How To Survive Exams

In my last post I spoke about returning to university to complete my mental health nurse training. As excited as I was about this I was secretly dreading the assignments and exams. My first exam was Nursing Bioscience (not as scary as it sounds). As far as I know there is no way of getting out of revision, so you have to find a revision method that's works for you. These are the 4 things I do to get  ready for my exams.

1.

Way back when I was doing my A Levels I realised I like my notes to look a certain way, colour co-ordinated and insanely neat and I've pretty much continued doing this. It can be pretty time consuming so I started writing up my lecture notes early in the module so I wouldn't have a ton to do when I started revising.

2.

Some modules I found quite easy to learn from my notes but there were some I just couldn't get my head around. For these I found actually drawing out the systems/structures made everything click. Unfortunately my artistry skills aren't all that (I'm working on it) so I did a little tracing and copying.

3.

After making pretty notes and diagrams I finally condense everything down into flash cards that I can read, re-read and use to test my knowledge.

4.

Since this exam was multiple choice I googled 'bioscience mcq's' and just did a ton of practice questions. Not all the content was relevant to what I was studying but it definitely helped identify gaps in my knowledge. My favourite sites were www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/topic/science and www.khanacademy.org

And that's how I survived my first exam as a nursing student :). I'm always interested in different ways to revise so drop me a comment and let me know what your favourite study tips are.

xoxo