Teachers, parents, year advisors, department of education pamphlets, even your

school diary gives you advice about what to do when you sit down to take an
exam. Read the paper before starting. Read each question twice. If you have a
hard question, break and come back to it. Start with the easiest questions. This is
all good advice.
However even by following this advice there may still be situations in which you find
it hard to get all of the marks available in a paper. Maybe the subject is challenging,
or you run out of time, or a question just plain stumps you. It happens. When it
does, you still want to maximise the number of marks you get.
What we want to focus on here are some exam tips which might be a little more
situational, but which can help you squeeze a few more marks out of your test paper.

You can cram before the exam

Cramming is not an effective study strategy in and of itself, but there is one thing it
can help with, and that's pre-loading information into your short term memory. If you
keep a little book of formulae, quotes, important dates or names, or any other clear
factoid you need to remember for an exam, reading over this right before going in
can help you remember them once you're in there.
There's a limit to how much you can carry in this way. It'll only be a few things, and
they need to be short, discrete facts, not things like an entire historical timeline, or a
summary of a text you've read, or how to graph a cubic function. It works best as a
refresher for facts you've already studied and are already in your head, and you're
just bringing them to your active memory as preparation. And it helps greatly if
you've used this little booklet as a memory aid before in your study.
But if there's one particularly troublesome equation you just know you're going to
forget in the heat of the exam, stick it in your active memory right before going in,
then jot it down once you're in there, and that might help you squeeze a few extra
marks out of a key question.
Annotate the test paper
During the reading break at the start of an exam, it's pens down. However once
writing time starts, you might want to go through and highlight key terms in a
question, or even annotate the question. Some questions get quite long and
involved, and identifying keywords in an essay prompt, or critical directionsin a
technical question, can help you remember that they are there.
Let's say you have a maths question. You're running a pool installation business
and need to give a quote to a customer based on the most cost efficient dimensions
of a pool with a desired volume. So you need to calculate the smallest surface area
for that volume. One of the ways you could lose marks on this question is by
forgetting to remove the top surface from the shape you are calculating. Another is
by forgetting to convert your surface area