May and June are stressful months for students due to the end of year exams. Modesta Pousada, Professor of Psychology, a researcher at the UOC, and the author of the papersmart review provides keys to achieving what every student wants: to pass. And these are: planning study and revision with time and carrying it out progressively; minimizing distractions while studying; knowing what the assessment tests will be like and working on the contents coherently with this, and, finally, trying to manage adequately the anxiety that the assessment situation may generate.

Tricks to prepare the exams effectively and to pass.

Firstly, the expert recommends recognizing the primordial role of memory. "An assessment situation involves retrieving and bringing into play diverse information in order to respond to the questions, problems, or reflections that are asked of us". And, secondly, to know certain aspects related to the functioning of their attention and their memory that will be very useful to them, both when preparing for exams and when taking them.

To the question of what they should take into account when preparing for assessment tests, the expert answers: "The first question is that we cannot retrieve information if we have not previously recorded it; we must have stored it previously. It is the time of learning, where attention plays a determining role, one of the key characteristics of which is that it is limited".

Memory, learning, attention

These are the keywords in a historical moment plagued by young people with a weak attention span in a society where doing several things at the same time is considered the most natural thing, despite the evidence: "We cannot attend to multiple sources of information or multiple tasks simultaneously, without any of them being affected", corroborates Pousada, who recommends that at the time of study students be in a context with the minimum possible distractions.

That is a comfortable environment, where they have everything they need to work, where they can leave interruptions behind, and where they can concentrate. "Turning off or silencing the mobile phone or other devices, eliminating sources of noise, and having all the material we need at our fingertips is the first step," he stresses.

Knowing beforehand what features the assessment test will have is also important. It has been proven that the ability to remember something depends on what they did when they received the corresponding information, that is to say, they will recover information better if the way they study it is congruent with the type of assessment test they will have to take.

Studying for an exam

"You should not study in the same way for a multiple-choice test, a short-question test, a problem-solving test, or a long-question test. In each case, students should focus on those keys that will later be appropriate or useful for answering each type of question," recommends Modesta Pousada.

How long do you have to study?

How much time to spend on the study and, above all, how to distribute it is the workhorse of many students. Research has shown that memory improves if instead of an intense but brief period, for example, three days of study with seven or eight hours a day, practice is distributed less intensely and more widely (two weeks, studying two hours a day), he says. Naturally, this implies planning the study task with more time and also planning when the material will be reviewed, something that is fundamental for a good consolidation of what has been learned.

This is fundamental for good consolidation of what has been learned "In general, it seems clear that the information that we keep in our memory (the information that is available) is much greater than the information that we can access at a given time (the information that is accessible).

Therefore, it is important that when we are in an assessment situation and we try to recover information, we use two successive strategies: the first is to use as recovery clues the keys we used when we learned: did we make a general outline that we can now follow mentally, did we make a list of similarities and differences between concepts, did we note a series of steps that we must follow so as not to forget the procedure for solving the problem?