Exam day: the practical bits
By this point the revision is what it is. What is still in your control is how you spend the three hours.
The morning
Do not revise anything new. The temptation is to spend the morning cramming a topic you are shaky on, and it usually costs more in anxiety than it gains in marks. If you want to do something, do ten minutes of light recall on material you already know well. It warms you up and it is reassuring rather than alarming.
Eat something. Take water if it is allowed. Get there early enough that being late is not one of the things occupying your head.
Nerves are not the enemy
A raised heart rate before an exam is your body making more resources available. It is the same physiological state as excitement, and the label you put on it matters more than you would think. There is research suggesting that people told to interpret arousal as helpful tend to perform better than those told to calm down.
If it tips into something worse, the reliable tool is your breathing, and specifically a longer out-breath than in-breath. Four counts in, six or seven out, for a minute. It is not a trick, it genuinely shifts the balance in your nervous system.
The first five minutes of the paper
- Read the instructions. How many questions, from which sections, is there choice. Every year people answer the wrong number.
- Work out your time per mark. A ninety-minute paper worth sixty marks is a minute and a half a mark. Write that number at the top.
- Scan the whole paper and mark questions you can definitely do. It settles you, and it stops you meeting a hard question cold at the end.
Order and timing
Answer the ones you can do first unless the paper requires otherwise. Marks are marks in any order, and banking the certain ones early means a late panic costs you the questions you were least likely to get anyway.
Keep an eye on your time per mark and be willing to abandon. If a six-mark question has taken fifteen minutes, leave it, mark the page, and move on. Finishing two other questions is worth more than winning that one.
The single most common avoidable loss is spending a fifth of the paper on one stubborn question, then running out of time on three you could have done.
When you do not know
Write something. Blank scores nothing, and partial method marks are real in most subjects. Put down the relevant formula, define the terms, describe the approach you would take. Examiners award what is there, not what you intended.
In essay subjects, if you are running out of time, bullet points with the argument in them beat half a beautiful paragraph.
Between papers
Do not conduct a post mortem. Comparing answers in the corridor is the fastest way to damage your performance in the next paper, and the marks are already decided. If people around you are doing it, walk away. This is not superstition, it is protecting the paper you can still affect.
Eat, drink, get outside for a few minutes if you can, then look at the next subject only lightly.
Afterwards
Exams measure a narrow thing on a particular day. They matter, and it is worth doing them well, and they are not a verdict on you. Whatever happens there is a route onward from it, and most people find a few years later that the specific grade mattered far less than it felt like it would.