How to prepare for university exams

Preparing for university exams is in some ways very similar to secondary school. There's the obvious taking of the exams, no talking, prepare well in advance. All the usual. But uni requires a lot more independent study than school did. Where you might have once had a teacher directing you to exactly the right place to find study resources, now that you're in uni you need to find out lots of this information independently. 

Here are our tips to remember as you get prepared for your uni exams.

Finding information

Finding out all the information to do with your exam is a great first step.

Look for an assessment notification on your canvas, or blackboard page. Depending on the subject and your degree, you might also want to look at teams and your emails to see if the subject coordinator or your tutors have sent any information there. 

Getting across every aspect of the exam will help you know what's expected, what you need to study and how to complete the exam on the day.

Studying

By the time you get to uni you'll probably be used to studying for exams.

Trying to decipher what they want you to do for those exams is important. You'll want to find out things like:

What is the passing grade?
What topics are included, if everything what were the main focuses?
What sort of style is the exam? Is there a number of essays, equations? Is it an open or closed book exam? If it is an open book exam, is there a limit to what you can take in, or is it fully open book?

Exam technique

While you may have been lucky and had a couple of open book exams during school, they were probably not as common as closed book exams. Depending on your degree, uni can have quite a few open book exams. They resemble life in the workforce a bit more closely, but being completely reliant on them during an exam is not really how you want to set yourself up. 

If your exam is online, think about how you can best set up your space.

If you exam is open book, don't plan to use every note that you've ever written. Consolidate your notes and learn them, so you only use them if you really need to.

No matter what format your exam is, you've got this!