Tips from a Top Student
How to take Math Exams and Quizzes?
(and get good grades)
(and get good grades)
Have you been in an exam room and felt like the time was never enough to complete the assigned tasks? I have been, very recently. We will not be able to extend the duration of our exams but at least, we can be very strategic on how we can use it.
In this article, I will walk you through my way of taking math exams. I will show you examples of how I would write my answers. Those examples are taken from the open-access book Precalculus by Abramson, Falduto, and Gross, Access for free at openstax.org. This is what I, as a teacher, will consider a “complete written work” that deserves a full point. I believe my teachers who gave me A's would agree with me on this. (If not, why would they give me A’s anyway?)
Let us suppose that I am sitting in a big exam room right now. It is 7:30 pm and about a hundred students are sitting around me. I already studied a lot in the previous days. The proctor approaches each table and gives the following sheet of paper to each student.
Step 1: I read ALL the questions
The first thing that I do (after writing my name, of course) is skim through all the questions to see what they are about. Even if I feel that I can do one question in particular, I do not stop there. I always read them all.
Step 2: I write what I do know about each question
Before I wrap my head to solve a given problem, I write a very short note in each question about what I already know. Since I am not using any outside materials but only my memory, this is not considered “cheating”! My exam sheet will look like the following after this step:
This step may also save me in case I run out of time. At least, my teacher will know that I understand the material. They may decide (If they are nice…) to give me partial credit. I do not write a full sentence in an exam. I only write phrases that are enough to understand what I mean.
Step 3: Identifying the easiest question/part of a question
Exam questions are not written in degree of difficulty. From my (around two decades of) experience taking exams, I know that if I start with the difficult question, I may run out of time (and energy) to do the easiest one.
Therefore, I solve my exam problem from the easiest to the most difficult. Those “easy” questions may not give a lot of points but when they are combined, they make a significant part of the grade. Remember, 89 is a B, and 90 is an A. So an easy question that “only” worth 1 point really makes a big difference.
Step 4: Start working on the problems from the easiest to the most difficult
In our example, question number 2 is the easiest and fastest to answer. I will then start with number 2.
Note that I do not write a full sentence. In a textbook, the answer may look like this: The leading term of f is -4x³ so the degree of f is 3 and the leading coefficient is -4. No grader will expect that in an exam/quiz. What a grader wants to see is that I understand the material.
So, I write clearly, which means, I avoid uncommon initials and I only use the usual shorter terms. In this example, I do not use LT for the leading term because that may mean something different for different readers. However, if I write “coef”, any people reading maths would understand that I mean coefficient. Also, I try to use tables as much as I can.
It reduces the number of words I have to write and is very easy to read for the grader.
I do not recommend poor writing styles but a quiz/exam is not about your English or your writing. So, do not try writing a textbook-style answer. It will not help you in a math exam. Make it clean and clear. Use the least amount of words that can explain your ideas. This definitely saves time.
Do not rewrite the question
Nobody ever gets even 0.5pt for rewriting the question. It is a complete waste of your precious time.
Write out the math in full on your exam
Try to practice writing cleanly. Use a sharp pencil and bring your eraser. That way you will not need scratch paper. I am really convinced that using scratch paper in a math exam is a waste of time.
No grader will look at your scratch except if they suspect you were copying somebody else’s work. You should show all the steps of your computation in the exam/quiz paper. That is what “show all your work” means. That is also why you should try to not use scratch papers, you may not have time to rewrite your work.
You can see below the paper after I complete the quiz my way. If I grade this paper, definitely, I will definitely give it 100%.
I hope this article has helped you. If that is the case, please let me know with the applause button below and share it with whoever may need it.
