Exams are coming up!

I’m not sure exactly how much time you have, but I’m assuming around 1-3 weeks.

Either way, It doesn’t matter.

In this post, I’ll show you my exact proven steps to preparing for your upcoming exams so that you can ace them, regardless of where you’re at right now.

Let’s go!

P.S.

When I say ‘exam’, I also mean ‘test’.

Table of Contents

• 🔍📚📝 3 Steps to Exam Prep

  • Step 1: Identify

    • Stop-light Method

  • Step 2: Learn

  • Step 3: Practice

  • The Night Before

  • 🫵 Trust Yourself!

  • ✅ Action Steps for the Week

  • Put in the work and ANNIHILATE THEM!

The 3 Steps to Exam Preparation

🔍️ Step 1: Identify

List out all the topics that are going to be in your exam. This should be on your exam notification. If not, ask your teacher specifically what’s going to be in there.

Once you’ve found these topics, list them all out.

With each topic presented in front of you, use the stop-light method to identify what you do and don’t know.

🚦 Stop-light Method

You can do this either digitally or on paper.

1. Take out the syllabus

2. Using three different highlighters, go through each of the points that will be in your exam and mark it based off of the criteria below:

   Green — ‘I know this!’

   Orange — ‘I kind of know this. Need to revise it.’

   Red — ‘I don’t know this at all!’

3. Now you can clearly see what you need to work on

📚️ Step 2: Learn

Revise or learn the topics that you’ve identified in step 1 in the order of:

RED → ORANGE → GREEN

How exactly do you do this?

1. Understand:

   • Read over the textbook

   • watch videos on the content

   • ask chatGPT for help

   • ask your teacher for help

   • Make a mind map

2. Memorise:

   • Make active recall questions to test yourself on the knowledge (flashcards work too)

   • Teach the content to others (or yourself by speaking aloud)

   • Blurting — write down everything you know about the topic on paper without looking at your notes to test yourself

📝 Step 3: Practice

The most CRUCIAL step…

PRACTICE!

Do as many practice questions and past paper exams as possible. Make sure you’re not just doing them blindly, but doing them effectively.

Follow this 6-step formula when doing practice questions/past papers:

1. Do the question/past paper

2. Review

3. Make notes from the past paper

4. Revise over weaknesses and mistakes

5. Do targeted practice questions

6. Repeat

💤 The Night Before

The night before your exam, don’t do any more practice questions.

Why?

If you do practice questions the night before your exam, you may get something wrong or come across a question that stumbles you.

You’ll then end up stressing and start to question how much you really know, which will lead to extreme anxiety and ultimately, poor exam results.

Instead, do the following:

1. Read over the mistakes that you made during the practice stage (step 3).

2. Brush over your notes

3. Do a relaxing activity to take your mind off of the exam (for me, this was reading, watching a TV show, exercising or meditating)

4. Have a good night’s sleep and tell yourself that you’re confident and will smash tomorrow’s exam!

P.S. I always did the least amount of study on the day before the exam.

🫵 Trust Yourself!

Once you have applied the steps above and have done everything you can to prepare for your exam,

DON’T STRESS ABOUT IT ANYMORE!

I know it’s easier said than done.

I used to stress before my exams too…and stress a lot.

However, it was after a couple of exams that I realised the following:

Stressing the night before isn’t going to help you in anyway. Instead, what will help you, is to give yourself a pep-talk and convince yourself that you’ve done enough and that you will smash it!

Understand that you’ve done everything you can, and regardless of the results you get, it’s a win!

How?

• If you do terribly — you can learn from your mistakes and improve for the future exams that are even more important

• If you do great — nice!

✅ Action Steps for the Week

1. Apply the three steps mentioned above to prepare for your exams.

2. Read my E-book on how to effectively do past paper exams

3. Relax — take deep breaths and remind yourself that once you’ve put in the work and have done as much as possible, don’t stress!

I wish you the best of luck in your upcoming exams.

Put in the work and ANNIHILATE THEM!

Go and make me proud 😃