Good Habits for Exam Takers
Whether you are sitting GCSE's early or are battling with retakes, it is a good idea to adopt some habits that may not seem entirely natural for teenagers. I am not going to moralize about the evils of drugs, or complain about the drinking habits of the youth of today – there are plenty of people doing that already. What I want to present you with here are some facts about the effects of bad sleeping habits, diet, certain drugs and alcohol, and specifically how these can affect your ability to learn and revise. We wouldn’t expect you to become a nun or a hermit for three months around the time of your exams, but there are nevertheless some reasonable modifications you can make to your lifestyle that will really help.
Question.
Teenagers actually need more sleep. True or false?
Answer
True
Teenagers' Brains and Sleep
A teenage brain is a very busy thing, it’s carrying out lots of not entirely obvious developmental work and so consequently it requires lots more sleep. So, in spite of what some grown-ups might say, teenagers are not just plain lazy. Given that you may need a bit more sleep then, you have to find a way of getting all the sleep you need without waking up at three in the afternoon. What’s wrong with getting up at 3pm? The key issue is that your exam may well start at nine in the morning – i.e. somewhere in the middle of your 'night', so if during your study leave you are sleeping from 4am through to 3pm, 9am exams are going to be a very nasty shock to the system indeed.
You most definitely need to try to achieve a sleeping cycle that gives you enough sleep, fits into a 24 hour day and means that you get up early enough for a 9am exam not to be too dreadfully painful.
Is sleep really important?
Here’s a gruesome experiment from 1960’s psychology (in the days before ethics committees). Take one cute puppy:
Question
If you don’t let the puppy sleep what do you think will happen?
Answer
Eventually, if you keep this up for a few weeks the puppy dies.
To my knowledge no-one has ever performed the same experiment on a human infant, but we can be sure that something similar would happen. Although we are not entirely sure what sleep is for, we are absolutely certain that it is very important.
Exercise
Write down what happens to you if you don’t get enough sleep.
Sleep deprivation in human adults can lead to the following:
- Feeling physically and mentally tired (obviously).
- Grumpiness.
- Irritability.
- Vulnerability to depression.
- Accentuate other mood problems such as anxiety.
- Reduced cognitive ability - your ability to think and use your brain.
- Greatly increased risk of accidents.
- Slower thinking.
- Delays and errors in doing mental tasks.
- Slower mental arithmetic and logical reasoning.
- Memory is affected, with reduced immediate recall.
- Reduces the ability to do simple or monotonous tasks.
- Ability to think laterally.
Which of these did you have?
Hopefully it is pretty obvious that none of the above are really going to help your revision. Some are clearly worse than others, but none of them are good.
People lie…
Yes, I know it shocking, but it’s also true.
Not every story of beautiful girlfriends is true.
Claimed versus actual:
VS 
Stories of alcohol consumption are often exaggerated...
Claimed versus actual:
VS 
So what has this got to do with revision? Well when people say "I didn’t do any work" and then they get three A’s at A level, it's a lie. Working hard is not particularly cool, so at best students play it down at worst they tell downright lies. So, when you are trying to decide how much work you should be doing, your friends and what they say are probably not the best way of making a judgement. The blunt reality is that almost every single person who does well puts in a lot of effort – research shows that people at the top of their field, whether it’s sports, music, academia, or whatever, have put in around 10,000 hours work to get there.
Now, no one is expecting you to work for 10,000 hours for each exam. However, the point is that to do well you do have to put in the effort. It’s worth noting that if, for example, you do A level maths and guesstimate the time you’ve spent over your whole life doing maths then you’ll get a figure of a couple of thousand hours.
Good Working Environment
If at all possible find somewhere quiet to work. It is easier to concentrate in a quiet, fairly well organised room, rather than a chaotic, noisy one. It is also much better to create an environment where interruptions are kept to a minimum – that includes: your mobile, Facebook, twitter, Msn, Yahoo, and so on. And yes that does include you!
Do not delude yourself that you can multitask – that is irrelevant – it will still absorb way more time than you think. A fifty minute revision session will easily be reduced to effectively half an hour with a few texts and Facebook posts and whatever other interruptions you allow yourself. The world will not end if you don’t check Facebook every five minutes!
If there isn’t somewhere suitable at home, you can always try the library, or even a park if the weather is decent. The key thing is that it is quiet and you don’t get interrupted too much.
Some people can work in noisy, chaotic environments – but that doesn’t mean it is good practice and doesn’t mean that it will work for you. I am not suggesting that you have a spotless desk with only a book, pen and notebook, but rather that you don’t have to spend half hour wading through banana skins, copies of FHM and half-eaten sausage rolls to find those vital notes on "Of Mice and Men". The questions to ask yourself is "can I work here and can I find stuff" if the honest answer is yes – then your desk is probably neat enough. Note: the "honest answer" is not the same thing as the "answer that is best for you".
On the other hand if you are an obsessively tidy person, try to ensure that you don’t spend 3 hours organising your desk and 20 minutes working – that’s not much use either.
Diet
Here we are taking about what you eat: diet – not losing or gaining weight: dieting.
There is no magic food that will make you smarter. Some fish oils, for example, might be beneficial, but the effect is so slight that some studies show positive effects and other no effect at all. Whatever the truth, cramming yourself with "brain vitamins" is not going to help in any significant way.
However, what you eat and drink can make a difference. As far as possible try to eat well and drink enough water. Eating rubbish food is likely to make you feel tired and in the worst case, unwell. Dehydration can cause memory loss, confusion, headaches, and obviously, in the extreme, death – none of which would help with your revision. There’s no specific number of glasses of water you "have" to drink – after all glasses vary from shot glasses through to 2 litres or more; also quite a lots of your water intake is via food. So best to have a glass of water handy and just sip every now and then, and keep it topped up. If you drink too much water well you will just end up peeing more frequently (not a major issue); if you don’t drink enough your brain will go a bit fuzzy (a major issue if you are trying to revise).
Caffeine
The important thing about your consumption of caffeinated drinks is that sudden changes won’t help. If you drink coffee (or Red Bull or whatever) then don’t suddenly stop or massively increase your intake during exams. Caffeine can mess quite seriously with your sleeping pattern, so given the importance of sleep and a regular sleeping pattern, it’s best not to mess with it during a revision period.
If you usually drink 2 cups of coffee a day, then you might find you drink one or two more per day – that’s fine. 8 a day would be a bad idea.
Alcohol
Hangovers and revision are not compatible. If you are a wasted-three-times-a-week type person then you need to consider how this will affect your ability to revise. During your exams you will need to modify your social life so that you don’t lose too many days to a post-alcohol haze.
Morals and drugs
There are plenty of people out there telling you that drugs are bad, evil, immoral, illegal, support terrorism, support the sex trade/arms trade/child pornography, lead to ill-health, crime, prostitution, rape, murder, death and so on. This page is not about morals it’s about exams and being good at them, so the following information is not intended as a moral guide, but as information about how recreational drugs can affect exam performance.
Cannabis and memory
There is a lot of clinical evidence that cannabis has a significantly negative effect on your memory. These effects may last weeks and possibly months. So if you are a user and you want to do well in your exams you should stop well ahead of your exams.
Cannabis also has other significant effects on physical and mental health which will affect your performance in exam. Don’t fall for the "my mate smoked ten joints a week and got into Oxford" stories – even if it is true (which it probably isn’t) it is one example and really tells you nothing useful. Claims such as that are just the B-side to the "my mate smoked ten joints a week and ended up in a mental hospital". There are almost certainly true examples of both of these ten joint a week scenarios – they are what statisticians call outliers – they tell us nothing about what typically happens.
A study in New Zealand came to the following conclusion about cannabis: "High levels of cannabis use are related to poorer educational outcomes, lower income, greater welfare dependence and unemployment and lower relationship and life satisfaction."
Other mind altering drugs
Without wishing to state the blindingly obvious, mind altering substances alter your mind. And the efficiency of your mind is obviously vital in term of doing exams. So, the unavoidable conclusion is that mind altering drugs will affect exam performance, never in a good way.
Prone to procrastination?