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SIMON GROOM knows how to wrestle your examination monsters into a deep sleep
KEY POINTS
- Know where the exam is held.
- Prepare for the unexpected.
- Read your papers carefully.
- Invest in some common sense.
Examinations are stressful at the best of times. The last thing you need is a major catastrophe to push your sanity to the limit, and seriously affect your chances of passing (particularly if it could have been avoided).
Having tutored students for well over 20 years, I have come across more than my fair share of horror stories, some completely outside of anyone’s control and some are events that on a normal day could never happen. But exam days are never normal.
I have deliberately chosen four such situations in which the outcome could have been completely different had sanity prevailed; they are therefore things that can be avoided so the aim is to prevent them from happening to anyone reading this article.
Before the big day
It goes without saying that you should know exactly where you are sitting the exams and how you are going to get there. But have you got contingency plans?
What happens if your train is cancelled? What happens if there is a Tube strike? (Be careful: there is in fact one planned for the first day of this November’s Association of Tax Technicians (ATT) and Chartered Tax Adviser (CTA) examinations.)
You cannot plan for everything but you can give yourself a good margin to reduce the risk. There is nothing wrong with arriving two hours early; plan for a disaster and you can pretty much guarantee that everything will go off without a hitch. Let’s face it, it is better than arriving as the exam is starting.
Know your place
Following on from the first point, you’ve reached the general area that you are supposed to go to but do you know exactly which entrance is the right one? I have had experience of invigilating a professional examination where there were a couple of students wandering around after the exam had started complaining that they had no desks.
The fact was they were in the wrong hall; the right one was next door. They had arrived in good time, seen a group of students outside a large building, and joined them. They had not thought to check if they were doing the same exam: not a great start!
This is easily avoided by visiting the venue in advance. What seems easy to find on a two dimensional map can be very difficult in reality …
The right paper
Having options is often seen as a good thing but be warned, it can lead to disaster. In some assessments, and I am thinking of the CTA examination in particular, students are presented with a number of different variants of the same paper on their desk.
They have to choose the correct one to do. They know which paper they have studied for, they can read perfectly well, but in the heat of the moment, the desire to open up a paper and start answering a question takes over.
I remember a student wondering why there had been so much inheritance tax in his paper when he had studied companies. In retrospect the answer was simple – he had answered the first paper he had come to, rather than picking the right paper for him, which was several pages later. Probably even worse was the fact that he realised this just as the exam finished.
Remember to hand in your script
It sounds obvious, does it not? You have worked tirelessly for three hours, so you might as well hand in what you’ve done at the end of the examination. Picture the scene: the exam has not gone well, your pages are scattered all over the desk and on the floor, and you just want to get out.
You gather everything together, put it in your exam folder and leave the scrap paper on your desk. You have a well earned rest that night and begin to prepare yourself for the following day.
You arrive in the morning, refreshed and ready to do battle, only to find some of your answers from the previous day still on the desk. Exams are hard enough as it is without personally creating obstacles to passing.
At the end of the examination you have time to assemble your script in the correct order – make sure that everything is there. That extra ten seconds checking can make all of the difference.
And finally…
Of course, fortunately for most candidates, occurrences such as the ones I have described are relatively rare, but if they do happen to you, they will have a major effect on your chances of passing.
This would not really be a fitting tribute to all those hours of hard work. All of the mishaps can be avoided by applying common sense – but this seems to be in short supply once the exam gremlins get to work.
