You wake up on the morning of your final exam to a beautiful birdsong and the sun shining through your window. Still half asleep you slowly realise that your alarm didn't wake you. You bolt upright in bed, check the time and, sure enough, you overslept. Now you only have 10 minutes to wake up before writing your final exam!
Jumping out of bed, you start to make your way toward the kitchen for your morning cup of coffee, but halfway to the door you step on a Lego. Once in the kitchen, you put the kettle on and stub your little toe on the doorframe as you rush to feed your fish in the next room while the kettle boils. Grabbing the fish food, you open the container in a hurry and the thousands of small pieces of food fly in every direction. You try to scoop up as much as you can, but the kettle starts its shrill whistle and you rush back into the kitchen to turn off the stove and pour water into a cup.
You take the cup to your desk and start to boot up your computer for your online exam, but then you realise that you forgot to feed your fish. You go back to the fish, only to find that Fishy had somehow drowned during the night and was now floating on top of the water. Taking a few deep breaths, you decide to go write your exam and deal with things later.
You sit down at your computer and start your exam. You read the first question, but slowly start to realise that you have no idea how to answer the question in front of you. Stumped, you reach for your coffee, only to realise that you never added instant coffee to the cup before pouring in the hot water.
As if you hadn’t had enough at that point, about a week later your marks are released: You failed the exam.
No matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, and no matter how much we double-check or even triple-check something, at some point we all fail. No one is perfect and sometimes things simply don’t go as planned - and that is okay. Being imperfect is part of being human, and no matter how much we wish we could change that, it simply is an undeniable fact of life.
Even though we can do nothing to prepare for a bad day or prevent ourselves from making mistakes, we can control how we react when we do fail.
Here are a few practical things to do if you happen to fail.
1. Take a deep breath and evaluate the situation.
Many situations can benefit from a moment's pause. Take a deep breath, go make yourself a cup of camomile tea, sit down in a quiet place, and review your marked exam. You cannot improve your marks if you don’t know where you went wrong in the first place.
The marker’s comments will give you a good indication as to what was missing from your answers. Sometimes students misunderstand the question, sometimes they don’t write enough, other times they only answer the question partially. If an exam didn’t go well, the very first thing to do is review the comments in order to ascertain how to prevent a similar result in the future.
2. Come up with strategies to prevent similar mistakes in future.
Many things can go wrong in an exam, so having practical strategies to do better next time is very important.
All problems are fixable - if you identify what went wrong to begin with. Figure this out and you can prevent making the same mistakes.
If the problem is that you didn’t read the question carefully, take care to pay closer attention to the questions in future exams. If it’s that you didn’t answer the questions fully, take care to write enough to earn the maximum amount of points for each question. If you didn’t know the content well enough, try out a new study routine or adjust your learning strategies. Some students benefit from using different learning strategies - maybe you would benefit from switching things up.
3. Ask for help.
Most universities do offer extra help for students, the only catch is that they need to ask for it. You will not receive help if you do not ask for it.
Let’s read that profound statement again: You will not receive help if you do not ask for it.
Your university wants to see you succeed. If you are struggling, contact someone - send an email, phone a friend, contact your student advisor - and ask for help. There is always someone that will be willing to sit down with you and run through possible solutions to your specific problems.
So, if you happen to oversleep, step on a Lego, stub your toe, confetti your living room with fish food, find your fish-friend belly up in its tank, accidentally skip your first cup of coffee the morning of a big exam and the results of the exam are less than favourable… try applying the three above mentioned tips. Remind yourself that the problem is fixable, it’s just a matter of figuring out how.
Comments
Post a Comment