Most students experience anxiety before exams, but even though it’s common, it doesn’t mean that it’s ‘all good’. Test anxiety can affect your performance. It can stem from fear of failure, general nerves, feeling unprepared, past experiences and much more. It’s always a good idea to work on building your confidence to drive through your test anxiety.

Building Your Confidence

  • Prepare Yourself
    Revising is a great way to build up your confidence before an exam. You’re brushing up your knowledge, so you go into the exam knowing your stuff. However, it’s important that you aren’t cramming in all your revision the night before. Set aside an hour or more each day (if possible) to revise. When you try to revise all in one go, there is a high chance that you won’t retain the information. If you need any revision tips, check out our other blogs:

  • Stay Positive
    Staying positive will help you maintain your confidence. When you start to doubt yourself and think negative, you start to believe that you’re not capable of achieving the results you want.
  • Keep Fit & Healthy
    You might think that this isn’t important. However, it is one of the best ways to build your confidence. Not only this but staying fit and eating healthy can increase the amount of information your brain retains when revising. For more information, click here. It can be easier to eat the wrong foods, lounge around and stay up late but it won’t be doing you any good.

Reducing Your Test Anxiety

  • Take Your New-Found Confidence to the Exam with You
    Don’t let all the hard work you have done to build your confidence get lost now. Try to think of the exam as something that you want to do, rather than something you have to. By doing so, you will go in with a more positive attitude, hopefully resulting in great results!
  • Be Prepared
    Hopefully, you have already revised for your exam. But you should now be thinking of preparing yourself for before and after the exam. Before your exam, go over any notes that you made while revising. Take a bottle of water to the exam and something to snack on afterwards. Exams seem to be the only time where everyone’s stomach start to rumble at the same time, right? It’s important that you have had something to eat before-hand.
    One of the last things you want in your exam is to start feeling sick because you’re that hungry you can’t concentrate.
  • Get There in Plenty of Time
    After all your hard work of preparing for the exam, you won’t want to miss it. Make sure that you are there at least half an hour before your exam is due to start.

Whilst in Your Exam

  • Clearly read the questions, don’t skip over them in a hurry.
  • Think about your answers (think back to revision).
  • If you can’t think of the answer, leave that question and come back to it later.
  • Take your time but be mindful of how long you have left.Don’t panic, stay calm. People might have finished before you, but they may have skipped questions and rushed through.
  • If you do start to panic, take slow deep breaths, take the exam one question at a time and think back to what you learned during revision.

When everyone is comparing their answers after the exam, don’t join in. If they have all put the same answer, you will automatically think that your answer is incorrect, however, this may not be the case. Think back to all these tips that we have given you, make a list of what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, when it comes to your next exam, you will know how to prepare yourself.

We hope that this blog has been of use to you. If you still need to secure your student accommodation in Sheffield, please contact us today, we’d love to help.