As we tumble toward final exams, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address one of the most dreaded denizens of the season: the blue book essay exam. Nothing strikes more fear into the heart of a liberal arts student than seeing that big blue book, full of empty, lined pages, just waiting to be filled with paragraphs pregnant with novel insight.

These exams are tough. But in this post I will teach you a devastatingly effective trick for squeezing out the most possible points once you sit down for the test itself. Of course, this advice assumes you’ve done smart preparation (see last week’s post on exam prep mistakes for some pointers on this topic). But assuming you know your stuff, this advice will teach you how to strut it.

It all comes down to the three simple minutes…

Essay Basics

There are two ways to lose points on essay questions. First, you don’t answer everything asked by the prompt. Second, while answering what’s asked, you leave out important relevant arguments covered in class. That’s it. If you can bypass these two pitfalls you’ll do well.

(A common myth is that the quality of your writing matters on these exams. This is rarely true.)

Fans of Straight-A know my advice for avoiding the first pitfall: outline! The technique is simple. Before you start writing your answer to an essay question, sketch out an outline of every argument you want to cover in your response. (I used to write my outlines on the back cover of the blue book.) This outline should be a bullet-point list, containing just a couple words on each line reminding you of the larger points you want to include.

Here’s another tip from the red book: after sketching the outline, go back, look at the question description, and make sure you’re addressing every point it asks. It’s common for students, in their rush to answer, to miss one or more pieces of the question, lurking somewhere deep in a subordinate clause.

Now it’s time to move on the marquee advice…

The Three Minute Rule

To address the second pitfall mentioned above – bypassing relevant arguments in your answer — there is only one thing to do: slow down.

The start of an exam gets the adrenaline pumping. The fear of running out of time motivates you to start writing as soon and as fast as possible. It’s exactly this fear that causes students to blow past those argumentative nuances that make the difference between a B and a A.

Here’s what you should do instead: after you finish sketching your outline for a question stop and think for three full minutes. Literally: look at your watch and time yourself for 180 seconds.

While this time passes, quietly ponder the following: What are you missing? What tricky point did you discuss with your professor earlier in the semester that would fit perfectly in this answer? What argument from another topic could be reapplied here to interesting and informative effect? What argument isn’t really a good fit?

…To Those Who Wait

These three minutes of reflection – and it has to be three minutes; any less and you won’t generate enough new thinking, any more and you might run out of time — can shake loose all manner of insights that you would have otherwise blown right past. I’ll admit, it’s hard to slow down when your mind is screaming for you to keep moving. But these strategic lacuna can make the difference between a blue book God and just another sweat-stained undergrad furiously scribbling like his life depended on it.

The scenario is common. You sit down with your test, flip it open, start reading the first question, and then…panic. You have no idea how to answer it. Minutes pass. A cold sweat glistens. Eventually, you move on to the next question. But your brain, now buzzing with the electricity of nervous dread, cannot focus. The answer eludes you here as well. Suddenly a thought slips in from the periphery: “what if you left the whole test blank?” At first, it’s soft. Almost comical. But the insistence grows. As does your panic.

How to Side-Step Panic

We can’t ignore this common academic occurrence. Its impact is too great. After hours of careful, efficient study, a panic spiral can, in essence, erase all of this effort. Your score is no different than if you had blown off your studying altogether. Clearly, this is something to avoid.

Below are some simple tips to help you side-step test-taking panic before it scuttles your performance:

1. Re-Order the Questions. Quickly review all of the questions. Determine which ones are easy (you know everything necessary to get full credit), which are doable (with some thinking, you should be able to put down something good), and which are worrisome (you’re not sure how to start). Tackle the easy questions first. Then move on to the doable. Leave the worrisome until the end. This ensures that you get down great (confidence-boosting) answers for the easy, solid answers for the doable, and approach the worrisome without concerns about wasting time that could be spent answering questions you know.
2. Create a Time Budget. Before tackling the easy and doable questions, figure out a simple time budget. Assign more time for the doable questions than the easy, because the former will take a little more concentration. Leave time at the end to take some stabs at the worrisome bastards lurking in the background. A common mistake is to spend too much time on the easy questions, eliminating your ability to wring out the maximum number of points from the doable and worrisome prompts that follow.
3. Change your Goal from Letter Grade to Point Grab. Don’t approach your test with the high school mentality that 90% to 100% of the points earns an “A,” 80% to 89% earns a “B,” and so on. In most college classes, your grade is relative to the performance of your classmates. If you studied, and are having a hard time, than it’s likely that are people are struggling as well. You don’t have to beat the test. You just have to beat them. Your goal, therefore, on the worrisome questions is not to get a perfect answer, but, instead, to wring out every possible partial credit point. While your classmates panic, and leave full questions blank, you can calmly record every useful insight or step that comes to mind. These little points add up.
4. Ask Targeted Questions. Once you’ve finished the easy and doable questions, and you’ve recorded as much as you know about the worrisome, you might consider using a targeted question to shake loose some additional insight. Determine if there is any ambiguity in your understanding of the hard questions. Often, a confusion over what is being asked, or the type of answer expected, can be what’s blocking your progress. Ask the professor (or TA) a targeted question meant to disambiguate this block. Often, their answer will help you move forward.
5. When Stumped, Go Back and Clean. If you’re completely stumped on a worrisome question, and can’t make any additional progress, go back to your doable questions and polish your answers to an intense shine. Double-check your work. Add extra arguments. Make them the best damn answers the grader will see. Squeezing out every last bit of credit from what you do understand will help offset what you left blank. Remember, many of your classmates are having the same trouble. Your goal is to grab points that their panicking pushed out of reach.

Conclusion

Having a plan — any plan — goes a long way toward diffusing a slide into panic. The advice above, which focuses on getting down what you know and not losing control of your time, further helps avoid this slide by disarming the pitfalls that help fuel a test-day meltdown.