be studying and whether they have enough time left to prepare. Julie, on the other hand, is free from these worries. All she has to do is look at her calendar each morning and schedule a time for whatever piece of the study process she finds recorded for the day.
Saturday—Nine Days Before the Midterm
Julie’s busy. As on most weekends, she has a lot of schoolwork to finish for Monday, and she also has some ambitious social plans for the evening, so her time is certainly limited.
The goal of this weekend is to organize her history materials, which thankfully doesn’t demand a lot of hard thinking. (Julie hopes to get some relaxation out of her two days off.) She consults her calendar: Today (Saturday), she should print hard copies of all the relevant notes and then prepare the memorization aids for the timeline section. Tomorrow (Sunday), she will focus her energy on constructing the practice quizzes for her notes.
First, Julie sets aside an hour before lunch to print out the lecture and reading notes she made during the first half of class. She gathers the printouts, stashes them in a folder, then she heads off to meet some friends for lunch.
Later that afternoon, she sets aside another half hour to work on her memorization aids. Fortunately, all of the major events discussed in the lectures were also described in the class textbook. Though most of these events were covered in much more detail in the other reading assignments, to construct a simple list of events (and their respective dates) requires only a quick scan through of this one book. As she comes across each relevant event, she jots the name on one side of an index card, and then puts the date on the other side.
Sunday—Eight Days Before the Midterm
Midmorning, a slightly groggy Julie (it was an eventful Saturday night) pulls herself out of bed, snags her laptop, her folder of note printouts, and a large coffee, and then heads to one of her favorite secret study spots. Being early on a Sunday (at least, early relative to the typical college student schedule), the library is deserted—just the way she likes it.
Getting down to business, Julie first sorts her notes into piles by subject. Some notes, of course, seem to straddle multiple subjects. That’s okay. The piles are just a rough form of organization. Nothing has to be exact here. She ends up with six piles, which together constitute her study guide for the midterm.
Julie then goes through each printout in her first pile, typing quiz questions on her laptop as she proceeds. Sometimes she copies questions straight off her notes. Other times she puts down a more general question that covers several smaller points described in her notes. It doesn’t really matter exactly how she chooses the quiz questions, just as long as the questions being typed into her laptop more or less cover every important point discussed in the notes. After about an hour and a half, Julie has finished typing up quizzes for the first three of her six piles.
She breaks for lunch, then returns later in the afternoon and spends another two hours constructing her quizzes. Once she’s done, she prints out all six and attaches them to their corresponding piles.
Though Julie’s goal for the day was only to organize, the very act of constructing these quizzes has forced her to do a quick review of all the relevant cours
e material—an important first step in internalizing all the necessary information.
Monday Through Friday—The Week Before the Midterm
On Monday, as dictated by her calendar, Julie spends two hours mastering the first two quizzes, a task she accomplishes by pacing around her dorm room and lecturing answers to an imaginary class. (Needless to say, Julie waited for a time when her roommate was out before starting this vocal review.) On Tuesday, she works with her memorization flash cards for forty-five minutes. On Wednesday, she spends two hours mastering the middle two quizzes. On Thursday, she spends another hour with her memorization flash cards. And on Friday, she spends two hours mastering the final two quizzes.
As one might expect, even though she had previously eliminated most question marks in her notes by following the advice of Step #5 (Invest in Academic Disaster Insurance), Julie comes across a handful of questions that she still doesn’t really have a satisfactory answer for. She jots down these questionable topics, vowing to deal with them later.
Saturday—Two Days Before the Midterm
Julie had hoped to finish studying before this weekend, but she was busier than she had expected the previous week, so she still has a little more to review. Because she also has a paper deadline on Monday, she knows that, at most, she can spare maybe an hour today for exam preparation. She uses this hour to finish her academic disaster insurance investment; specifically, she takes the list of questions for which she doesn’t have great answers and sends e-mails to classmates in hopes of soliciting better ones.