UCC Skills Centre Updates
By Conor O’Driscoll
As exam season approaches, we at the Skills Centre want to say congratulations on getting this far and best of luck going forward. Sometimes, all you need to ace an exam is a bit of luck. However, you cannot undervalue the role of good preparation in catalysing success.
Throughout the semester, the Skills Centre has offered guidance to students on how they can excel in university. We did this through the delivery of timely peer-to-peer workshops alongside one-to-one sessions. Ranging from Note Taking to Presentation Skills to Academic Writing, these workshops and sessions are designed to give you the tools needed to excel in university and professional life. From here on, our focus lay on exam preparation.
Exams entail a series of relatively unpredictable questions which you must answer without notes in a short timeframe. Therefore, we believe that the foundations of exam success lay in the quality of your lecture and reading notes. The objective of note taking is to collect the important information and interpret the evidence. Once this is done, notes should be refined (i.e., shortened) to capture the relevant information and key ideas behind the topic within a coherent narrative/structure.
Ironing out your notes in this fashion not only reduces your study workload by refining the material, but you can also use this material to construct sample answers for possible exam questions. This process reduces the time you will waste sifting through material trying to find relevant pieces to learn, enhancing the efficiency of your study time. The Skills Centre offers numerous resources to help you in this regard. Namely, small-scale workshops and one-to-one sessions in Exam Preparation and Note Taking. For those studying maths, our Calculation Centre may be useful. The Calculation Centre focuses on assisting students through mathematically based problems, concepts and software.
Effective note taking and problem solving enhances unconscious learning because you are forced to think critically about topics, thereby gaining an improved understanding. Implicit to this process is organisation and time management. Taking notes consistently and filing them according to topic is a great start in streamlining your exam prep, as everything you need for a particular topic/exam question is in the same place. In this regard, the Skills Centre offers workshops in Critical Thinking, Unpacking The Question, and Paraphrasing, alongside our valuable Calculation Centre.
However, there are other elements of organisation and time management worth considering. Specifically, your study schedule, and how you construct it, becomes increasingly important as the semester goes on. In this context, you should be conscious that you are not overly focusing your study on one subject relative to another. For instance, if you have two exams and one is worth more marks than the other, it makes little sense to allocate substantially more study time to the exam that is worth less. Similarly, if you have two exams, and one will take place two weeks after the first, it makes little sense to prioritise studying for the second exam before the first has taken place. Whilst obvious now, many people fall into these traps unconsciously. To help you avoid these traps, and others, we provide workshops in Study Coaching, Study Strategies, and Time Management.
Whilst exam preparation is important, it is also important to mind yourself over what can be an extremely stressful period. In this regard, we advise you to try and maintain a steady and consistent sleep schedule and keep in touch with friends and family. When studying, we do not recommend you cram at the last minute; instead, dedicate consistent spells of time to study in the weeks/days building up to exams. If you feel you may benefit from any of our workshops/sessions, do not hesitate to book-in, just google UCC Skills Centre. Alternatively, you can find us in Q-1 in the Boole library, just follow the yellow footsteps.