3 Exam Strategies Every Student Must Know

In the previous article, we have explained that there are 3 key success factors that will determine how well a student do in POA and ‘O’ Level. One of the 3 key success factors is to have effective study methods and exam strategies. Effective exam strategies help in minimizing the amount of time you need to spend studying, maximizing the amount of marks you score in the examination and detaching you from the negative emotions, such as exam anxiety during the actual exam.

There are many study methods and exam strategies, ranging from the basic to advanced strategies. In this article, we will go through 3 of them. Applied correctly, you should see your exam results begin trending up.

1. Understanding vs Memorizing

Over-reliance on memory work is the most common problem we notice in students. Let’s be very clear, you get nowhere by relying on memory work. We believe that the reason why students resort to memorizing is because they have difficulty understanding the concepts taught in school.

The solution to this is to ensure that you clarify any concept that you are not clear with your teacher. Of course, if you are too shy, you may choose to engage a tutor, whether it is a private 1-to-1 or group tuition. We recommend group tuition so that you can benchmark yourself against students from other schools. Disclaimer: Our opinion may be biased on this as we conduct group tuition. 🙂

The rule is that you should NEVER memorize anything that you do not understand!

2. Practise, Practise and Practise

You can have the best understanding of the concepts, however if you do not practise what you have learnt, there is very little chance you can surpass other students. Look at yourself as a professional athlete. Although they have the best understanding of the concepts to perform best in their chosen sport, they continuously practising their movements so that they can perfect them by the Olympic Games. You too, should do the same!

It is important that you spend more time practising questions that are more likely to appear in the exam rather than those that have remote chance of appearing.

This paragraph is going to be an advertisement about our service. You may skip this paragraph if you wish to. 🙂 See, advertisement does not need to be boring! In Mr. Wong POA Tuition, we carefully select the types of questions that our students should practise in class and at home. This is to ensure that students can derive the maximum benefits out of the time they spend practising.

3. Exam Forecasting

There are too many expected learning outcomes in the syllabus. This does not only apply to ‘O’ Level POA, but also for other subjects in any levels of study. It is very unlikely that you can acquire the same depth of understanding on all the learning outcomes in the syllabus. Even if you can, you may need to spend unnecessarily significant amount of time which you can devote to learning other subjects. It is therefore very important that you learn to forecast what the exam questions which are more likely to appear in the exams, say ‘O’ Level exams. However, it is important to note that by no means you should ignore other concepts which are less likely to appear. You MUST learn all the concepts in the syllabus, so that you will still have a chance to answer any question that comes out despite having the most remote likelihood of appearing.

Forecasting also allows you to be focused in your study. Obviously, if you think the questions are going to come out, it must be irrational if you still choose not to study them! The ability to forecast the exam questions accurately is probably one of the most important factors that propel Mr. Wong to be Top 30 Graduate in Singapore.

We hope what we share in this article will be helpful to you. Do remember to share this with your friends who may also benefit from the exam strategies we shared in this article.

Written by Mr. Wong – Principal POA Tutor of Mr. Wong POA Tuition