Tricky exam situations and how to handle them

Preface: This article is applicable for any written/digital examination

This article looks at several challenging situations one might face during an exam. Any of the following may happen to you while you’re writing an exam:

1. You encounter a question in which you have no clue about how to answer it.

2. You begin to answer a question, then you realize that you have adopted a wrong method or have misunderstood the question or that you are adopting the right method but don’t know how to proceed further.

3. In-between the paper, you think that you will not be able to complete it

4. Your mind goes blank or you get very tensed.

How to deal with such situations? Here are some ideas on the same. Feel free to skip to the relevant section.

SITUATION 1:

You have no idea about what the question is asking or how to answer it.

Case I - If you have control over the flow of questions:

1. Identify such questions in the reading time

2. Skip them when you begin to solve the paper (don’t forget to mark the question)

3. Come back to them after you’ve solved everything else

4. If you still have no clue, as long as there is no negative marking, make some attempt if time permits. For an objective type, just select any answer. For a descriptive question, make some random attempt, you may get step marks

Case II - If you have to attempt the Qs in a linear order

1. No choice here, skip and move ahead, don’t waste time

SITUATION 2:

This is a tricky one! I cannot give you one fixed suggestion for this. Once you realize that you are going wrong or don’t know how to proceed further there are two possibilities:

Case I - You know what the correct answer/approach is:

1. Now you choose to either re-write the correct answer immediately or mark it out and come back to it later

2. Quite often trying to make corrections in what you’ve written wastes times and may lead to more errors especially in case of maths of calculations and it reduces neatness. Here it might be better to strike what you’ve written and re-write the answer

Case II - You know that you are wrong, but don’t know what the correct answer/approach is or don’t know how to proceed:

1. Take a minute to analyze the question again

2. If you still don’t know how to proceed to leave the question THEN AND THERE and come back later

3. You can leave space in the answer sheet to come back to it later

4. You may have to force yourself to skip it and move on

5. Be very careful here, because if you keep trying to solve it, you might end up wasting a lot of time and frustrating yourself. Avoid that please!

SITUATION 3:

1. Here you need to aim for scoring maximum marks

2. You can pick questions with higher marks weightage and the one’s you can quickly answer

3. Even if you know how to answer/solve a question correctly, but you know it will eat up your time or involves a high possibility of calculation errors, then attempt it towards the end.

SITUATION 4:

There is a dedicated article for this. How to tackle exam induced stress

I hope you found this article helpful. Stay tuned for more articles addressing different aspects of education, examination, and career-building. If you need further assistance do sign up for a session.

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