Exams………..HUH……….YEAH…………………..what are they good for?

I wish I could say absolutely nothing.

At the most basic level they give you a qualification that will help you get a job

– and that I find is  exactly where my problem with exams exists. You end up in the situation where people can do very well in exams, can perform, can self promote, but ultimately are as thick as stumps and quite useless. (We ALL know folks like this). I digress.

Currently, exams are the best and easiest measure to see how far or how well people are doing.

To be honest, I wasn’t good at exams until I left school and went to university. It was my inability to conform I think.  At university I was free and stopped trying to understand what the teacher wanted, and figured  what was required from the syllabus independently. I began to  excel.  On my terms, exams became my own measure- I did my best, I tried my best I should say, and if that wasn’t good enough, then clearly I shouldn’t be there.

My best is all I can do , if its not good enough- then so be it.

It took the pressure off during exams and  is  quite a fatalistic approach- but it worked for me.

I say the same to the pharmacy students I teach- If you don’t know this stuff- you shouldn’t be a pharmacists- ultimately you’ll end up killing people.

Now when you’re; 16,17,18,19,20,40……whatever age – although it’s not life and death on those terms, exams  may feel like it because you have no control.

So what changed between school and university?

It was a mindset: To succeed at exams you must take back CONTROL and carry them out on your terms.

So, here are my tips on how you should do that based on my experiences as a student and as an educator…..

1. Figure out what you are  doing these exams  for.

Sometimes it’s; parents, pressure, expectation and you’re doing these exams with no clue as to why.  Will you really need Chemistry? Maths? Drama?

The straight answer is: Yes. (soz)

Not in a direct way, like; I’d like to be able to use chemistry to coat all metal in my house in gold, or colour everything green, but chemists have skills in deductive reasoning, step by step equations, thinking outside the box.

Maths- OK, I’ve never applied the equations under a curve in all my life since I was 18, but finding patterns, solving puzzles- that’s what maths gives you.

Drama: Will I ever be on stage? Nah. However, I could learn confidence, clarity of speech-(great for oratory skills).

These skills help you, you get the picture.

When I look at university admissions, it’s not so much the subjects you do , but the fact that you’ve done them at all. Gone through that pain, willpower and discipline to get to a point that you can apply for university or for a job. We’ve all been through it. We feel your pain. We respect that.

It’s the same as going to the gym- why do people do it? To get fit, look fit, get healthier- numerous reasons- but because you can see an effect  it’s worth the effort, all those mindblowingly boring excercises. Bleurgh. This educational process is the same- sometimes mindblowingly boring- like having your soul sucked right out of you, and  you can’t immediately see the effects.

So what are you doing this for?

Answer: To give yourself a different skill set that will give you options,  put you on a journey. It’s painful, but you are gaining  discipline at a different level. Look after yourself, take pride in what you have acheived and develop yourself even if you can’t immediately see any value in it.

When people say ‘it’s hard work’- its this pain and discipline that they’re referring to. People always respect hard work.

Once you’ve mastered discipline, you are then testing yourself to see how well you have done.

Excercise: What skills will your most hated subject give you?

2. Is it too overwhelming?

Well, duh. Yes.

Be brave.

Take the first step. The first step is one more step than previously, so you are progressing. Slowly, but if you continue you will be further ahead than you were before you started.

If you never start- you will never start and a year from now you will still be in the same place.

Apart some sounding all wise, the truth is that  once people start, they feel better and the anxiety diminishes.

If you are about to start revision and know NOTHING – you are learning for the first time and not really revising. Revising and ‘new’ learning are two different things in my book.

Learning everything from scratch takes time,  it will take time to grasp concepts- so give yourself extra time before you hit revision. You’ll need to spend time watching youtube videos or even a book or two so you can grasp what’s what.

It is useful during whatever course you take to make sure you understand stuff. If you don’t-DON’T WAIT TIL REVISION TO SORT IT OUT- this takes too long. But if  you have  left it late, don’t lose hope.  Give yourself extra time in your revision/ learning timetable – (probably give up on hopes of lie ins)- or simply put- just start.

Whatever.  Start. Go on. Start. Now.

3. Set your own pace for revision

We want everything immediately, it’s in our nature, but if you chip away at something, then untimately you make change happen.

Figure out your own pace of learning- then figure out your destination (what must you have learned by the end of revision) then make a plan of how long you estimate it will take to get there; for example:

You have a syllabus. USE IT. If you can manage to learn only 1 topic of a particular subject  a week, and you know you have at least 20 topics within that subject to be examined on, ask yourself the following:

Do you understand the concepts in the syllabus?- If yes: you are revising-If no:you are learning for the first time.

If you are revising, how many times/how often do you have to repeat it before it will go in? Usually for me I had to go over the same thing on at  least 3 different occasions during revision- I was a slow reviser and knew my limitations, plus I literally had my room, house and toilet door covered in Post-it notes of things to remember or pictures.

From this, figure out how much time you need to revise- including rest stops, days off and at the end, going over exam papers to be properly polished for your exam.

Once you have figured all of that out- work out how much time (realisitcally) you will commit to getting to that level. Again, do include in this the  time to rest and relax- burnt out students are good for no-one.

4. NEVER, EVER,  EVER compare yourself to others (unless by some twist of fate and intelligence you are top- in which case well done- and why are you reading this?)

Ultimately you are your own gold standard.

If you are revising and you have leapt up from 30% in an exam to 40%- that, my friend, is a significant improvement. Keep going.

5. Keep going.

Again, true as in life, I believe sometimes people are only where they are because they’re the last man standing. Pure tenacity and staying power have kept them there. Don’t give up and you’ll get there. You can surprise yourself when setting yourself these tenacious challenges as to how far you can actually go. You will find that each time you push yourself, you will have acheived much more than you previously had ever thought possible.

6. Practise. 

So you’ve revsied as much as you are able- but is it good enough?

Well, your best is all you can do, literally, but sometimes applying a bit of savvy to the process helps a lot.

• Practice exam questions to give you a number of perspectives on what you had thought you had learnt.
• Learn to articulate what you have learnt.
• Teach others.
• Write it all down, write essays.

All of these processes help.

Finally- some of you are night owls, and burn the midnight oil. This is bad news if you have a 9am exam. Try and revise during the periods that your exams will be set, otherwise you will just be knackered and not your physical best, especially the week before your exam.

Summary:

Most of these lessons apply to life. Learn them now and it makes certain paths you will travel easier. You will learn them sooner or later though, just make it so that you can apply them before you grow too old to use them.

If you do have any questions to help you with revision techniques please post them in the comments section and I’ll be more than happy to help you work through them.

Good Luck!

It is something we take for granted. It covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface. Life has evolved so it can’t go on without it. We know it as H₂Oand yet once upon a time it was just water.

In the 1700’s, water was considered elemental. Part of the whole ‘Fire, Water, Earth & Air” thing espoused by the ancients (Greeks mostly and the film ‘The 5th Element’).  That is- a thing in its own entity. Not made up of the gasses Oxygen and Hydrogen, but a thing – like a lump of iron, pure- water. Not molecules and certainly not chemicals. And yes. Water is a chemical. Get over it.

2H₂ + O₂ → 2H₂O

Discoveries in chemistry enabled us to see the world as never before. Henry Cavendish  (1731-1810) who discovered that water was made up of smaller parts and wasn’t elemental in its own right,  named it first as ‘dephlogisticated air‘. It’s a bit of a mouthful and you can see why that name didn’t stick.

There are so many things about water that we take for granted- It evaporates easily, makes steam, freezes and dissolves things, for starters.

If you think about the freezing thing. Yes, you may know it expands upon freeezing (cracked pipes in winter and water bottles in the freezer filled too high), and you know for sure that it floats-icebergs and polar  bears on icebergs, but out of interest can you list how many other things in their solid form float when they freeze?

Most things sink when they freeze. Think about that.

If we didn’t have ice floating what would happen to the world? Well- if ice sank to the bottom of the sea, apparently the whole of the body of water would freeze solid- and most aquatic life as we know it wouldn’t survive. Then all the life that depends on that aquatic life would suffer and so on….

It also dissolves things easily too- coffee granules, sugar, salt and molecules  in your blood. And when you drop your plugged-in-iphone into the bathwater it’s the dissolved salts and other things that help electrocute you.

Racoon realising how washing your food before you eat may not be the best idea especially if its candyfloss

Aside from it’s behaviour it is mesmerising,  beautiful and blue.

For those of you that have seen the sea, it is blue- but in your water bottles, or even buckets of water from the beach- it looks clear.  So why is the sea blue?

It’s a matter of volume really and the blue colour is soooooo dilute (literally), small volumes of water won’t have enough colour in them to  be detected by the naked eye. If you collect enough water together though, it’ll look blue and it’s blue because it reflects blue light only.

So where does the red, yellow and orange  light in the spectrum go when white light is hitting the water?

Well,  it gets absorbed (with added impurities for good measure more light is scattered and the clarity of the blueness is diminished somewhat). Below is a nice guide to how we see colour  from direct  white light.

Even more than floating and its colour though, is this wonderful ability to form water droplets and bubbles- and this is because of charges on the tiny molecules themselves. A positive and a negative charge- (negative charges carry electricity to give you an inkling).

So now to explain….

Chemistry: Oxygen is big and fat and has charge. Hydrogen ions are tiny and needy and attacted to  elements like oxygen that are bigger and can give them what they want. They want charge (electrons).

So they meet up. This co-dependent relationship. Ideally, they would ‘Share’ electrons, Oxygen needs what Hydrogen has to offer and Hydrogen needs what Oxygen has to make it complete.

So they hook up, but the bigger, fatter Oxygen has lots more negative charge (electrons)  than the hydrogen, so the electrons that they ‘share’, stay close to the oxygen, and poor old hydrogen  in its co-dependent needy relationship is bereft of  what it wanted most- yes it’s still complete, but actually has lost it’s negativity and become a positively charged ion.

So now our H₂O has a positive side and a negative side.  The size of the Oxygen, overwhelming in its fatness and negativity, causes the hydrogen to exist at an angle the furthest away from Oxygen that it can possibly be. So it exists as a V shape  or Mickey Mouse ears. A bit like when you see Leia backing up from Jabba the Hutt.

This polarity- negative one side and positive the other,  gives water those properties we take so much for granted and I don’t mean that it just dissolves candyfloss.

Now, opposites attract, and so the positive Hydrogen is attracted to other Oxygens (negative) within the water- and this force of attraction is called a Hydrogen bond. Likewise, the Oxygen wants to play away too- so is attracted to other Hydrogens. Water molecules bonds loosely to other water molecules- the positively charged parts attracted to the negative- you’ll have seen this in magnetism. Sort of.

When they’re in the liquid state, those little molecules are sliding all over each other, and these attractive forces mean they’ll not evaporate unless you boil them.

What this means is that with  these Hydrogen bonds within the water it takes a bit more effort and energy to get the water to boil and turn into a vapour or  gas. Now the important bit: If those qualities of H-bond attraction didn’t exist, water wouldn’t be liquid at room  temperatures  it would be a gas and we’d be dead as there would be no liquid water on the planet, not to mention our veins would be full of air- oh and we wouldn’t exis……

Now because water is fluid, you don’t appreciate much of these shenannigans until things get extreme- i.e very very cold or when water meets air.

When it freezes the water molecules attracted to each other align themselves.

Hydrogen bonds keep the molecules  at an appropriate distance for conformity- a bit like when soldiers have to line up an arms length from each other. And these alignments are strong- don’t forget the burst frozen pipes. In maintaining this precise distance, water increases by about 9% in volume, becomes less dense than liquid water and so can float.

When it comes to contact with air, what does water do?

Droplets.

Droplets are also due to the charge that water carries .We refer to this as surface tension and you may have seen it if you ever look at a water boatman or a mosquito on water. They are not heavy enough to penetrate the surface.

How does it create tension at the surface? Well. You know by now water is charged. Usually,  these forces pull any one water molecule that is surrounded by other water molecules in all directions. At the edge though, there is nothing. No charge. Nowt but the air. So the charges that exist face inwards making these water molecules at the surface more strongly attracted to each other.

These characteristics of water also  contribute to other behaviours like  capillary action-  and also  the refraction of light and crystallisation of water- but snowflakes and crystals are for another time…

So the next time you’re drinking your aqua vita think of how amazing this molecule is.