Preparing For Essay Exams

Prepare from Day One

Pre-exam Strategies

1. Predict questions that you think may be on the exam and practise answering them, giving yourself a limited time. Ask a class mate or TA to critique your answer.

2. Get old midterms from cluster leaders, TAs, friends who've taken the course in an earlier semester, or someone in your program in a higher year or from books.

3. Arrange a small group of class mates to discuss possible essay questions and key issues or concepts from the course. Choose members of the group carefully, to ensure that everyone will be motivated to participate. To make group study even more effective, everyone should be at about the same point in their preparation for the exam.

4. Most instructors offer extra reading to complement the primary course material or textbook. Don't be intimidated by long supplemental reading lists. Using a technique like SQ4R can help you to glean the main ideas from a book in a very short time. The resources on the course reading list can be particularly useful for enhancing your understanding of difficult texts or course concepts.

5. Know your instructor's area of expertise and make a point of reading his/her research if it's relevant to the course.

6. Concept mapping is a method of visualizing and making connections between the major concepts in a course. Draw a diagram of the major topics from both the lectures and the text or readings, looking for links and similarities you may not have noticed before. From there connect minor ideas to the major topics and see how many crossovers and linkages you can discover.

Special Situations

In this case, research the given questions from your text and lecture notes and prepare outlines for your answers on paper ahead of time.

The essay exam is a take-home exam:

In this situation you have some time to practise your answers. Use the same study techniques as if you were going to write the exam on campus. Don't leave your studying until you receive the take-home exam, or you may spend all your time researching the material instead of focusing on writing the paper.

During the Exam

1. Read the instructions carefully, noting how many questions you need to answer in each section. Essay exams often include a choice of questions; don't waste time by doing more than required!

2. Process the question to ensure you know how to answer it. For example, are you being asked to analyze, compare and contrast, or discuss? Each requires a different approach.

3. Read all the questions on the exam before you begin writing. Make a brief outline for the questions you plan to answer. This is very important to do for an exam, even if you don't normally use an outline when writing essays. Sometimes your best ideas might be used in more than one answer. You don't want to start writing and then later discover that your discussion of imagery in Hamlet would have fit better in the question on Shakespeare's imagery than the question on Hamlet.

4. Calculate the amount of time available for each question depending on how many marks it's worth. Try and stick to your time plan - it's usually better to have something for each question, even if it's incomplete, rather than nothing at all. If you run out of time to finish a question, jot down the rest of your ideas in point form. Your instructor may give part marks for your ideas.

5. Leave enough time to re-read your paper at the end of the exam when you have some objectivity and distance from your writing.

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