GLOBAL UNIVERSITY INDEX www.braincollege.com EXAM TIPS II

Imagine this: you've been jarring for nine months waiting to wage
war at the exam and the day arrives with one or two things wrong!
From misplacing identification documents to misinterpreting the
timetable, numerous exam day misfortunes exist. But the good
news is that these mishaps are all entirely avoidable. There's only
one way to avoid them: being careful and conscious always. No one
goes into an exam wanting to write the same exam twelve months
later. That should be enough motivation for extra caution.

1) Gambling with things you cannot control
I once gambled with transportation to the exam centre and it almost
cost me an A grade. I was writing the GCE Ordinary Level exam. I
supposed that my mother will give me taxi money to school. When I
told her I needed taxi money, she confessed to me she hadn't a franc
in the house. I had never told her of my exam schedule and it was no
fault of hers. There was I, sweating at home 30 minutes and 150
Francs away from an exam I'd prepared for nine months with a lot of
money. I rushed around to ask for help from neighbours but
everyone had gone to their own business. Moreover, it was an
afternoon session and my case was more complicated because the
school was two miles away and located in a section of town taxis go
to only in the morning. I walked out of the house and paced up and
down the street panic-stricken. Ten minutes to the exam, a
passerby offered to pay my taxi fare. You may not be that lucky.
DON'T GAMBLE! Hold your taxi fare a day before the exam. Stand to
pick up a cab at least one hour before the exam as traffic stuffy
roads in most of our cities today mean that you need more than 15
minutes to get a taxi. If you are in Douala, Yaounde, Bamenda and
Limbe, it's safer to be on the road 1hour 30 minutes to pen off time.
You should aim at arriving the exam centre at least thirty minutes
before time. Don't stay and gamble that a neighbour will grant you a
free ride or daddy will give you a lift on his way to work. You'll not
know whether dad's car is in good shape or if he's been given a
mission in the opposite direction.
2) Arriving the exam centre with messy, missing documentation
Nothing guarantees your failure better than messy documentation.
Your exam identification is paramount. Don't arrive with soiled
timetables, scratched photos and blurred id cards and wonder why
the invigilator won't understand you. They shouldn't understand. At a
time when fraud casts shadows over exam status, it's your
responsibility as a candidate to protect your documents in a
waterproof bag to avoid any embarrassment. It's raining like hell
these days in the southern section of the country (le Cameroun
meridionale). Don't soil documents with spills of okra, achu soup or
eru. Keep your "doky" away from the dining table.

3) Arriving without stationery
This one is really puzzling. It's not possible to understand how someone
gets to and exam room without pens, pencil, sharpener, ruler, geometry
set and calculator (if required). Try your two blue pens at home and be
sure they flow. Have a pencil and a sharpener. Don't hope that you'll
beg one from Adeline. Have yours. It's annoying to have people fidgeting
in exam halls for equipment. It's a breach of the rules and besides that,
you could get into a hall of dudes where everyone else thought every
other person will bring a ruler and sharpener and so nobody brought
one.
4) Weatherstorm
You probably have no control over the weather but you can certainly
control how it affects you. Be sure of one thing: your exam will take
place even if the whole Pacific Ocean were to pour over your town like
it's Debundscha. Watch the weather. If the sky is frowning, leave for the
exam hall early. However wild the storm, struggle to get to the hall. Be
properly clothed. Trek if necessary. Taxis may become clogged in the
traffic with huge pools of water on the road like the current mess in
Bonaberi, Douala.
5) Sudden illness
"Never say die!" This should be your motto for the entire exam. A lot of
students have made good exam grades even though they wrote while
vomiting. If a suspicious fever creeps up days to your exam or on the
morning itself, never you let it be part of your exam. You mustn't
suggest giving up on the exam, except you are in a coma. Your fever
might just be as a result of reading stress, fatigue or sleep debt. These
things cannot stop you from passing. Some candidates commit the error
of thinking that the exam will aggravate the illness. Lies! On the
contrary, a good exam performance can shake off the fever. I've heard
stories. I'm yet to hear one of somebody who was killed by an exam.
Exams do not kill. Sometimes, illness takes of the stress from an exam.
You write without pressure, knowing that you do not want to hurt
yourself by being too serious and that you just want to give it a try. This
makes you relaxed and can help you approach questions with an off
hand neutrality that brings out a great performance.
Tension, as students call it, is the ingredient that spoils the exam broth.
A sudden fever well managed with a positive frame of mind can instead
free you from an ill like tension.