We are professional exam takers.
ETH exam season starts tomorrow.
Our academic calendar is structured in a way that two months in summer are off, which is quite an exception of other university schedules that I know. “The curve” factors this time in. This might be part of the reason some exams in our university are notoriously hard.
So two months of free time, spent with studying, or not studying, all for the sake of these next four, five, or more exams.
What is actually happening?
Every day, mass pilgrimage to a place called “the library”, people sitting in silence next to each other for several hours and then leaving late in the evenings. Absurd?
What we do at the moment reminds me of us being professional athletes. But we're not athletes, we sit in the library 10h a day, staring at a screen. We are professional exam takers.
If you think about it, exams won't get much harder past university. This particular mode of studying for weeks or even months, and then converging into one exam, won't get much harder. Right now is the peak of exam taking, exam taking at the highest level.
A day
Observing myself over the past weeks, a day could look like this:
- Get up. Eat something. Go to the library (to the training facility).
- Do a mock exam (run a 100% sprint). Eat lunch and go for a walk (rest between training, underrated).
- Do exercises (drills to improve some particular thing).
- Review and grade your exercises and mock exams (analyse video footage of yourself, very underrated).
- Do some sports to get your mind off the study material (engage in some non-sport activity). Eat dinner.
- More sprints and or drills.
- Go home.
- Get sleeping hours in and recover.
And then: Repeat.
Professional exam takers.
State of mind
I've been mapping things from the studying schedule to professional training. Reversing the mapping, we can borrow some ideas from professional training for ourselves.
There is one point in particular which stands out to me, the state of mind. Skill and training are preparations you take, adding to your overall capability and potential. In the final setting, what counts is what fraction of your potential you can deliver.
Simple concrete numbers, in relative units. Say you have 84/100 skill points, but you're in a bad state of mind in the exam (no sleep, distracted, too many thoughts, etc). So you only get to use half of what you prepared. 84 × 0.5 = 42.
If you had only 47/100 skill points but a good state of mind where you could deliver 90% of what you prepared, then 47 × 0.9 > 84 × 0.5.
Routines
So to get into a good state of mind, pro athletes have routines, routines before a game and routines during the game. This seems to be a whole art of its own, I won't go too deep into it.
Two simple examples are swimmers wearing these big headphones before a race starts and the tennis players doing a sequence of touches and bouncing a ball this exact number of times. This is purely psychological.
Now, there won't be a section on the one hack that gives you optimal state of mind. You know yourself best, you know what works for yourself best.
If you're still reading, two general heuristics that seem to be timeless are sleeping well and eating something which gives you energy, especially for exams in the afternoon.
For myself, I always take exams in a short-sleeved shirt. No long sleeves, even in the winter when the window has to be open (Covid times).
So in the end, if you are reading this and having exams some time in the next weeks, I sincerely wish you all the best. Rest well, and deliver what you know and are capable of.