9 Common Mistakes made in the Examination Hall

It’s not only about the students, but most of us at any stage of our life may commit mistake. Such mistakes are often committed when we overrun a task or are uncertain about how to do it. Low confidence or diffidence, lack of complete knowledge or performing unwillingly might also be a few reasons for committing mistakes, but what tops this chart is ‘Applying Short Cuts’.

So, we would like to share here a few mistakes commonly done by students in the examination hall. These observations have been summarized after a collective survey done with the help of parents, educators, students themselves and even analyzing answer sheets.

So, here we go…

1. Misinterpreting the Questions

The most common one, Attempting the answers without even completely reading the question. Most observations depict that many students do not read or understand the questions completely and generally search for key words in the question. This might lead to misinterpreting the questions and quoting partially correct answers.

2. Haste makes Waste

Next, it has also been observed that many students generally start writing answers, in a nonchalant manner, without bothering much about word and time limit assigned to a question. Later as they reach the end of the paper, and the time is less, the pressure mounts up. Some students also consume too much time in answering the initial questions, which might lead to missing out or unattempting a few questions or creating unnecessary pressure while writing the last few answers-and all of us know ‘Haste makes Waste’- therefore students end up either with submitting incomplete answers or the answers are written in a haphazard manner which comes hard upon checker.

3. Hurry to complete and submit the exam

There has also been another observation that some students submit their answer sheets before time without revising it or even without checking whether they have attempted all the answers or not. In the hurry to complete and submit the exam, sometimes they don’t realise that they might have missed a sub part, or might have done incorrect labeling for a diagram or for a questions, or filled the map incorrectly. The hurriedness also prevents students from highlighting the keywords or making the answer sheet more presentable, which makes it easier for checker. These are a few silly mistakes that have been done by students, all the while accepting that revising the paper and giving it a thorough reading might have prevented them from doing such silly mistakes.

4. Anxiety

One of the most accepted reasons by students themselves is they get nervous. Especially those students who are allotted seats in the beginning or at the end. Some students also get perturbed by the presence of the invigilator. They might start thinking, ‘When would the invigilator go from there?’, ‘Is the invigilator reading my answers?’ etc. Such unnecessary thought not only wastes precious time but also disturb the concentration of the students and might make them write incorrect answers, or even forget a known answer.

5. Concept and Content Clarity

Another observation has been that students mention incorrect factual or quantitative examples or case studies which might have been taught by the teachers to merely explain a concept, but was not suitable in writing. Students might use the wrong formats, quoted incorrect dates, and got confused with character names, etc. too. This also might cost crucial marks to be lost.

6. Expressing Answers

Cramming or remembering an answer word to word is a tedious task. Therefore, some students prefer to write their answers in their own language, which might lead to exceeding the word limits or missing the key words or unable to convey (express) what the examiner requires in the answer. In such situations, the answers become meaningless, irrelevant and incoherent, thereby causing the students to lose out on scoring.

7. On the spot Decision Making

Some students face difficulty in remembering answers. Thus, they leave some space in the answer sheets in the hope to fill that space later when they would recall the answer. The amount of space left might turned into large empty space or even becomes clumsy as student may found it hard to write complete answers. This leaves a bad impression on the examiner in case the student is unable to recall or fill the complete answer. Or the students might take too much time in attempting one or two questions or to decide whether to wait or move further or to decide where to start from or to decide the order of questions to go for, leading to wastage of precious time for the students.

8. Recall Movements

Sometimes students are not able to recall certain answers as they don’t even try to think those recall movements or they have not connected the concept with real life situations which helps in creating any recall movements to remember for long and understood it better, and have merely crammed the answers.

9. Negative Mindset

Last but not the least, the biggest hindrance between students and high marks is a negative mindset and a pessimistic attitude might be due to low confidence, lack of practice, subject fear, bad health, healthy competition, past experience, lack of resources, parental pressure, mood swings or our own perception. Examination fear is a necessary evil. But it is upto the students whether they transform that fear into a source of oppression or a source of motivation.

The best possible preparation of success is

"EMPOWER YOURSELF WITH TRUST IN SELF CAPABILITIES"