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22 Remembering for
Examinations
You need no longer fear examinations:
• No more the year-long dread that increasingly looms like a
storm on the approaching horizon as the year progresses.
• No longer the frantic, rushed, sweaty, frightening final few
weeks' and days' build-up of tension before the event.
• No longer the stressful dash into the examination room in order
to save every available second.
• No longer the nervous first rush through the examination
paper, during which you read so fast that you have to read it again
to find out what is actually being asked.
• No longer will you need to spend as much as fifteen to thirty
minutes of a one-hour examination jotting down random notes,
scratching your head, frowning, frantically trying to recall all that
you know and yet at the moment for some reason seem not to
remember.
• No longer the frustration of not being able to dig out the essence
from the mire of your generally disorganised knowledge.
The common scenario suggested above applies not only to
those who know little about the subject but often to those who
have a great deal of knowledge. I remember at least three students
in my undergraduate years who knew more about certain subjects
than practically everyone else in the year and who consequently
used to give private tutoring and coaching to those who were
struggling. Extraordinarily, these bright students would regularly
fail to excel at examination time, invariably complaining that they
had not had enough time in the examination room to gather
together the mass of knowledge that they had and that for some
reason they 'forgot' at critical moments.
All these problems can be overcome by preparing for examin-
ations using the techniques for reading and studying outlined in
Use Your Head and Speed Reading, applying the Mind Map
memory techniques as outlined in chapter 23 and especially by
using the Major System in conjunction with the Link System.
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REMEMBERING FOR EXAMINATIONS
Assume, for example, that the subject you wish to study and
prepare to be examined in is psychology. As you study and
organise your notes throughout the year, you would consciously
and continually build up categories (much as you did when
remembering jokes) that contain all the subcategories of the
information.
In psychology these categories might include the following:
1 Major headings
2 Major theories
3 Important experiments
4 Significant lectures
5 Important books
6 Important papers
7 General significant points
8 Personal insights, thoughts and theories
Using the Major System you would allot a certain section to each
of these major headings, attaching the Key Memory Image Words
from your subjects to the appropriate Major System or Key
Memory Image Word. For example, if you had devoted the
numbers 30 to 50 to important psychological experiments, and
the fifth of these was an experiment by the behavioural psycholo-
gist B. F. Skinner in which pigeons learned to peck for the reward
of grain, you would imagine an enormous suit of armour (mail)
taking the place of the skin (Skinner) of a giant and warriorlike
pigeon who was pecking at the sun, causing millions of tons of
grain to pour from heaven.
Using this approach, you will find it possible to contain an entire
year's study within the numbers 1 to 100 and to transmit this
organised and well-understood knowledge into flowing, first-
class examination papers. If, for example, you were asked, in your
psychology exam, to discuss motivation and learning with
reference to behavioural psychology, you would pick the Key
Words from the question and run them down your Major System
Memory Grid, pulling out any items that were in any way relevant
to the question. Thus, the general form of your opening paragraph
might be as follows:
In discussing the question of 'motivation and learning with
reference to behavioural psychology', I wish to consider the fol-
lowing main areas of psychology: blank, blank and blank; the
following five theories: blank, blank, blank, blank and blank; the
following three experiments, which support hypothesis A: blank,
blank and blank; the following two experiments, which support
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