Welcome to #3 of Feeding the Curious Mind. Today’s post is an updated, edited post first shared back in 2022 looking at some tips to help with exam preparation for students approaching exam season.

You’re looking at the questions of your first assessment. You thought you understood the topic, but the question leaves you confused and you panicking. This is a common experience and you are not alone.

Years of teaching tell me that annually students struggle to understand the questions set. It must feel like the qualification authorities use their own language. As a lecturer, my role is to help students decipher this language. Today I’m going to outline 9 tips to help students navigate the assessment/essay and exam questions they face.

Turn your Question into a Checklist

You will usually be asked to do various things by your questions. I often return work for resubmission or as a fail because the student has not answered all parts of the question. You need to take the time to read the question and identify all the different things you are being asked to do.

Break your question down by identifying all those different elements. Are you being asked to simply describe something or are there additional elements? For example:

Compare and Contrast Best Practice and Best Fit approaches to HR Strategy. Assess the effectiveness of one of these theories for your own organisation and make recommendations regarding improvements that could be made.

The above question requires you to do 3 different things:

• Compare and Contrast Best Practice and Best Fit
• Assess the effectiveness of one in respect of your own organisation
• make recommendations for improvements

Breaking the question down like this helps you to think about what you are being asked to do. By creating yourself a checklist, you can ensure that you cover everything that you are being asked to do.

Use Highlighters

Using highlighters to emphasise key words and phrases in the questions is an easy way to analyse your questions to help you understand them and create your checklist. This allows you to focus on what’s important. From this, you should be able to identify what you are being asked to do. Using the example above, I’ll underline the words I would highlight:

Compare and Contrast Best Practice and Best Fit approaches to HR Strategy. Assess the effectiveness of one of these theories for your own organisation and make recommendations regarding improvements that could be made.

Once all the key words have been highlighted you will have clues about what’s needed to answer the question. This will help you to understand how to focus your response.

Assessment/Essay Question Language

Assessors use a range of different assessment words to indicate how they want you to answer. I used 4 in the question I created above as our example (compare, contrast, assess and recommend.) You need to know if you are being asked to describe, explain, analyse etc and its important to understand what each means and what your assessor is expecting from you. This Oxbridgeessays blog provides a detailed explanation of the assignment words and what the academics are looking for. Its really important that you write appropriately for the instructions given. You may fail your assessment if you describe instead of explaining or analysing, so its important to understand these words.

Reword the Questions

Sometimes in class, when we’re working on question interpretation, I will task my students with rewriting the question. You may find it useful to put the question into your own words. It helps you to understand what you are being asked to do, and if you get stuck, you could ask your lecturer.

Analyse Past Exam Papers

If you’re studying for an exam rather than working on an assessment, I recommend reviewing past papers. Over time you will identify trends. As you are being assessed on the content of your course syllabus, there is a limit as to what you can be assessed on. This means the same themes will recur, but the questions may be phrased differently. By studying past papers you will become familiar with the different ways the same question can be asked. This means that when it comes to the exam you will be more familiar with the examiner’s writing style and more likely to interpret the questions correctly in your exam.

Write your own Questions

To help get you in the mindset of your examiner/assessor, you should write your own questions. Again, this is a technique I use with my own students. It takes you out of your comfort zone, but it will help focus your studies and aid with interpreting the questions.

I usually develop this activity and have my students answer each other’s questions and then mark the answers. This can be an interesting exercise as not only are the students thinking about their marking criteria (what constitutes a pass/fail etc) but they also discover that their peers may not interpret the question as expected, demonstrating the need to be clear in writing and interpreting the questions.

Peer Marking

I’ve referred to this above, but if its not an activity done in class; working with classmates you could practice marking each other’s practice work. Putting you in the mindset of the assessor makes you more critical. You should have a better understanding of what you need to do to meet your assessor’s expectations.

If you need to work on your own, you could set aside some answers you have written for about 4 days, then mark them (get a red pen). It may feel strange marking your own work but the time gap should give you enough distance to be objective.

Practice Writing Answers to Mock Questions

The more you practice writing you will become familiar your course content. Reading a book or articles gives you much information, but you need to consolidate your learning. Answering questions allows you to take your learning and make sense of it. Answering questions allows you to develop and check your understanding. You will also identify any gaps in your knowledge or understanding. It will also help you develop your academic writing and exam techniques.

Answer the question set

If you have followed my tips above you should be on track. You will stay focused on the questions set. I do have one final tip for you though. Keep a note of the question(s) you are answering in view as you work (I’ve even been doing this drafting this post), Keep asking yourself how does what you’re writing answer the question. If you can answer that question and haven’t included it in your explanation, you should add it. If, however, you find you can’t answer it, they you have possibly been side-tracked. Often I read information and ideas that are interesting, but are irrelevant and don’t score any marks. When this happens you need to be ruthless and remove the irrelevant material. It is hard to do, but I guarantee it will be worth it.

Good luck with your assessment writing and exams.

Now over to you … leave any answers to my questions, or any questions you might have in the comments section.

What words in assessment/essay questions do you struggle with?

What things about assessment/essay questions cause you problems?

If you would like to receive notifications of future blog posts, including further study skills topics, please like my post and subscribe to the blog.