Bad news: it’ll be exam time farily soon. Eep! Alright, we may currently not have quite reached D-Day yet; but we know it’s coming.

And when it does come, it pays to be ready. We don’t just mean in terms of doing lots of revision; that’s something that it pretty much goes without saying that you’ll need to do. No, we mean ready in terms of psychology. Mastering your subject content is obviously a fundamentally important aspect of being ready to face down all those tough questions that’ll be coming your way, but if you’re not psychologically prepared for the mental strain created by exams, it’s quite possible that all that hard revision graft will come to nothing.

The psychological dimensions of exams are often overshadowed by the emphasis placed on revising, but look around you and you’ll find evidence of the merits of being mentally prepared as well. You’ll see it in the student who virtually revised themselves to death out of a fear of failure, only to not get the marks that all their hard work deserved. Why? Because they were left mentally and emotionally shattered by the pressure they put themselves under.

And you can see it in the person who cockily strolled into the exam, assuming that their preparation would let them stroll through the exam, only to find when the results came that they’d lost their way when answering the exam questions. When this happens to people we could just view it as complacency, but it’s also the case that by understating what was at stake and the difficulty of the task, they weren’t capable of seeing the exam as a challenge from a psychological standpoint. They may well have had all the sujbject knowledge they needed stored in their head, but because they saw the exam as no big deal they didn’t see fit to make proper use of it. Hence why such cases are more than just a matter of simple complacency.

So, psychological preparation is vital. But where do you begin with it? Well, the underlying goal is to make sure that on the one hand you are not unduly stressed and panicked by the prospect of an exam, meaning your brain won’t freeze up when you’re in the exam hall. But at the other extreme, it also means making sure you don’t just view the exam as a joke or a formality, as if you do this you’ll be unlikely to fully scrutinize the questions and be alert to the traps that the examiners have set in their questions.

There are all sorts of techniques you can use to get yourself into the happy middle ground that exists between these two extremes, but as a starting point we’d like to make the following two suggestions:

1: Put everything into perspective

To some, exams are an Extremely Big Deal, with your entire career hopes hanging on each and every one. To others, they’re a piece of cake, and not performing well in them is totally consequence free.

Neither of these two positions is helpful, with the first creating a sense of pressure and panic and the other lulling people into a false sense of security. It’s important to keep a healthy level of perspective on your exams. On the one hand, no single exam will ever determine your life chances, so don’t spend your time envisaging catastrophic scenarios of failure. There’s always a chance to try again, or to turn your efforts to something else that will ultimately be just as rewarding. On the other hand, no-one really likes to fail, and you’ve got nothing to lose at all by putting the full weight of your efforts into your exams, even if there’s a voice in your head telling you they’re going to be dead easy.

We suggest that you look at the two extremes we’ve outlined above. If you think one contains shades of how you react to exams, focus on the perspective that counterbalances. So, worriers: remember that exams are not a matter of life or death; chillaxers: remember that even if you think it’ll be easy or that the exams don’t matter, there’s nothing to be gained from taking that attitude into the exam with you.s

#2: Don’t caught up in the mentality of the exam herd

It’s pretty rare for us to be the only person we know sitting any given exam. Most of the time, we count amongst our friends some or all of the classmates who will be taking the exam with us. Even if your classmates are just acquaintances, you’ll inevitably see them in the huddle of people that develops outside the exam hall before it’s due to begin.

Now, the thing with people when they interact with one another is that their attitudes tend to rub off on one another. So if the prevailing mood amongst a proportion of a group of students is that the exam they’re going to take is going to be impossible to pass, you can bet that in the ten minutes before everyone goes into the exam hall they’ll have convinced a good chunk of the other students to buy into their panic.

The same thing can happen on a more slow-burning basis if you have friends who are taking the same exam as you and you spend time with them in the build-up to it. If you have a friend who is panic revising day and night and continually harping on about how stressed they are, then it’s difficult not to start asking yourself whether you should be doing the same.

In the face of all this, the best course of action is to follow the sage advice of that poet. You know the one, the fella who also makes fruit pies or something. It goes a little something like this:

IF you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs […] Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Or, if you can’t keep your head under such circumstances, we’ve got a better solution: stay away from people who are likely to try and infect you with their panic!