How to Reduce College Exam Anxiety
College exams are always very stressful and difficult to prepare for. It’s hard to know exactly what will be on the test and how to answer questions in the way that your professor prefers. However, there are a few ways that you can approach studying that make it much easier to calm your nerves and feel confident on the day of the test. Here is how to reduce college exam anxiety.
Complete Your Required Reading
There’s a very slim chance that you are going to feel confident about all of your college exams if you don’t do all of your required reading. The reason why you have the reading is so that you can deconstruct it in lecture. However, if you haven’t done you’re reading then you won’t really be able to follow what’s going on in lecture and you won’t be ready to answer all the relevant exam questions that.
Communicate with Your Professor
If you’ve done all of your reading and gone to lecture every week but you still feel nervous about the test, then you should visit your professor during their office hours. This is a great way to make a one-on-one connection with your professor and get some guidance on how to focus your studying efforts. If you are shy about asking questions in class then this is the perfect time go get all of your questions answered. If you write them all out before you visit your professor, it will really demonstrate your dedication to your studies and help make sure you don’t miss anything during your conversation.
Organize a Study Group
If you feel as though your reading and notes are not sufficient enough to adequately prepare for your exam, then you should definitely get a few good students together and pool all of your resources during a study group. You can fill in the gaps for one another and discuss some of the more salient topics that were addressed throughout the chapters. This is one of the best ways to work out any confusion and discrepancies within the material.
Summarize Your Notes
Whether you are taking a class for Rutgers masters in social work or UCLA’s bachelor of sciences, you are going to need to learn how to summarize all of your notes. Whenever you study for a big exam, you want to pull all the pages of notes together that you’ve taken throughout the unit and see if you can summarize them all onto one page or less. This is a great exercise to ensure that you understand the material forwards and backwards – to the point where you can succinctly wrap it all up into a short summary.
Get a Good Night’s Sleep
There’s a lot that you can do to prepare yourself throughout the week leading up to your test, but if you don’t make sure to get a good night’s sleep and eat a good breakfast the morning of the test, then there’s a good chance that your brain won’t be awake and alert enough to access all of that information that you worked so hard to learn. So be sure to get to bed early and get a good, healthy start to your day so that you feel ready to turn your brain on.
