Midterm season has come and gone again. As students, we watch it emerge gradually from the shadows each semester, and time begins to lag behind as we defend our academic standing, exam by exam. I have recently considered my midterm exams through the lens of a formula that I could set. After all, we all have the same goal once we take a seat for an exam: to not make mistakes and to not do the wrong thing. The stakes are particularly high for in-person, timed exams, and so in this article I will focus on this mode of exam-taking.
When you are given 50 or 75 minutes for an exam with multiple sections and tests of knowledge and skill, it is a strenuous feat to avoid answering the questions in an unfamiliar way. I will argue that an unfamiliar method for going about exam questions is always a wrong method. For we must assume that completing the tasks of the exam has been ingrained somewhere within us with each lecture and lesson. Since we know that doing something unfamiliar on an exam will lead to wrong answers, I will argue that we should train our minds to recognize when we are doing something that feels unfamiliar, so that we can recognize this sensation of an unfamiliar method during an exam and avoid it. Therefore, instead of cramming for hours straight before an exam, you should break up your study time by taking a few minutes to do something you have never done before: something weird.
I will first offer a more careful description of how I believe exams operate in terms of testing mastery of coursework. In most humanities classes, one can expect several different types of test questions, at least some of which will involve some sort of written response. The key to answering these questions is to provide details and/or explanations of what the concept or prompt is and how it functions, in such a way that follows a set operation of problem-solving as defined throughout the course. This means that there is a correct path for providing these details based on how the course has programmed the test taker to think about the topic. The same is true in STEM classes, in which case unique exam questions will also be entirely operational in the same sense, as they often involve solving a problem or describing how concepts interact. STEM and humanities exams may each include multiple choice questions, but I would posit that this mode of questioning is also operational, even if it is asking for a simple definition or explanation of a concept. I say this because multiple choice questions allow for multiple paths for ultimately making what the test taker thinks is the best decision. However, there is a correct answer, so there must be a correct path of decision-making in this way, thus multiple choice questions are operational in the sense of ruling out all answers but the correct one.
Now we have raised the question of how to stay on the correct path during an exam, such that we make no mistakes. Arguably, this is a simple task for someone who knows the course content just as they know how to write their own name on the exam. But this is only true because such a student has spent substantial energy training their brain to do the right thing. Students who perhaps have some gaps in their knowledge or are less confident should be more concerned with not doing the wrong thing. To accomplish this, students need only recognize the sensation of doing something unfamiliar because, assuming the student has attended lectures and done their due diligence in studying, the course will have naturally ingrained some sense of the correct operation for a given question. Therefore, students can always benefit from understanding what it feels like to answer a question correctly and familiarly, but it is more important for students to recognize when something feels unfamiliar when responding to the question.
There may be some objection from those who want to say that exam questions are entirely outside the scope of what was taught in the class, in which case doing something operationally unfamiliar is necessary. To this I say it is of similar importance to recognize the sensation of doing something unfamiliar, for the same reasons it is to recognize when you are obviously doing something the right way. For this new scenario merely reverses the prior scenario, in that doing something familiar is the wrong thing to do because it would likely not lead you down a path of showing your innovation in taking the exam, and doing something unfamiliar is the right thing to do for entirely opposite reasons. Therefore, this objection should take my argument the same, just as its inverse.
The only thing left to establish is how we can train our minds to recognize when we are doing something unfamiliar. As I have suggested, take just five minutes around an hour or so before your exam and do something you have never done before. For instance, 30 minutes before an exam I was particularly stressed about, I left my study spot—where I easily could have filled my water bottle—to get water from a building across Grounds. As another example, perhaps you could wear your shirt backward, and this would continually remind you what the unfamiliar feels like before and even during your exam. Then, when you are taking the exam and completing an operational question, if you happen to feel the same sensation in that moment as you felt based on the unfamiliar thing you did in preparation for the exam, you can easily notice when you are doing something incorrectly on the exam, change what you are doing, and avoid mistakes.
In conclusion, every student should take the time to do something weird prior to an exam.
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