Studi-Tip: Exam preparation
You may have already written your first exams or your first big exam is still ahead of you and you are in the middle of preparing. This little post is intended to give you tips on how best to prepare for your exams. Of course, these tips only reflect our own experiences. After all, studying at a university means going your own way and finding out what the best study strategy is for you.
Basically, it is highly recommended that you invest time in preparing and following up on your courses during the semester. This will save you a lot of time in direct exam preparation.
The author of this article proceeds as follows: First, all existing documents, i.e. transcripts, summaries, lecture notes, slides, exercise material, index cards, questionnaires, etc. are reviewed. Secondly, the student’s own notes and official documents are worked through again in order to recall the material. Once this has been done and the content is understood, exercises are started before old exams are calculated. In subjects where these documents do not exist or are not necessary, we either write a summary ourselves or bundle the material with existing summaries. Afterwards, questionnaires or index cards are studied. If you don’t want to print them out and cut them out “old school”, you can use index card learning programmes. There you can create index cards in various formats and also export and import them. In the days shortly before the exam, the theoretical part is usually repeated and the most important material is discussed with fellow students to see where there are gaps in understanding. In particular, asking each other questions or explaining things to each other helps a lot here.
As mentioned at the beginning, this is only one way to prepare for the exams, because there are many more options. Feel free to comment on what you think is the best tactic for exam preparation.
No matter how you study, whether it’s weeks before the exam or a few days (and nights) of continous studying, we wish you the best of luck in your upcoming exams!
