How to Pass a Written Exam

Written exams make up the majority of your exams in college, which in turn make up the majority of your grade point average. Your performance on written exams will be directly reflected in your grades.

Basically, they’re a pretty big deal.

How to Improve Your Performance on a Written Exam

There are two skills you must master in order to improve your performance on a written exam:

Time management

Deduction

Both are essential skills that will not only give you a better chance of doing well on an exam, but they will also improve your academic performance overall.

Time Management

When taking a written exam, first allocate enough time for you to complete all the questions. Briefly review the test to determine the number of questions and how long each of them should take.

Reviewing the test in advance gives you the option to determine which questions you know well, and which questions will require more effort.

There are three categories by which you can divide the sets of questions during an exam but even though this takes time the end result is usually worth it. The three categories include –

• Questions you know well (easy questions)
• Questions you know better (moderately hard)
• Questions you know nothing about (hard questions)

Always answer the questions in order of difficulty, not necessarily the order that they are in on the test.

Avoid leaving questions blank. An incomplete or incorrect answer will always be better than no answer at all.

Deduction

The power of deduction is especially useful for moderate or difficult questions. Most people refer to this as an “educated guess,” because you use your education and contextual clues to determine the most likely answer.

Deduction is a powerful skill that can be practiced. Once you’ve answered all the easy and moderate questions, you can potentially use those answers to deduce the more difficult questions.