Last year, my exams passed in a fuzzy haze of disorder. My husband broke his elbow not long before my exams and it left me with next to no time to revise. You can read about that here. I did have to resit one exam in the summer, but overall, I did pretty well, all things considered. I wasn't worried about my exams. Perhaps because I didn't have time to worry. Possibly because I knew that I only needed to pass my first year and my results didn't count towards my final degree classification.
I don't know what is wrong with me this year. For the first time in my life, I am getting really nervous about exams. To the point where I feel physically sick on the morning of exam day. In my first exam, I had to calm myself by breathing slowly and tackling the exam logically. Doing the questions in order of the ones I knew the most about first. I have never really suffered from any kind of nervousness like this before. Following every exam so far, I have come out feeling deflated. Like I might have passed, but only just. I just want to feel like I have achieved something. Maybe I am asking too much to feel like I have done well as I come out. I also have a bad tendency to beat myself up about exams. Bringing the questions home with me and going through what I should have written and all the points where I went wrong.
Economics is the subject I struggle with the most. I have never worked so hard at something but subsequently understood so little. I think it is because there is such a huge amount of knowledge that my little brain struggles to keep it in. At least with philosophy and politics they are pretty interconnected, so I can cover the same topics, or fill with something relevant from the news. Economics is just, well, just hard. I have one more exam next week and really, really hope I can then put my books away until October, rather than have to resit in August!
If you have any tips on how to keep calm, or how to revise effectively, please feel free to share them!
