Remember Everything You Read: The Evelyn Wood 7-Day Speed Reading \& Learning Program pdfdrive com

Principle 2: Take Aggressive Measures to Manage Pre-exam
Anxiety
Some of the most gifted students fail to do their best on exams because
they become excessively nervous just before the test. On the other hand,
a good student may also perform below par because he fails to get
nervous enough!
When you’re too nervous, you tend to freeze. Your mental processes
become blocked; things that you normally would remember easily
simply won’t come to mind; creativity disappears; and panic frequently
sets in, thus making the situation even worse.
At the other end of the spectrum, a tired, lethargic, bored, depressed
or negative-thinking student may seem to lack nerves at all. But that’s
not because he’s relaxed. Rather, he’s given up before he even enters the
examination room! Lacking the competitive edge required to do his best
on a test, he also ends up performing far below his capacities.
So what’s needed is a feeling of nerves that lies somewhere between
these two extremes. I know many top students who worry if they’re not
feeling edgy or having butterflies in the stomach before a test. On the
other hand, they’ve learned to manage this pre-exam anxiety so that it
doesn’t get out of hand and begin to paralyze them and inhibit superior

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performance.
How do these students manage their nerves before an exam? Here are
some practical tips we’ve gleaned from evaluating their approach:
Avoid answering questions of other students during the day before
the test.
That’s not to say that you should become antisocial, or refuse
to interact to some extent with your classmates in an effort to pick up
points you may have missed. But the best students generally find it’s
counter-productive to try to verbalize in-depth answers to questions in
the minutes or hours just before the test.
One reason is that many people tend to fixate on a last-minute concept
or question that’s posed to them. In other words, that particular issue
may loom so large that it becomes difficult or impossible to draw on
other material studied.
Also, trying to answer last-minute questions from classmates,
especially when the queries require a great deal of thought, may actually
make it more difficult to respond to a similar question on the test. The
student seems to exhaust his ability to deal with a particular question or
issue when he focuses on it too much just prior to the exam.
Finally, trying to answer questions at the last minute can trigger panic.
Almost any other student is capable of posing some question to you that
you feel you can’t answer adequately. When this happens, a typical
response is, “Oh, no, I don’t know this material at all! These other guys
are much better prepared than I am.”
In fact, though, the questions that other students put to you just before
the exam are not likely to be on the test, at least not in the form that the
classmate has chosen. Furthermore, responding off the cuff as you’re
talking to someone outside a test situation doesn’t provide you with an
opportunity to put your best foot forward. After all, most people put out
their best effort when they know it counts. In addition, you’ll almost
always do better when you’re able to see the questions on paper in front
of you, rather than when you’re trying to deal with an issue off the top
of your head.
But be sure to keep this piece of advice in perspective. As I’ve
indicated earlier, it 
is
a good idea to try to anticipate questions that your
teacher will pose on the test and also to do some trial runs in trying to

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answer those questions. This practice testing, however, should be done
well in advance of the test, or at least several days ahead of time, so that
you’ll have an opportunity to work through all the possible answers for
potential questions 
and
have a day or so to sit back, review the entire
course, and be certain you have the big picture in mind.