Examination questions useful advice

Read the instructions very carefully. Make sure you are clear how many questions you need to answer. Do not answer more questions than are required. You may be penaMzed, in that only those questions answered first will be marked these may not be your highest scoring answers. 

Read the entire paper. Choose the questions that you are going to answer and decide the order in which you will tackle them. Start with a question which you think that you can answer well, to build up your confidence for the less-appealing questions, but do not spend more than the allocated time on this question. 

Essentials of Organic Chemistry Paul M Dewick 2006 John Wiley Sons, Ltd 

HOW TO APPROACH EXAMINATION QUESTIONS SELECTED PROBLEMS AND ANSWERS 

Answer the question asked. Easy marks are lost by not answering the question asked. Do not spend time giving information that is not required whilst missing out other aspects that are clearly asked for. Do not try to copy out your lecture notes. The examiner expects you to be selective and to formulate a critical answer to the question. 

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The following are suggestions about how to tackle the questions in Test 1 of this book. These pointers may be applied to the other tests in this publication. The questions are tackled in groups and a number of points are considered. However, some of the points discussed may certainly be adopted in answering other questions. Sometimes the open-book questions may even present more of a challenge than the closed-book questions. In the case of Test 1, which is an open-book examination, there is also advice about the best use of reference books within the time allowed for answering the MCQs. 

When a photometric system is calibrated in concentration units in many clinical chemistry applications, a linear curve is established usually using only one standard (concentration reference) solution. In these situations the legitimacy of the linear curve should be questioned. Available guidelines generally advice that a reasonable linear range be examined, i.e. a minimum of five points is recommended and these points should be sensibly spaced. 

A certain group of students—often characterized as good test-takers —may not know every detail about the subject matter being tested but seem to perform extremely well most of the time. The strategy used by these people is not a secret, though few instructors seem to realize how easy it is to break down their questions into much simpler ones. Lists of these strategies are widely available, eg, in the descriptive material distributed by the National Board of Medical Examiners to its candidates. A paraphrased compendium of this advice is presented below. 

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