Common Mistakes That Learners Make During an Examination

It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers, they help us to learn. John Bradshaw

One of the things you try to avoid at all costs in an examination is mistakes. This is simply because you are taught that an examination is not the place for errors.

Well, in your rush to finish an exam, you may be making a few silly mistakes along the way that go under the radar. So, while rushing to finish your paper will leave you with minutes to spare to check your work, your biggest mistake is being too lazy to check your work simply because you want to be done with the exam.

The thing to remember is that you will make mistakes in your exam, but you need to keep those mistakes to a minimum. The best time for making mistakes is during examination preparation.

It is while preparing for exams that you are allowed to make as many mistakes as you want to.  When you make mistakes during exam preparation and you pick up these, you will be far better equipped to avoid the same mistakes in the exam.

This particular article focuses on how you can actually avoid making mistakes during exams. While it may seem rather obvious that the examination is the one place that you strive for making no mistakes, you can very well seek solace in the fact that after reading this article, you will avoid making any careless errors in your exams.

Are you ready to take the mickey out of the common exam errors that we all tend to make? Are you ready to learn to avoid making these mistakes?

Mistakes That Learners Make During the Examination

Not admitting a mistake is a bigger mistake. Robert Half

You may feel a little silly when you make a mistake in your exam, but you will be pleased to know that many of your friends have made the same mistake as you from time to time. Perhaps you made a mistake while solving for y, maybe your friend could not solve for y either and she might have made a few other mistakes along the way too.

You should worry in a situation where you come out of an exam with more mistakes than correct answers. To keep your mistakes to a minimum, you need to understand what mistakes learners make in the first place.

The first mistake that learners make is to answer questions without looking at the mark allocation. You may wonder why your marks are so low when you answered every question correctly. Well, if you haven't answered according to the mark allocation, you make be losing marks unnecessarily.

The next mistake that learners make is not re-reading answers that they have written. Sometimes when you are thinking and writing at the same time, you tend to write clumsy sentences or sentences that do not make much sense.

The last mistake that learners make is that they do not manage their time well. Being in control of your time will allow you to check your work and ensure that you do not make any careless mistakes.

A Superprof tutor can give you a taste of the common mistakes made by learners and in the process, teach you how to avoid making those mistakes.

Exam Errors

It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from the mistakes of others. Warren Buffett

We briefly looked at the common errors that many learners make. Now let's explore the implications of making these mistakes.

Not Paying Attention to the Mark Allocation

If you are not paying attention to the mark allocation, you are probably not reading the question properly.

While it is easy to be baffled as to what a question is asking you, you cannot deny that you are making unnecessary mistakes if you are answering a question by providing one point only when the question and the mark allocation specifically state you need to give three points.

We are not at all advocating that you squeeze a pre-prepared answer into a question that isn’t really asking for that answer anyway just to make sure your answer meets the mark allocation. We are saying that if a question is worth five marks, your answer is explained well enough to get you the five marks.

Not Checking Your Work

You should check your work, not checking your work could result in errors that you didn't even know you made.

In most exams, you may find yourself feeling a little stressed or your stress may be out of control. Regardless of how much stress you feel, you must never forget to double-check your answers. The more you revise, edit, and perfect your answers, the better your performance in the exams will be.

Poor Time Management

How will you succeed later in life when you are faced with hectic deadlines if you can't finish a paper in time?

This question may catch you off guard but by leaving an incomplete paper, you are throwing away marks that you probably would have achieved. Sometimes it is due to stress and sometimes it's due to a very difficult paper that many learners fail to complete their papers.

To address the time management problem, you need to practise by completing a past paper within a stipulated time. If you are running out of time during your exam preparation, you will know that you need to put far more effort into managing your time.

If it means specifying that you can only spend 10 minutes on a question, then so be it. Move onto Section B even if you are not finished with Section A. Chances are you will have a few minutes to spare at the end to revisit questions that you did not manage to answer.

Avoiding Exam Mistakes

Experience is making mistakes and learning from them. Bill Ackman

Now that you explored the commonly made mistakes and looked at how to avoid these mistakes, you can surely consider how to avoid making mistakes in your exams entirely.

To avoid making silly mistakes, rely on your instincts. If your instinct is telling you that you are not ready for your paper, revisit and revise your work so that you can feel more confident during the exams.

You don't need to know your entire study guide by heart to feel stressed when taking a big exam, but you do need to be confident that you understand the content that you have studied.

If you feel confident that you know your work, you will feel less stressed out when writing your paper, and you will pay attention to the mark allocation for each question, as well as revisit your answers to check them. Feeling less stressed while writing your paper will mean that you will also pay attention to your time management skills.

While it is easy to attribute all exam mistakes to the mistakes that you make while writing your paper, you could be making some mistakes while studying for your paper.

If you are not in control in terms of your examination preparation, you will most probably have a bad paper.

Without further ado, let's look at how you can work on perfecting your examination technique.

Mistakes That Learners Make When Studying for an Examination

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas A Edison

If you think like Thomas Edison, you will have to try a few studying techniques before you find the technique that works best for you. While we are none the wiser in terms of what studying technique works for everyone, we can confidently state that cramming a whole textbook in a few hours is entirely impossible for anyone.

Feeling stressed while you are studying for exams is never ideal. Therefore, you need to breathe before you even start studying.

Studying an entire textbook the night before your exam is also not ideal. It is always best to start studying a while before your examination date. If you start studying early, you even have time to summarise your notes, or highlight the most important information. In this way, you can simply revisit your summarised notes the night before your examination.

Do not just study your notes to prepare for a big examination, make sure to try working through past papers. Matric students are taught to visit past paper websites before their trial and final examinations.

Remember not to just try past papers for the sake of it, you must check that your answers are correct by using the marking memorandum. Checking your answers against the memorandum helps you to actually see where you are going wrong in terms of your answering technique.

For further tips on how to write your examinations properly, visit the article on how to avoid exam mistakes.

Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk...

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. John Powell

You know the saying, "Don't cry over spilt milk?" Well, you must remember that even in your attempt to avoid certain mistakes, you must never lose sight of reality. It is human nature to make mistakes from time to time.

While you may wish that you never make careless mistakes in your papers, the truth is you will always make mistakes and those mistakes will be stepping stones that will enable you to learn.

The next time that you notice an erratum on your examination paper, remember that even your teachers and lecturers make mistakes from time to time.

You are thus allowed to make mistakes in your paper, as long as you note them mistakes and learn from them.

Perhaps the article on exam board mistakes will help you to put the saying, "Don't cry over spilt milk," into perspective.