Every examination season produces the same flood of advice, and most of it dissolves on contact with an actual exam week. We asked students across all years, plus two advising staff, which strategies they still use by day three. Six answers came up again and again.
1. Plan backwards from the timetable
Start from each exam date and divide the material across the days available, hardest subjects first. “A plan that starts from today drifts. A plan that starts from the exam date can’t,” said advising coordinator Sarah Lindqvist.
2. Practise retrieval, not recognition
Re-reading notes feels productive because everything looks familiar. Closing the notes and writing down what you remember is uncomfortable — which is exactly the point. Past papers and self-made quizzes beat highlighting every time.
3. Work in fixed blocks with real breaks
The most common pattern among the students we asked: 45 to 50 minutes of work, ten minutes genuinely away from the desk. Not scrolling at the desk — away from it.
4. Teach it to someone
Explaining a topic aloud to a friend, a sibling or an empty room exposes gaps faster than any amount of silent review. Study pairs where each person teaches half the syllabus were mentioned repeatedly.
5. Decide the night before, not the morning of
Choose tomorrow’s subjects, location and start time before going to bed. Every decision left for the morning is an opportunity to negotiate with yourself, and you will lose.
6. Protect sleep like a grade depends on it
Because it does. “The single most reliable difference between a bad exam week and a decent one is sleep,” Lindqvist said. “Nobody believes it until they try it.”
The library’s extended midnight hours run through examination weeks this term — details in our earlier report.
The strategy nobody defended
One tactic came up almost as often — and was defended by almost no one who used it: the all-nighter. Every senior we asked had pulled at least one; none recommended it. “You buy six hours and pay with the next two days,” one put it. Lindqvist’s office keeps an informal record of what students report after examinations, and late-night cramming correlates with exactly one thing reliably: regret. The strategies above are duller. The students who swear by them are, notably, the ones sleeping.
