The activities are just overwhelming. As a University student, you attend lectures, read your notes, write assignments, test and exam. And as you do these set of tasks for months, you’ll still have to write exams, answering questions related to what you have covered throughout the course of your semester.
What a difficult work!
A lot of students fail – woefully. They can’t cope with all the academic works and still pass their exams. The question is, how do you smartly minimize your risk of exam failure?
Well, there are many ways to do that ranging from reading hard, organizing your time, engaging in group discussion, etc. The problem is, most of these tips rarely work. I mean how can you organize your schedule or read hard when you have a test tomorrow, three lecturers today, and an assignment to submit today by noon?
It is difficult.
What if there is a way to hack your exams question, not literally of course so that you can predict the questions that will come out in your exams? it will be excellent, right? Because you’ll focus your time on reading those topics without much reading, work, hassle.
The good news is, there is a way to rightly guess the exact questions that you’ll be asked in the exams. to do that, here are three simple questions to answer:
What are the core objectives of the course?
Every course has its objectives. Your lecturer’s main goal is to ensure that you achieve those objectives. They pass those objectives – the specific sets of knowledge you’re expected to learn at the end of the course – through their knowledge, expertise, and teaching method or methods.
Before you can guess the topics that might appear in your exams, study the subject’s main objectives. For example, if your next paper is Soc 101: An Introduction to Sociology,” understand the general objective of this course. Usually, this introductory course’s main objectives are to help students:
- Define the concept of Sociology
- Understand Sociological theories or perspectives
- Know how the social system works
Once you understand these objectives, you’re half way done. Now, analyze your teacher’s area of emphasis.
What topics did your professor emphasize on?
Our lecturers focus on the most important topics when teaching a course. You need to study the particular areas they pay much attention to for you to guess – rightly – the topic that will likely come out in your exams.
You figure all this out by noticing the questions they ask you to write:
- Assignments
- Tutorials
- Tests
The goal is to critically assess the areas they prioritize – they’re what matters for the course. And they’ll likely reflect in your question paper.
Which topics cover the core objectives of the course?
Remember this: In the first section, your goal is to understand the main objectives of a course, right? Here, the most important thing is for you to determine what topics cover these objectives. Because some topics are just an added explanation to the main theme of the course while others are the foundations through which the whole course is built. Figure the topics that are fundamental to your subject and read them – thoroughly.
They might appear in your exams.
