Blog 46: Exam Tips – part 1 by Xavier Lo, FIA, FRM, MBA

No theory this week! It’s the Summer [夏天] now, and a lot of students may be using these last few weeks to really study as hard as they can before the exams come up in autumn [秋天]. As I’ve sat through quite a number of exams myself, let me share a few tips that I thought were useful during the preparation period [溫書時期].

I think the biggest tip [小技巧] I can give is not to do cramming [填滿式溫習]. Some of you may have adopted this approach to your middle school exams. While this may work, I think it is not the best method for any professional qualification exams [專業資格試]. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, cramming just puts all information into your short-term memory [短暫記憶], and the knowledge from these exams are actually worth putting into your long-term memory for your career. Secondly, your brain can only absorb a limited amount of knowledge per day, so its probably more efficient to do maybe half an hour or an hour of revision per day for 4 months rather than 10 hours of daily studying on the week before your exam. Consistency [堅持]over a long period, and not short bursts of high-volume, is what determines success.

Another tip is to do with going through topics that you struggle with. A lot of people like to do questions that they are familiar with, as it makes them feel confident [信心] and gives them a sense of progress. However, you need to fight this urge and actually spend more time revising topics and doing practice questions on topics that you find difficult. This definitely feels uncomfortable [不舒服] and demotivating [失去動力], but I guarantee you that if you persist, it will pay off rewards in the end.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of tips that I can give. However, Instagram only allows me to write a limited number of words. So I’ll put more tips in a future blog at some point. In the meantime, feel free to message me here if you need help. Back to more theory next week!