10 tips to ace your exams

1. Sign up for Netflix

As you all probably already know, Netflix offers a big range of scientific and high quality documentaries. Even university professors use Netflix as an objective information source. Besides the fact that Netflix offers high quality documentaries, it is also a nice way to chill out a little bit during the test week (although the topics are quite boring).

2. Drink beer during breakfast

Scientific research shows that alcohol turns you into a creative thinker. You can think a lot faster and it makes you able to think more out of the box. This is really useful if you have to prove some hard mathematical theorems or if you need to fix a programming problem. It is also highly recommended to drink vodka instead of water during your exam (vodka is a natural cleanser of the body).

3. Read your book back to front

If you read your book back to front, you better assimilate words. Besides this, you also analyse the information from a different point of view, which is really advantageous for processing all the information you just read. If you also read the words back to front, you will never even forget the words anymore! So it’s really efficient to read your book and the words back to front.

4. Don’t sleep the night before your exam

It has been proven that you can concentrate a lot better if you haven’t slept the night before, compared to when you did sleep. This is because of the fact that the brains haven’t 'turned off' the night before, so they also don’t have to restart again, which saves a lot of the so-called ‘brainergy’ that you can use during your exam.

5. Leave home as late as possible

As we all know, the trains in Holland always drive in time. So it’s completely nonsense to leave home early in order to take an early train. It’s best to take the last train possible, so you can stay home as long as possible, which is beneficial for your mental rest.  

6. Go studying in the new Polak Building

It takes at least thirty minutes to find a nice spot to study, so you get a lot of physical exercise, especially with all the stairs the building has. There exists scientific evidence that physical exercise improves the study skills. After you have found a spot, there will never be total silence around you, which improves your multitasking skills: listening and studying at the same time! So studying in the Polak Building is a real efficient way of studying.

7. Stare at the wall

Staring at a wall is a good way of clearing your mind in order to think better. It is scientifically proven that if you stare at a wall for more than half an hour, you can think 120% faster and clearer. So it’s highly recommended to stare at the wall for at least one hour each day.  

8. Check your Facebook timeline (especially FAECTOR's Estimator's posts!)

By scrolling through your timeline, you accumulate all kinds of knowledge and you can get inspired and motivated by the quotes of others. It’s also possible to share your studying troubles with the rest of the world, so other people can motivate you and support you in these hard times.

9. Make your answers look really professional

Be creative when you write your answer down. Invent all kind of symbols and variables, so that it will look really impressive. Especially when you have to prove a theorem, you need to be creative. It’s also important to write really sloppy and to write extremely long answers. In that way, your answers look even more professional and hence the professor knows that you understood the required study material really well.  

10. Take a break of one hour after each five minutes of studying

The human brain isn’t designed to concentrate for longer than five minutes. So it doesn’t make any sense to study more than five successive minutes: you don’t absorb any more information. In order to study efficiently, you should take a break of at least one hour to recover from the five minutes of studying. Only then studying makes sense.

About this article

Written by:
  • Maaike Niehof
| Published on: Dec 10, 2015