Page 252 - Keys To Community College Success

Before she began writing the answer to this essay question, this student created the
planning outline shown in Key 8.8. Notice how abbreviations and shorthand are
involved.
Neatness is crucial. No matter how good your ideas are, if your instructor can’t
read them, your grade will suffer. If your handwriting is a problem, try printing or skip-
ping every other line, and be sure to write on only one side of the page. Students with
illegible handwriting might ask to take the test on a computer.
The purpose of a test is to see how much you know, not merely to get a grade.
Embrace this attitude to learn from your mistakes.

WHAT CAN YOU LEARN
from test mistakes?

Congratulations! You’ve finished the exam, handed it in, gone home to a well-
deserved night of sleep. At the next class meeting you’ve returned refreshed, rejuve-
nated, and ready to accept a perfect score. As you receive the test back from your
instructor, you look wide-eyed at your grade. How could that be?
No one aces every test or understands every piece of material perfectly. Making
mistakes on tests and learning from them is an essential part of the academic experi-
ence. Instead of beating yourself up about a bad grade, take the risk of looking
realistically at what you could have done better. Identify what you can correct, and
you may be rewarded with better study choices and an improved performance on
your next exam. Jay certainly found out from his experiences that learning from
mistakes is essential to growth and development in life. Here are some helpful
actions to take:

Ask yourself global questions that may help you identify correctable pat-
terns. Honest answers can help you change the way you study for the next exam.

■ What were your biggest problems? Did you get nervous, misread the question, fail
to study enough, study incorrectly, focus on memorizing material instead of on
understanding and applying it?
■ Did your instructor’s comments clarify where you slipped up? Did your answer
lack specificity? Did you fail to support your thesis well? Was your analysis weak?
■ Were you surprised by the questions? For example, did you expect them all to be
from the lecture notes and text instead of from your
notes and text and supplemental readings?
■ Did you make careless errors? Did you misread the
question or directions, blacken the wrong box on
the answer sheet, skip a question, write illegibly?
■ Did you make conceptual or factual errors? Did
you misunderstand a concept? Did you fail to mas-
ter facts or concepts?

Rework the questions you got wrong. Based on
instructor feedback, try to rewrite an essay, recalculate a
math problem from the original question, or redo ques-
tions following a reading selection. If you discover a pat-
tern of careless errors, redouble your efforts to be more
careful, and save time to double-check your work.

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