Three exam survival tips that actually work
I rocked up to a school hall the other day, a whole year early.
I was well prepared, ready for an expo, and instead I found myself standing outside a room full of students sitting exams. Wrong date. Not by a day, by a year. Well prepared indeed.
But standing there, my attention went to the students inside, and it took me straight back.
I remember exam dread. I had studied hard, but I never knew what I would actually be able to pull out of the hat once I sat down and had to write an answer.
I knew what I wanted to say. I just could not get it onto the page in any way that made sense.
Sometimes I misread the question. Sometimes I did not understand it at all, and I wrote something, anything, to fill the white space, hoping a mark was hiding somewhere in the waffle.
And here is the thing that still happens to me now. I read something, get to the end, and none of it stays with me. It just wafts through my brain and out the other side. So back I go and read it again.
Students today do a lot of their exams on laptops, which solves the handwriting problem. But it does nothing for knowing the answer and being unable to get it out. And nothing for reading a whole paragraph and not one word sticking.
Those are the real problems. And they are not about trying harder.
So here are three things that genuinely help, at the kitchen table or in an exam.
When nothing is staying in, stop pushing through. The instinct is to keep going and hope it clicks. It will not. Stop, close your eyes, take one slow breath, reset, then read it again. That pause does more than three rushed read throughs ever will.
Use a line guide. When the whole page is staring back at you it overwhelms, and the words blur together. Take a blank sheet of paper and slide it down the page so you only see one line at a time. Read it, stop, move down. If a line is still too much, cover everything except one sentence.
Catch the answer before it scrambles. For the blank page moment, jot the key points down first, in any order. Get them out of your head while you still have them, then shape them into sentences. Hold the whole answer in your head and write it perfectly at the same time, and you lose it. Get it down first, tidy it after.
It feels slower. It is not. It is far better to spend the time getting it right than to race ahead, miss the point, and hand in a vague answer that never says what you actually knew.
If you are watching a young person go through exactly this, and you want to understand what is really going on and what actually helps, that is what I walk parents and teachers through in my From Confusion to Clarity workshop. One hour, online, with time for your questions at the end.
Wednesday 23rd September, 7.00pm.
About me
I'm Nikki Palamountain, and I work with children, teenagers and adults who think in pictures and have found reading, writing or spelling hard going.
I know this territory from the inside. I struggled through it myself, and I still notice it in my own reading now. That is part of why I do this work. I understand what it feels like to sit with a page and have the words refuse to stay put.
Through Dyslexia Unpuzzled, I help people discover how their own mind works, and give them practical tools they can actually use, at home, in the classroom, and in the exam room. There is nothing wrong with the people I work with. They simply learn in a different way, and once they understand how, everything opens up.
If you would like to talk through what is going on for your young person, I am always happy to have a free conversation. You can find me at dyslexiaunpuzzled.co.nz.
