Past Exam Vision
Students have just been told their exam results for Semester 1, and some of them are facing replacement exams. So we'll be trotting out our standard suite of exam advice again, which will be all the more poignant now because these people tried to do it last time and failed!
One piece of advice we give is not to use past exams as your main study tool. So many students study for their exams by taking a stack of past exams and systematically working their way through each question and making sure they can do all the intimate details. This is a bad idea for several reasons. I'll list some in dot point form:
| 1: | The course may have changed over time, so some of the questions will not be relevant to your course content anymore, while still other questions just won't have appeared in past exams. |
| 2: | The lecturer probably changed, so the style of the exam questions may be quite different to the exam you are about to do. |
| 3: | No one exam can cover every concept in a whole course, and even several exams will miss something between them. |
| 4: | Lecturers are not stupid, and so will generally always put something in that has not been done in an exam for the past several years, in much the same way that they don't use yesterday's questions today on a TV quiz show! |
| 5: | You need to save at least a couple exams to do as proper timed exams in exam conditions or you won't practice the skill of doing exams in exam conditions. |
​​​But there is one more reason I myself had never really known fully until