One of my school friends had his birthday in the beginning of May and he could never throw a party and call his friends that day because we always had our final exams then.

May is starting again and those of you who have your exams and birthday will have to make do with a subdued celebration. That doesn’t really matter because you can celebrate birthdays later on, but you need to focus on your exams as you can’t give the exams later on.

While ‘How to celebrate your birthday’ is an interesting topic to discuss, we will be discussing here ‘What mistakes to avoid during exams’. Exams are more important and tricky. No matter how well we prepare for something — exams, trips, parties, interviews, debates, speeches, etc., — we are bound to commit some mistakes. A successful person is one who learns from mistakes, whether their own or of others, and avoids them in the future.

Some mistakes are very common and peculiar to a certain situation, for instance, during exams people are prone to running out of time and not attempting all the questions, misunderstanding instructions, writing illegibly, forgetting an important stationary item, etc.

Since your success in exams are as dependent on you doing the exam preparations well as it is on not making mistakes in giving your exams, let us look at some of the common mistakes that people make during examination and how we can learn to avoid them.

Selective study: Learning the whole course that is going to come in the exams is a task that few can claim to do well, most of us resort to going through past question papers, hints dropped by teachers and class discussions to narrow down to the questions that are most likely to come in the paper, whatever the subject.

Then we sit down and learn the answers to those particular questions. But such guess work hardly pays, and it never happens that all the prepared questions appear in the paper. A better option is to focus on important topics and chapters rather than important question because if you learn a topic well, you can answer the why, when, how and who, related to it.

But those who leave their learning for the last few days before the papers, they can’t help but depend on learning just the important topics/questions.

Panicking: We all freak out before or during a paper. Try to calm your nerves, take deep breaths, say your prayers, make sure you’ve had a good breakfast, and jolt yourself into concentrating on the question paper in front of you.

Tell yourself “I can do it!” Or “I know the answers, I need to just focus!”

Once you have calmed down, read the questions slowly and with concentration. Forget about the difficult questions, start with the easy ones that you know. This will boost up your confidence and then when you come to the tougher questions, they will not appear so very difficult.

Arriving late: Last minute delays and problems can happen anytime so always be ready before time and reach the exam hall or room in advance, especially if the sitting arrangement has been changed or the exam in a new room or centre. If you are in a higher grade and have to go to an exam centre that is different from your school, do take time out and check it before the exam day so that you don’t lose your way and become late.

If you are late, you lose precious minutes of the exam duration or, in worst scenarios, be barred from sitting in the exams! And the rushing you might have done is bound to make you tense and worked up, leading you to do poorly in a paper that is otherwise not too difficult.

Missing stationery items: The night before the exams, always set your bag and make sure you have the required stationery items packed in it. If you need a compass or calculator, do bring your own rather than plan on taking it from a friend during the paper.

What if they refuse? Or you are not allowed to borrow anything during the paper? So come well-prepared to give your exam. And keep some spare things too — just in case.

If you use an ink pen, fill it up with ink and the spare one too so that during the paper if you run out of ink you will not have to waste time refilling the pen.

Missing personal information: Forgetting to write the required personal information on all the answer sheets can lead to your paper getting mixed up or lost — making you lose marks.

The moment you get the question paper and the answer sheet, write down your name and all that is being asked. If you take extra answer sheets, write the personal details first before preceeding with the exam as you might forget to do so at the end. Also make sure to staple or bind all the sheets together well because papers may get mixed up or fall apart while being handled by others.

Rushing to start: In the nervousness of exams and tests, many people just look at the first few questions or page and rush to write the answer. Or the first question may be an easy one and you get excited and quickly start writing without going through all the questions first as you don’t want to waste time.

If you have prepared well and all the questions are not too difficult, then this approach might work but that’s not always the case.

First go through all the instructions and questions. See how many questions you need to answer as there are often choices given. Then carefully choose the questions you can and have to answer, see how many marks the questions carry and then divide your time accordingly, setting aside more time for the questions that carry more marks and those that are difficult and lengthy.

Now start with the short and easy ones, leaving the bulk of your time for the difficult and lengthy ones. A common mistake that people make is that they don’t go through the paper well and divide the time, with the result that they end up spending more time on the easy ones with fewer marks and have to rush through the lengthy answers.

Lack of planning: Planning is required in selecting questions to answer, which we discussed just now, and how to answer a question.

Has it happened that you have started answering a question and halfway through you realised that you have arranged the paragraphs in the wrong way — you have left out what should have come in the beginning of your answer? Or you started answering and then realised that the beginning was all wrong and you then crossed out the whole answer and started again.

You’ve wasted precious time and made an impression on the examiner that you are unsure about the answer even if you know it well.

So before starting your answer, take a moment to read the question well. Underline the key words in the question and ask yourself what kind of answer the question demands. Understand what is being asked and in which sequence, and then begin your answer.

A carefully planned answer would also get more marks than a poorly planned answer.

Writing too much or too little

This really needs little explanation as how long your answer to a particular question should be depends on the marks it carries. No question that is worth just one or five marks out of 100 is going to need a full-page essay answer. And no question that carries 25 marks out of a total of 100 marks will require students to write just two paragraphs.

But often we lose marks by wasting our time and energy on writing a detailed answer when we are asked to ‘briefly’ explain something or writing a short definition/answer when we are asked to ‘detail’ something. Be mindful of the length of your answers if you want to score well.

Wasting time on what you don’t know: You don’t know the answer to a question or are unsure, still you stay on it, waiting for a miracle to happen and the answer to appear in your mind. Minutes pass but you are still stuck.

At the end of the paper, you still don’t know the answer and you don’t have the time to answer all the questions that you do know the answer to. In such situations, move on to the questions you can do — time is too precious to waste.

Failing to answer all the unanswered questions in the end: When the teacher starts the countdown to the end of the examination time, check how many questions remain unanswered. Choose the one that carries the most marks and do that, then move on to other questions in the same manner. Hopefully by the time the teacher says, “Time over! Pens down!” you will have only those questions unanswered that carried fewer marks.

But if all the questions carry almost the same marks and you are unsure of the answer to the one with the highest marks, then pick the easiest questions that require the shortest answers, and answer them quickly. Then, proceed to the remaining questions that require longer answers.

Write in short bullet form, forget proper paragraphing. Make sure the answers carry the key words, dates, names, etc., so that the teacher gives your marks for that. This is not the ideal way to answer but when you are running out of time, this is the best you can do.

Wishing you all best for your exams. Just forget the world for now, it will still be there when your exams are over.

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 30th, 2015