Preparing for the upcoming mid-year assessments? Score your best grade yet with these exam preparation tips for secondary students.
For many secondary and JC students, the mid-year period is a critical time for weighted assessments or tests. With multiple subjects, limited time, and massive pressure, students can easily end up overwhelmed.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to help. With the right exam preparation tips for high school, for instance, students can find sail smoothly through this challenge and the assessments themselves.
Essentially, you and your child simply need the right strategies to make the most of the prep period. To help you out, we’ll share essential tips for revision, letting you put together a performance improvement plan sure to reap results!
For many secondary and JC students, the mid-year period is a critical time for weighted assessments or tests. With multiple subjects, limited time, and massive pressure, students can easily end up overwhelmed.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to help. With the right exam preparation tips for high school, for instance, students can find sail smoothly through this challenge and the assessments themselves.
Essentially, you and your child simply need the right strategies to make the most of the prep period. To help you out, we’ll share essential tips for revision, letting you put together a performance improvement plan sure to reap results!
As anyone who’s ever been through a cramming session knows, there are benefits to preparing for any sort of test well in advance.
Among other things, it reduces stress, which can help students learn and retain information better. It also helps them stay more organised and focused on the revision as opposed to the clock (or the dread of the assessments being just around the corner).
This also permits smarter use of study time. There’s no pressure to continue studying even after a student has hit the saturation or exhaustion point, after all.
Plus, it means the student feels free to take short breaks whenever they start losing focus or concentration. Breaks are actually a great way to recharge when studying, but many students ignore them because they start revision too close to the deadline.
Mastering effective study habits makes learning easier in so many ways. For example, by breaking down large amounts of material into manageable chunks, it can stop a student from feeling overwhelmed.
This can feed into the student’s self-confidence too, which plays a part in how they fare in school or in assessments. When the student regularly experiences study or revision as something manageable, they’ll feel more capable in their educational pursuits!
Other good study habits include using active learning techniques, and seeking out additional resources for learning (e.g. textbooks, online resources or even study groups).
It’s also a good idea to try and work on actual test-taking strategies by doing mock exams. A lot of review books now provide mid-year review questions and answers for this, and we do something similar at Aspire Hub.
And if the student has a tendency to procrastinate, methods like the Pomodoro Technique can be among the habits to add to the arsenal. It breaks up tasks into things that can be done in 25-minute intervals separated by short breaks.
Time management is critical to a student, not just when preparing for assessments but in the day-to-day business of managing schoolwork. Without good time management, a student ends up frazzled or so disorganised that tasks or goals are constantly overlooked. Worse yet, a student can end up burned out.
Now, we already mentioned one tip that can help with time management: using the Pomodoro Technique. This is a way of scheduling tasks to make them easier to take on while discouraging procrastination by making tasks seem shorter and more doable.
Other things students can do include creating a study schedule, setting task priorities, and minimising distractions during “focus times”.
Students should also remember to set realistic deadlines, practise using task lists to stay organised, and so on. If you need more advice on this matter, we’ve written an article on it already – it’s a good reference if you need more guidance on time management.
It’s all too easy for students to end up feeling stressed during this time. As such, our last tip has to do with self-care.
Students at this level may seem fairly independent already – and they are, in many ways. However, they can still benefit from being reminded to care for themselves. Ensure they get enough sleep, eat healthy food, and take frequent breaks to avoid burnout. Recommend setting up a study area where they can remain calm and focused as well.
This can help them keep up their actual productivity too, as they won’t have factors like sleepiness or exhaustion working against them.
Even with all these tips we’ve given, though, it’s still possible for students to need a little more help to maximise their potential in the mid-year assessments. Luckily, we can help there too.
Aside from the guides we’ve already written on how to excel in school, we also provide revision programmes at Aspire Hub. Paired with our unique coaching methodology, we can give any student both the knowledge and motivation to ace assessments.
Enquire now and we can find the tuition or revision programme that best fits your child’s needs. With our personalised learning plans, students can do better than they ever have before!
