Practising under the conditions of the test

Transfer is narrower than people expect

Memory is sensitive to the conditions in which it was formed. Material learned in one context is retrieved more easily in that context and less easily elsewhere: a well-established finding, sometimes demonstrated in unusually memorable ways, such as divers who learned word lists underwater recalling them better underwater than on land.

The practical consequence for you: if every hour of revision happens in a comfortable chair with music, a window open and a phone in reach, and the exam happens in silence, timed, by hand, with nothing available, you have practised a different task from the one you will perform.

The conditions that actually differ

Make a list for your specific assessment and close each gap deliberately.

• Time. Almost everyone underestimates how much slower they are under pressure. Practise at the real pace, including reading time.
• Handwriting. If your exam is written by hand and your practice is typed, you have not practised the physical act, and hands cramp at forty minutes. Write by hand, at length, before the day.
• No lookup. Any practice where you check something mid-answer is not practice for a closed exam. Put the answer you are unsure of in and carry on; mark it afterwards.
• Silence, or noise you cannot choose. Exam halls have coughing, chairs, a clock. Some people find a library reading room a good approximation.
• Cold start. In an exam you sit down and begin, without a warm-up on the topic. Practise starting cold.
• Question order and choice. If your paper offers choice, practise choosing quickly. Time spent deciding is time not writing, and students lose a surprising amount to it.

The exam that allows AI

Some assessments now permit these tools, and open-book, open-AI examinations are appearing. They are not easier. When everybody has the tool, the questions change: they ask for judgement, for application to a novel case, for critique of a supplied answer, for defence of a choice.

If your assessment permits it, practise with it under time pressure, because using a model well under a clock is its own skill. The specific failure to rehearse against is spending eight minutes prompting your way around a question you could have answered in three. In a timed assessment the tool is often slower than knowing the answer, and knowing which is which is exactly what is being tested.

Coursework-heavy courses have a hidden risk

If your degree is assessed mostly by coursework, with one closed component, you can arrive at that component with excellent marks and no unaided capability. The gap is invisible until the day.

The protection is the unaided check from Module 3, run regularly, all year. It costs an hour a month and it is the difference between finding out in week five and finding out in the hall.

Building the exam week backwards

A schedule that works, counting back from the date:

• Four weeks out. Full past paper under conditions. Mark it. This tells you what the last month is for.
• Three weeks. Topic-by-topic retrieval on the weaknesses that paper exposed. Interleaved.
• Two weeks. Second full paper under conditions. Compare.
• One week. Timed single questions, mixed, cold. Handwritten.
• Two days. Light retrieval on your confidently-wrong list. No new material.
• The night before. Sleep. This is not a platitude: sleep consolidates memory, and a night lost to cramming costs more than the material gained. Everything the extra three hours might add is smaller than what tiredness takes away.

The free way to simulate the hall

You do not need anything bought. A kitchen timer or a phone alarm, a stack of blank paper, a pen, and a room you are not comfortable in. Your university library usually has silent study rooms that are much closer to exam conditions than your bedroom, and they cost nothing.

A group of three doing a past paper together in silence, in the same room, at the same time, then swapping and marking each other’s against the scheme, is the closest free approximation to the real thing, and the marking-somebody-else’s half is where a surprising amount of the learning happens.

On the day

Read the whole paper first. Allocate time by marks, and write the allocation on the paper. Start with a question you can do, to get moving. Leave the last ten minutes to check.

And if a topic you revised does not appear, that is normal, and it is not evidence you revised wrongly. Papers vary. The students who do well are usually not the ones who predicted the paper; they are the ones who could answer whatever was on it, which is what interleaved practice buys you.