Higher Education: 

What test taking strategies do top students use?

There are 2 different sets of strategies:
1) Test Day - Good test taking
2) During Semester - Good study habits

Test Day:
 

1. State of mind: Make sure you are at optimum state of mind, that means things like sleeping well the night before, drinking coffee in the morning, exercising, whatever you do for peak productivity. Your state of mind is the most important input to your test result. If you are sleep deprived you are already loosing.
2. Calm + Confident: Don't psych yourself out before the test, the number 1 way to do this is simply to not cram till the minute before the test. Instead relax for the hour before the test, go for a walk, whatever.
3. Start Test With Confidence: The best way to do this, is when they say 'start,' don't. Instead take a deep breath, think positive thoughts, and then slowly open the test.
4. Navigate the Test: Most people who do really well is tests, are just really good at navigating tests. Essentially, go through and answer everything you know first. Don't go in order of the test! So if you don't know Q1, skip it, leave space, mark it, and come back to it later. Answering what you know first does two important things: (1) It builds confidence cause you are knocking things off the test. (2) It makes the best use of time possible, saving you time for the hard things at the end.
5. Revise: With 15 min left, always make sure the ones you are sure of are the first ones you check, you don't want to loose out on 'easy' points for a silly mistake.

During Semester:

• Pay Attention In Class: My biggest take away from being in school for a long time is that you have to pay attention in class. I mean really pay attention. My strategy is to focus on listening, and to keep note taking to a minimum, mostly I write down only the things I don't understand. This way I know what to ask about later. More importantly, taking frantic notes is useless because you probably have a reference resource anyway, and if not, your classmates were taking notes anyway.
• Go to Office Hours: If you wrote down what you didn't understand from class, now you can ask good questions in office hours and actually fill gaps.
• Ask Questions in Class: Don't be afraid to ask questions. I used to think my questions were dumb, and slowly got over it, and now ask if I don't understand something. trust me this is the right move.
• Create a Good Study Group: In undergrad at least I had an awesome study group - I chose people who had the same schedule as me (roughly) and had different learning techniques and strengths so we would complement each other.

I assure you if you do these simple things, it will make a huge difference. I noticed over the years that while these may seem like obvious tips, almost none of my peers did these things. I stuck to these tactics pretty intensely - and they worked extremely well for me. I almost always outperformed on tests and did so about 40% faster than my classmates. The latter was because I navigated tests extremely well. In fact, I recall a quantum class where I did the entire test backwards, and ended up getting everything right... think about that... I started not knowing anything except the last question. Doing that built my confidence and momentum, and I got the second last, and eventually I got through the whole thing! 

These strategies really do work. 



Rishabh Jain,MIT PhD, Co-founder OpenLab,
Indian / American
Source: www.quora.com