How to suceed in your language exam

Transcript: Exam success

Lorraine Turner Akcakaya: What are the most important steps in preparing for exams? 

Richard Scott: [The] most important thing, and I would say this is more important than anything else, is to make a plan. Anxiety feeds in the dark corners of our minds when we don’t have plans and we just think about the worries. So, the first thing to do when we know there’s exams coming, sit down. What do I have to cover? How long do I have to do it? And then there’s something really important. Our brains are very poor at planning how long we need to do something. So, our natural tendency is to underestimate how long we need and to overestimate how much we will get done in that time. So, I always say to people, when you’re preparing, look at your plan. Work out, I have to reviseetw. überarbeiten, wiederholenrevise these topics, these subjects. This is definitely going to come up in the exam. See what comes out naturally. And then you really want to double the amount of time that you think you need. And you then want to about halve the amount of things that you think you’ll get done. So, it’s a really important first step. Make a plan. Stick to it. Next thing, you need to be active in your learning. So, reading and then reading some more and reading some more is not really gonna help. One that I love is doing kind of mind maps, Netzdiagrammspider diagrams. So, if you’ve got your topic, you put that in the middle and you maybe identify five or six things that you know are very important to that topic, draw some lines out and then maybe you want some bullet pointsStichpunktbullet points that you know you need to cover in the exam. And that is what you repeat and repeat and repeat. You do it every day. You go through the diagram again. You’re not going to learn everything by doing that, but you will learn enough to regurgitate sth.hier: etw. auswendig aufsagenregurgitate the material in an exam. So, it’s really important to be active. And the other thing that we can do when we’re trying to learn something is explain it to somebody else. 

Lorraine: Now, that’s a good idea. 

Richard: Get a partner, friends, parents, and tell them, say, “I’ve got an exam next week, this is the subject, is it OK for ten minutes if I just tell you?” And these things are really good to help combat sth.etw. bekämpfencombat anxiety because, in an exam, you’re going to feel some degree of nerves, but if you’ve got your spider diagram that you can quickly replicate sth.etw. reproduzieren, nachzeichnenreplicate, most exams give you a bit of scrap paperSchmierpapierscrap paper that’s not mark sth.etw. benotenmarked, quickly draw it on there. Stichwort, GedächtnisstützePrompts, Stichwort, Startsignalcues, our brains work really well with those things. You’re never gonna remember every single thing, but if you remember five or six key bullet points, you’ll probably remember everything else. Visual things work really well, as well, I think, for a lot of people, and the other thing is that I like to have something quite short that everyone can remember. WiederholungRepetition is remembering; don’t just do it once, don’t do it twice, keep doing it, keep regurgitating that material, keep explaining it to people, keep writing it down, sit on the bus, make notes on the way to school. Just grab sth.sich etw. schnappengrab some paper, see if you can remember the bullet points from your spider diagram and keep repeating it. 

Lorraine: What would be your five top tips for succeeding in an exam? 

Richard: The first thing I would say is you need to stick to your plan. If the exam will be getting nearer and nearer and nearer, you’ll be feeling a bit worried and a bit anxious. You’ve got a plan. If you’ve stuck to your plan, that’s great. Number two, try to think about your sleep the night before the exam. I wouldn’t  say to anyone, you must have a good night’s sleep before an exam. Stress and pressure and anxiety can interrupt our sleep, but try to set yourself up as best you can to have a good night’s sleep. That’s really important. Sleep helps memory consolidationGedächtnisfestigung, -speicherungmemory consolidation. So even on that last night before the exam, there’s gonna still be some learning taking place, but it’s happening when you’re asleep. Trust your brain, trust sleep. And that might be, you know, making sure you’ve organized everything for the next day. Try to have your room at a cool temperature. Try not to do too much with screens after maybe nine o’clock. And just think about what’s the right amount of sleep for you. Don’t listen to any TikTok videos that tell you how much sleep you need to have. Or just make sure you’ve planned enough time for you to get the sleep that you need. The next day, I would say the first thing you need to do when you’re getting ready and your plan’s in place and you’re off to the exam, breathe. There’s lots of advice and tips out there about how to breathe, what works best. The one I like to say most is, imagine you’re filling up a balloon in your tummy (ifml.)Bauchtummy. So, you fill it up with air. Hold it for a few seconds and then imagine you’re letting all the air out of a balloon, so, like that. If you do that three or four times, you’ll feel a sense of calm. 

Lorraine: And that’s then linking, you know, what you’re feeling inside, it’s all these feelings. It’s bringing it to the the physicalhier: die körperliche Ebenephysical and what we can actively do to control these butter­flies in your tummy or anxiety or whatever, because no matter what they’re there, so it’s just having a, just this, like, semi bitein kleines bisschensemi bit of control over the situation. 

Richard: Another thing that I would recommend is don’t drink too much caffeine. 

Lorraine: OK. 

Richard: So, if you’re somebody that relies on three, four cups of coffee in the morning, you might not want to do it before an exam. If your exam is in the afternoon, maybe that’s not too bad, but if it’s in the morning, maybe skip sth.etw. auslassen, weglassenskip the coffee that morning or maybe just have something decaffeinatedentkoffeiniertdecaffeinated. Caffeine is a stimulantStimulans, Anregungs­mittelstimulant and that can be quite good, but it can also have some effects that maybe interfere with sth.in etw. eingreifen, etw. beeinträchtigeninterfere with our thinking. And then number five, there’ll be some instructions as to what to do on the exam. Take a breath. 

Lorraine: Yeah. 

Richard: Again, if you [take a] big breath in, breathe out, read the instructions, read them again, explain to yourself what the instructions are telling you. Two or three minutes, that’s all it takes. What you’ll notice is there’s a lot of peer pressureErwartungsdruckpeer pressure from around you because most people will just start writing. 

Lorraine: How can we cope with failure? I think we’ve already allude to sth.auf etw. hinweisenalluded to this, but this all-or-nothing feeling, what tools can we arm ourselves with so a situation like an exam doesn’t feel so all or nothing. 

Richard: When I’m talking to clients at work, I encourage this kind of idea of a camera lens. So, if you zoom the camera lens in to just that exam, it can really overexaggerate the importance. That can amplify sth.etw. verstärkenamplify that feeling of, my goodnessDu meine Gütemy goodness, I have to pass this exam. If I don’t pass this exam, everything’s ruined. I won’t get my university course. My parents will be disappointed. Take that camera lens, zoom back out. OK, it is important, but actually, there’s other things that matter as well. And me kind of thinking about my future, that’s important thinking about what kind of person I want to be, what values I want to live. And all those things can come into it as well, rather than just the exam being the be-all and end-alldas Wichtigste, das A und Obe-all and end-all. And encourage people to try and have a little bit of grey area in their thinking. This is really hard stuff. I’m not saying this because this is easy to do. The anxiety builds and tells us you must pass. And the sense of dreadgroße Angstdread around failure makes it a thing that we want to avoid. We want to avoid that feeling that we failed at something. It’s not a nice feeling to have, but it is important to remember that everybody fails at something, we all make mistakes. 

Lorraine: Absolutely, yeah. 

Richard: We might not like it, but this is part of a life toolkitWerkzeugsatz; hier: Handwerkszeugtoolkit that we need to have to deal with the bumpBodenwellebumps in the road.