David Millard

It’s that time of year, a time of renewal, of promises… of revision.

Yes, spare some thoughts for the poor students, still nursing their New Year hangovers as they consider the exams awaiting them this January. For some of them it will be the first time they have been assessed at University, the first time they have been truly tested in their discipline of choice, and it can be quite a daunting prospect.

If that’s you then I have some good news. I have been an examiner for over ten years, writing, moderating and marking exams in IT, Computer and Web Science, and I can assure you that the examiner is on your side.

When you are writing your answers rest assured that the person on the other side of the paper (you know, the one with the red pen) is scouring them for marks. As an examiner my job is give you as many marks as I can. I love giving marks. Ticking things that are right is one of the few pleasures of marking (I confess, it is a thoroughly miserable job in all other respects). Conversely, the thing that is most frustrating is not being able to give marks because the student has failed the question.

Actually that’s not entirely true, becuase in my experience there are four distinct ways to fail. One of them deserves to fail, its not nice, but as an examiner it is my duty to point out this type of failure. The frustrating thing is that the other three are ways for perfectly good students to fail, students who you can sense are capable, but the exam itself has defeated them. Not the questions, but the context, the whole exam experience.

So here you go, as I see it, the four ways to fail:

1) Be Disengaged. Let’s get this out of the way first, because this is the one that everyone will be expecting to see. If you didn’t revise, if you give trite and superficial answers, if you start to plain guess, then let’s be honest you deserve to fail. And you will.

There’s only way way to avoid this one I’m afraid, and it’s to do the work. Be prepared. Know your stuff! I think most people will see this type of failure as necessary, but what’s horrifying to an examiner is that while people certainly do fail for this reason, its the minority. Most exam failure is of the other types, and they are perfectly avoidable.

2) Be Confused. You’ve heard the advise ‘don’t cram’, and this is why. An amazing number of students fill their heads with stuff the day before an exam, with the consequence that when they open their exam papers it all falls out higgeldy piggeldy on the page. Perhaps the most common one is to get terms and definitions muddled up, but it applies anywhere where things are connected (a situation to a process, a problem to a formula, etc). As an examiner I hold my breath through these answers, desperately looking for something that’s connected up correctly. It’s deeply frustrating when all the right notes are there, but not necessarily in the right order.

The solution: revise properly, and realise that understanding is not memorising. Courses contain activities (labs, coursework, etc) for a reason. You learn by doing. Treat your revision that way, so work through examples, take mock or past papers, and prepare collaboratively by revising with friends and discussing answers. It takes longer, but it sticks better. 

3) Be Apathetic. You can be too cool for school, and in an exam that will cost you. Apathetic answers are ones which are right, but that don’t give enough detail for the marks available. Your exam paper is a treasure chest of valuable information, and the most valuable of all is the marks breakdown. If you have been asked to answer four questions of 25 marks each, then you should expect to take a quarter of your exam time on each question, and put down 25 marks worth of answers. If part (a) is asking you to list things to do with widgets and is worth five marks, it probably wants five things. If part (b) is asking you to describe foos and bars and is worth six marks, it probably means that there are three marks for foos, and three for bars. If you know the answer but write only a single thing for each then you’ve just got two out of six available marks. Keep that up, and you’ll fail.

To avoid this requires a bit of exam technique, but is easy enough, just check what marks are available and make sure that your answers are comprehensive enough to justify them. This is not always as easy as saying that each point you make is one mark, but that’s not a bad starting point. 

4) Be Careless. This may sound obvious, but exams are not real life. In real life you are rewarded for original ideas and lateral thinking, in exams you are rewarded for answering the question. This question. Not the question you wished had been asked, or the one that was asked in that lecture you attended last month. But this question. For the love of all that is holy, read the question! As an examiner this is one that kills me, and I see it all the time. It’s the student who you know is good (perhaps they answered a previous question almost perfectly, perhaps they made a point that most of the other students missed), but then you realise that they misread this question, and none of what they wrote matches the marks scheme. To some extent this means just being careful and not rushing into an answer, but it is also is a matter of exam technique. What is the question really asking you to do, what are the key things it asks for? If it says, ‘explain three ways of building thingies and compare them to this other way’ then it wants three explanations, and three comparisons (Not three explanations and then a fourth explanation. Or two explanations, and then a comparison of the third one with the fourth). Exams in Universities are moderated, and moderators make sure that the marks scheme matches the question. Or looking at it the other way, that if you answer the question as its written then you can get full marks in the scheme.

Use this to your advantage. Read questions strategically, highlight or underline key tasks they ask you to perform. Do they want diagrams, examples, workings out? Do what is asked. 

Apologies, I may have got a bit preachy in there. At the end of the day this blog post is a cry of frustration, not at stupidity – I was a student once, and I recognise all these mistakes in my own exam experiences – but at needless failure. Examiners are your friends, and I have literally cried out in frustration when having marked three great answers, I get to the final answer and it’s a careless one, or a confused one, and the student gets near to zero for that part.

There are many ways to fail. But most of them are avoidable. For some it means doing the work, revising well. For others, it’s a simple matter of having good technique, reading the questions carefully, and noticing where the marks fall.

So best of luck in your exams! Try your best not to fail in any of these ways, and for what it’s worth my fellow examiners and I are with you!