Want to Pass Your English Exam? Do These Three Things.

There are a lot of students that contact me to help them pass their English exams. Usually by the time they find me they have less than a month to work on practicing and there’s a feeling of anxiety and worry in the air,especially if they’ve never done it before. And because of the stress of not wanting to fail the exam, they focus heavily on the work they need to study and totally forget some other common sense things that are equally essential to the success of their exam.

A student I once had found himself in one of these situations. He came to me desperately asking if I could help him out with his TOEIC exam. In some ways it felt last the last chance for him to pass this exam as he had tried at least SIX times before and he still couldn’t get his desired score. He needed the result to get promoted at his work so he could work with international clients.

When we started working together, I noticed something very strange. Every time we had a class he always looked very tired. I mean like ‘my eyes are going to close if you look away for a minute’ kind of tired. He was exhausted, the poor guy. He was actually quite good when we did the exercises but always struggled to get through the whole class. It seems that he had been working hard for 12 hour usually everday before jumping on a train to get back home and then working on fixing his house before taking the class: of course he was tired!

Here’s the interesting part: until I pointed out to him why he was always tired for class he hadn’t realized it by himself! He was too busy in his life to see that.

What I discovered also was when he went to take the same exam Six times previously, he was usually in this tired exhausted state DURING the exam! Exam after exam he would do this same thing.

No wonder he couldn’t obtain his desired result. And there was no way he could change this habit of bad results unless he changed his habits.

I suggest he do the following to increasing his chances of getting an excellent result in the next exam:

1) Sleep

This is probably in my opinion the greatest part of an exam you have to prepare for. It’s because without being well rested you cannot execute  your best performance at the exam. It is very obvious but most times widely overlooked.

So this means don’t party the night before or stay up late with friends or watching TV . Even if you feel nervous and are trying not to stress or think too much about it.

Turn off your mobile phone before you jump in bed( this one is kind of very important.)

You need to have only one thing in your mind which is: everything you’ve you revised for the exam. Visualize and imagine how the exam will go and even think of a strategy of how you will approach the questions.

Don’t let your friends, Family or the phone distract you. After all it’s only going to be only  one night, then you can continue doing all the things you usually do in your life.

A full sleep is good for another reason: this is a great way for your brain to process information and remember what you learnt previously. So try to go for eight hours sleep at least. Scientific studies have shown you retain more by sleeping after working on something. So you wake up next morning in a good mood, fully energised and ready for the task ahead.

2) Energy
This is the second most critical element for exam pre-preparation. Most people don’t realise going to exam is not only very stressful but it drains a lot of your energy and focus too. First of all have a bottle of water to combat dehydration which could also occur in an exam enviroment. As you go through each question your energy levels can also drop sometimes quite dramatically. So you could be quarter or half way through the exam and already tired and this is even after a good sleep. Great way to to combat this would be to have a Cereal bar or fruit like bananas which you can take into the exam.(Check if this allowed first in your exam before taking it in!)
This makes sure that when you start to feel tired and  like you’re losing your focus, the best thing you can do at this point would be to get down some water or eat something to reboost yourself.

3) Time strategy
You have to master how to use the time in your exam. It can be as important as knowing what the correct answer for the questions are. The key element in practising this is to use intention as part of your strategy. Which means you control the amount of time you use for each question on purpose.
You should know beforehand the maximum time you can give to one question (It will be different for each section depending on difficulty and time allowed)

You must be okay with answering each question as quick as you can and not thinking too much about consequences. When the allocated time is up for each question, move onto the next question immediately.If you can return back to the difficult question later that would be great but don’t do this before you’ve finished all the other questions. What you can do before the exam also is practice each subsection of questions under similar timing conditions to have an idea of how you’ll perform at the test. If you master the time, you could do very well in the test.