particular issue exactly right; you can always come back to that after
the flow of ideas has stopped. But at that point you may find you can’t
recall all the details you wanted to use. Nevertheless, by identifying the
problem in the planning stage you will have alerted your subconscious
and, while you’re writing another question, it will be busy unearthing
what you need.
Let’s say you’re taking a three-hour exam in which you have
to answer four essay questions, and you plan all four questions
before you begin to write the first one. This will mean you will spend
the first forty minutes of the exam planning. Then, if you write your
strongest question first and your weakest last, it will mean that your
mind will have 2 hours 25 minutes to riffle through your data banks
and come up with those ideas, arguments and evidence that you
weren’t able to remember when you planned the weakest of your ques-
tions. Even with your strongest question your mind has 30 minutes,
while you’re planning the other questions, to find the few items that
you couldn’t recall.
The common-sense of this approach is clear to most of us who
have ever taken exams. We’ve probably all had the experience of coming
out of the examination centre with a friend, comparing what each of
us did. As we go over it, all sorts of things suddenly spring into our
minds, that we should have included but didn’t. In this situation
what’s happening is that either we haven’t planned at all, or we’ve
planned each question just moments before we’ve written it. As a
result, the mind has been set tasks to accomplish and questions to
answer, but it has needed time for this, more than we have given it in
the exam.
The sad irony is that over the next hour or so, as the mind comes up
with what we asked it for, we’ll recall a rich assortment of ideas, argu-
ments and evidence, and we’ll curse our luck for not being able to use
it in the exam. But luck, in fact, had only a minor part to play in this
familiar drama; the major part was played by organisation, or the lack
of it.
One final point to remember about planning under timed conditions
is that, in most systems, examiners will give you credit for a plan, if the
essay is unfinished. In most examinations you cannot lose marks for
a plan, however scrappy and indecipherable it may be. You can only
gain marks. Therefore, if you run out of time half way through a ques-
tion, a clearly structured plan of what you would have done will earn
good marks.Revising for the Exam 169HTW22 7/27/01 8:29 AM Page 169