It’s that time of year again. Exams are upon us, and your semester grade is on the line. You’re stressing and calculating the exact grade you’ll need to keep your grade in the class. This is the time of the year when the pressure is on. So how do you deal with it? Listen to these ten tips.

1. Don’t stress. Yes, I said the pressure is on to perform for exams, and that’s not a lie. But stressing never helped anyone. Calm down and realize that you have learned all the material already. It’s all there (hopefully), you just have to get those neurons firing again.
2. Study. It’s that simple really. The more time you put into your grade, the better the outcome will be. If you spend no time going over what you learned for a whole semester, there’s not a great chance you’re going to remember everything. So spend time with worksheets and reviews that the teacher handed out because they gave you that for a reason.
3. Another tip about studying is to go over what’s important. The recent stuff should all be fresh, so you can spend less time on that. And the stuff at the beginning of the year has already probably been built off of. Most of the first couple chapters is only a base for what’s learned the whole semester, so if that’s the case, you may only need a quick glance over that material. The point is, study what you can’t remember the most, which is probably from the middle of the semester.
4. Study in the way that’s most effective for you. If you don’t know what that is yet, figure it out. Are you a visual learner? Audial? Whatever it is, do it. Make flashcards if you like to focus on memorizing. Redo problems if you like repetition. Do what you do best.
5. It’s all about repetition. It takes 10,000 hours for someone to master something. Does that mean you should study that long? No, that’s obviously unrealistic. But you do need to do things over and over and over again to get good at them. So go through worksheets from throughout the semester and do the problems over again. If you can do something from the middle of the semester, you’re on the right track to remembering the material.
6. Be prepared on the exam days. Doing this is just as important as what you do leading up to the exams. So don’t get to school late, don’t come without a pencil or something stupid like that, and don’t come on two hours of sleep. Start getting ready the night before, and make sure you come to school prepared.
7. During the exam, don’t lose your focus. Some of the tests are going to be long; they cover a lot of material, so they have to be. So know that going in. When you feel like you’ve hit the point where you can’t focus, take a short break. Re-focus and start back up again. Getting a fresh start during the middle of a test can make sure that you don’t fail the last half of the exam.
8. Ask your teacher questions the days before the exam. Try to figure out what’s going to be on it and make it easier on yourself. If you can focus your studies, there’s a much better chance of you understanding a question on the test. Talking to your teacher is always important before a test, so don’t let this one be any different.
9. Don’t cheat. There may be an exam you couldn’t make time to study for, but I guarantee you can guess more than zero questions correctly, because that’s what you get if you’re caught. Getting a zero on an exam will kill your grade. Even if you have 100% in the class going in, you’ll only end up with an 85%. It’s just not worth it. Do the work before hand so you’re not put in the situation where you’re even tempted to look at someone else’s work.
10. Do the review! So many times kids will just put off the review and choose not do it or just copy someone else’s. Teachers use the reviews to write the exams. More likely than not, the review will reflect exactly what is on the test. So use this to your advantage and do the work. I promise it will pay off.