The time has come again! This week and next, students in the UK, US and elsewhere will be heading back to school for the start of the new school year. If there's one piece of important advice I'd like to give, it's that you should ALREADY be thinking about your exams.
A pretty gruesome thought, right? Wrong! The students who achieve exam success realise that exams are not just about the final few weeks of studying. Instead, you have to build a good foundation on which to base your learning. If you come to your mock exams in 10 weeks' time or your main exams in 32 weeks' time and you haven't made any decent notes in class or kept up with your homework, then you're making life unnecessarily hard for yourself and your final days spent studying for your exams will be that much more difficult.
So let me qualify what I've said above. Sure, thinking about the fact that you have exams coming up later in the year is fairly gruesome - I used to absolutely HATE it when teachers opened with that line on the first day of class! However, nowadays I understand why they said what they did. If you think about the whole year as one long slow journey towards your exams, it will be FAR easier for you psychologically when it comes to studying for them. Why? Because you'll have already done 4/5 of the work.
- NB. Even if your exams are still some way off, many of the suggestions that I make in The Holy Grail of Exam Success are entirely relevant to all students at any point in the school year. So pick up a copy today and realise your full potential!
