LBCC - Test Taking Skills

the workshop last week for those who were here was called preparing for tests and some people don't do well on tests because they don't prepare right so kind of address that issue today's workshop is test taking skills next week is almost like part two if you want to call it that and I just wanted to let you know what next week was going to be about sometimes when people look at these two names it doesn't tell them very much so this is the simple explanation today I'm going to start with three general test strategies that

would work for any test you have and then I'm going to talk today about true-false tests and essay tests or any other kind of written test next week at the Moore test taking skills workshop I'm going to give three more general strategies and then I'm going to talk almost all about multiple-choice since that's kind of the big most common type of test question in college so that's sort of the the breakdown and one other thing I want to say before we get into these right here is that it's impossible for me to do a perfect

job of explaining to people how to be a great test taker and the reason is because every class is different every test is different every student is different and so I can't address everything that you may struggle with sometimes on tests but what I'm going to give you today are things that have helped a lot of students to do better on tests in the past so I'm going to just kind of focus on those okay so first of all we're going to spend about 15 minutes twenty minutes or so on this there are three things

that I always suggest to students to help them do better on tests and if you by the way I should say this too if you don't study for the test nothing I'm going to explain is going to help you these are not miracles that I'm going to give you like don't have to study and you get A's I'm not that good nobody is that good you have to put in the effort right but here's the first one and this surprises some people I don't know why this is this is a mystery to me but a

lot of students when they find out that I teach study skills and how to be a better student the first question they'd like to ask me they kind of whisper and they say can I ask you something and I said sure and they say could you tell me what's the smartest best way that I could study on the morning of the test what should I do and they're looking for you know like tricks and techniques or whatever and I give them a really oh I say I know the answer to that and what answer do

you think I give up nope it's one word and they don't like to hear it this is we're talking about the morning of the test okay so this is what I tell them okay don't and they look at me like no no you must have misunderstood me what should I do and again they're trying to get everything possible well I'm going to explain this to you in a second but the basic policy that I always try to encourage students to do is don't study on the morning of the test there are a couple of exceptions

to that that I'm going to give you in a minute but this is the basic rule okay so in other words when you go to sleep the night before a test usually you should lie there thinking is done I did all the studying it's all up there it's not going anywhere and just let your mind rest for a while okay the reason that I usually suggest this is that bad things tend to happen to most people when they study on the morning of the test leading up to five minutes before the test if you haven't

studied at all go ahead and get up at three in the morning and start cramming that's not going to work very well but go ahead but if you have studied here's what happens and I've had a lot of students tell me this they get up on the morning of the test and they think okay I've already studied but how about if I study just a little more you know it couldn't hurt so while they're eating breakfast or something similar while they're waiting they actually open up their textbook or go to their notes and start just

skimming through everything they've already studied and all of that sounds okay except really often what will happen is that they'll look at something in there book or notes something important and they'll look at it and think oh that's right that's right I forgot all about that and then the next thought they have is what else did I forget and they start panicking they start kind of getting confused other people do something even worse they're flipping through the book and they see something and they think oh I remember that oh but that's not the way I

remember it in other words I put it in there one way that doesn't look right well all of that tends to hurt your confidence hurt your ability to do well on the test and so that's not a good thing to happen on the morning of the test now there are two exceptions to this the first one is a good one and this may apply to some of you in here if you have a test that day but it's not until late in the day like 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon 7:00 at night something like

that it's not a bad idea for you when you get up to at least do a little bit of light review not cramming not studying or anything but just a little review because if you get up at 7 or 8 in the morning and your test is at 7 at night that's a lot of hours to pass without thinking about it at all so it wouldn't be bad to just kind of loosen up your brain a little but if your test is at 8:00 in the morning or 9 10 11 noon or whatever the first

few hours after you get up it's better to just let good enough alone and just leave it alone and then move on from there the other exception is a bad one so if this ever happens to you your time management was terrible in leading up to a test and that is if you go to bed the night before a test and you haven't finished all your reading yet go ahead and get up and start reading the next morning so for example if you have a test on chapter 5 and 6 and 7 and when you

go to bed the night before the test you've read all of 5 half of 6 you haven't even looked at chapter 7 yet you're in big trouble anyway but you might as well get up and start reading it's better than nothing but again this is something that you would want to avoid at all costs so this is the first strategy the first general strategy and then the second one want you to help me with this a little bit it involves two words okay first one is the most obvious one you can't take a test if

you don't arrive but when ya early and if there's ever a time as a student that you're going to arrive early at the classroom it's on the day of a test it's the smartest thing and so I wanted to ask you this because I am always interested in people's ideas before I give you mine if you could set up your schedule perfectly how early do you think would be perfect to arrive at the classroom on the david test fifteen minutes ten minutes any other thirty minutes sometimes I ask people the amount keeps growing okay and

so I wanted to tell you before I put this up here that a lot of students have told me they like to get to a classroom 45 minutes an hour something like that before the test now if there's no other class in the room before yours that means you can go in like an hour early and you have sort of the room to yourself well if somebody shows up that early what are they likely going to do while they're waiting for the test they're going to panic and they're going to study because it's right in

front of them and here's what happens and kind of imagine that the clock is in front somewhere here students have told me especially those who tend to get nervous when they take tests all the way to very nervous they tend to get to a test early and they sit there and study so that's one mistake and they also keep checking the clock and they look at it like 30 minutes 25 minutes 20 minutes and it's like the countdown to the electric chair it starts to make them more and more nervous which is not good you

aren't trying to minimize that as much as you can so my suggestion to everybody always is to arrive 5 to 15 minutes early and you may end up doing that normally in your classes but as I said especially on the day of a test it's really important to do now one of the things that I can tell you as a teacher and having looked at a lot of teacher of student tests over the years on average people who are there at the beginning of a test score higher more a higher percentage pass a test than

people who show up late and this is true even if some of these one minute late or five minutes late or ten minutes late it doesn't matter they almost always score lower and so one reason to get there a little early is so that you're there for the entire test and have all the time you need that's kind of obvious but there's another thing and that is a quick question for you about this is that if you arrive five 10 15 minutes early and you're not going to sit there studying what are you going to

do for those last 5 10 15 minutes yes both of those sound good to me not take a nap or whatever that's probably bad but relax and breathe I don't know when you take your tests in college whether you are totally calm all the way to really nervous everybody is different but even if you're a little bit nervous one of the things that's really good when you get there is to get make sure you have your scantron and your pencil or whatever you need and then just sit there and close your eyes and take some

deep breaths in and out what most of the time when somebody's really nervous their breathing changes and they usually don't know that but it does change and what happens to the breathing when you get nervous it gets yeah I always describe this like a dog panting although hopefully you don't look like that but it's like that like short panting breaths and that's what happens when you get really nervous well if you show up for a test and you sit there and you think I'm nervous or I'm not nervous whatever you think and you end up

taking some deep breaths and this is the way your breaths sound and this happens to students all the time I've had students say I don't think I'm nervous but maybe I am let me try and so they do this and then they open their eyes and think I think I need another one and another one and so you get your breathing under control it doesn't mean you're not going to be nervous but it helps also big benefit every time you take a really deep breath you're getting more oxygen to your brain that's a good thing

right before a test it's like you're opening up everything that's in there and so this is the main reason for it and then I wanted to show you one other thing and then I'm going to give you the third strategy does anybody have a textbook in here that I can borrow for just a minute okay a big one okay all right every semester that I teach here's what I see especially the first test I walk in to give the first test take roll the two minutes to the test and half the students are sitting there

with their scantron they're looking at me and just saying kind of like okay here we go other people frantically study okay so they have their book open or their notes and they're looking and they're looking at me and try to cram all this information in at the last minute and then finally here's what I say I say to everybody okay time for the test you need to close everything up put it off to the side or on the floor so half the people we're doing this say and then they do it but there's always at

least one to three people who keep the book open and they're still studying and they're looking at me and I finally say okay you need to close it up and so this is what they do okay and they say okay I'm ready and I think what's going through their mind is I'm the smartest person in this class because I used every minute of study time until the test but my attitude about studying in those last minutes right before the test is the same one that I mentioned up here and that is unless you haven't studied

at all anything you see at the last minute in your book or notes is much more likely going to do something negative then positives start to cause you to panic because you forgot something same example as before so it's a lot better to just sit there breathe relax etc and then there's one other idea that may sound a little bit strange to you at first but I always think this is a good idea to especially in a big classroom when you go in on the day of a test and you're there 5 10 15 minutes

early that means hardly anybody's there so you have your choice of wherever to sit where should you sit and I've had people say front the back the left the right you know people say all kinds of ideas well one little idea to throw out there is front is good on the day of a test even if normally you sit somewhere else and the main reason is this who gets their test first usually people in the front and if you're in a classroom not like this but that has you know rows of chairs you've probably had

the experience of being in the middle to back of a classroom and the teacher counts out 10 copies and then the person gives 9 behind them and they take forever to get the test back there and you're looking like this and by the time you get it the people in the front have already been working for maybe a minute or two and I know it's just a minute or two but it's a minute or two you're trying to get every advantage you can but the other suggestion that the official one is this and that's sit

alone be antisocial usually socials good but in this case sit alone why is that well it's the same basic idea here and that is to avoid distraction and to avoid confusion so I'm going to give you two quick examples of this in my first year of college I made a huge mistake twice about one week apart and then I learned don't ever do that again and I don't know if this has ever happened to anybody in here but I walked into a classroom that was probably twice as big as this one and I was about

10 or 15 minutes early and hardly anybody was there there were just a few students kind of sprinkled in the classroom and I for some reason walked and sat right behind two students who were sitting together and as I closed my eyes and to breathe and all of that like I said before they started talking to each other and what do people usually talk about right before a test yeah they talk about how nervous they are and they also talk about the test you know the information right well if I'm sitting there and they're like

three feet in front of me and I'm closing my eyes trying to mind my own business be like be in my own world I can't help but hear everything they're saying and what the first time this happened one person said to the other one something like this I can't remember the the name but it was like this who was John Smith again and my eyes were closed and I remember thinking that's easy I know that one and the other person gave the wrong information about the wrong person to oh he's the one who did such

a session which was wrong and I was thinking I don't want to hear anything wrong before a test I'm just trying to keep the right information in my head the second time this happened was about a week later and this was even worse I sat behind two people different class and they were talking to each other and one person said something like this who was Mary Roberts again and I remember thinking who were you talking about and the other person said oh she was the one who did this and then this and then after that

she did this and this and explained this long thing and I opened my eyes and I said excuse me and they turned around I said who is that we never learned anybody like that oh yeah I was right there in Chapter two and the heart attack begins I'm thinking wait a minute I studied I didn't study that name at all what other names didn't I study and now I'm starting to panic here comes the teacher saying you ready and I'm thinking no I thought I was a couple minutes ago that's a horrible way to get

started on a test to be doubting yourself so all of this is designed to have you be relaxed and in a good frame of mind when the test starts okay one last thing about getting to a test late when a student it comes late to one of my tests often times maybe let's say they're five minutes late which doesn't sound like much what they end up doing is this everybody is sitting there quietly taking the test and they walk in like this and I just look at them and I think oh man you are headed

for disaster when you are rushing your heart pounds you're breathing goes faster and all that the same things that happen when you're nervous so if you're nervous and you're running late forget it and so you want to be there and when the test is given to you again be in really good focused frame of mind it doesn't guarantee that you're going to get an a on every test you take but if you don't do these things you have a tendency to get off to a bad start and when you get off to a bad start

it usually gets worse and worse after that okay so these are three strategies I'm going to give you three more next week when we're talking about more test taking skills anybody have any question about this before we move ahead yes from a bullfight and I panicked I was trying to do it right doesn't it come to one of the things that I hate to do is sort of to put you off on this one of the subjects that's covered in next week's workshop is sort of how to get your brain working again if you start

to blank out or get nervous because that happens all the time and it's no big deal if it happens you just need to have a plan for how to get it going again and that's one of the things I'm going to explain next week so you have to wait a week but that happens all the time so any other questions okay that's good that's good we're going to talk about to test question types for the rest of the workshop today the first one is true/false and so I'm going to put you to work on something

in a minute but I wanted to introduce true/false this way when I ask students this question I usually get a weird look from them but I say out of all the different types of test questions what's your favorite type and most people say none right but when they say a particular type almost everybody amazing number say Oh true/false and I say that's your favorite one why and here's what they do their thumb comes out I don't know what that is and they say 50/50 that's their answer it's like flip a coin you know multiple choices

one out of four one out of five true/false oh just 50/50 get the feeling and answer it but true/false can actually be among the most confusing and tricky questions of all and that's what I wanted to kind of show you and talk to you about for a little bit today so I'm going to put you to work this is a test-taking workshop so what am I going to have you do yeah take a test and my attitude is there you can never take too many tests and people look and say yeah you're a teacher aren't

you okay this is should be the most relaxing test you ever take in your life because first of all you're not going to turn it in and it's not going to get graded it's just to illustrate some things okay and the other thing I'm going to tell you two things ten true/false statements I want you to read each one carefully a couple times and put T or F in the blank write normal but the one thing I wanted to tell you just so that you understand this is that the first five questions the first half

of this little test has to do with board games and card games and if you read a few of these you may not even know what those games are and so don't worry about it just look at it carefully and make your best guess I'm not trying to test your knowledge of things which is what usually happens on a test the last five questions are about study skills so everyone's kind of more I guess even on that one so again you don't have to put your name on this you're not turning this in to me

but I'm going to give you about maybe three minutes or so to work through these and I don't want you to go really really fast but I don't want you to get stuck on one either so just take a few minutes to do these try to answer them the best you can and then I'm going to use this as part of my teaching in just a couple minutes okay now whether you got all those right whether you missed half of them doesn't really matter for this but what I wanted to say first is to make

sure everyone understands the most important thing about true/false and that is when you read a true/false statement how much of it needs to be true in order for you to mark true yeah yeah on all of it and so and the reason for that so a hundred percent that means that if you read a long true/false statement and ninety percent of it was right and one little part was wrong is false it's got to all be right so one of the worst things you could do as a test taker is to read a true/false statement

kind of quickly okay that's true okay that's false because it's easy to overlook one word or one part of a word that can make the whole thing false so you actually want to slow way down when you read true/false and look at every word and even look at it twice and make sure you see everything and then answer okay now the second thing which is the main point of this little quiz that I had you take is this it's always good to be on the lookout for specific words in true/false that have a tendency to

guide you as to whether something is more likely true or false and so I want you to help me with these we'll just kind of compiled a list pretty quickly here in statement number one what is the key word there everyone okay what does everyone mean yeah it means everyone okay how many exceptions none okay when you see a word like that in the true/false statement what is the answer usually going to be it's usually going to be false always false no but usually and that's because most things in life have at least one exception

and all you have to do is think of one exception and it makes the whole thing false and I'm going to show you a little more about that in a minute how about number two right no one okay and no one means no one no exceptions it's the same exact idea as this it's just on the other end so whenever you see a word that has no exceptions to it it's very extreme then all you have to do is say okay that is a danger word so if I can think of one exception it's false

and if you can't think of any exceptions mark true but usually those are false okay and number three what's the word there right frequently and why is this word better in the true/false statement than those other ones right it's it's more kind of more reasonable it's sort of like more in the middle these are actually called in-between qualifiers and these are 100% qualifiers and so other words like most some few you could write a long list of these these might be in the middle they might be leaning one way or another but because they allow

for exceptions they're more often true and again it's not that these are always false and it's not that these are always true but you need to be on the lookout for them okay number four I'm going to skip for a second number five the word there is mostly and I can sort of stick a little ly on the end and then number six there are two words there what are the key words in number six one of them is always and the other one is every and again this again allows for no exception so that

means that it is more likely to be false but I did want to stop here for a second a lot of people get number six wrong and probably some of you missed that and that's because teachers always tell you don't leave anything blank you know even if you have to guess answer everything because if you leave it blank you're going to get a zero but remember all it takes is one exception to make it false does anybody know any test you've ever taken or anybody ever takes where that's not true that you should always answer

every question scantron is possible what I have in mind more is most of you at one point in your life took a standardized tests like the SAT and other kinds of tests and on those tests they have the weirdest scoring ever you never experienced this in college you get a point if you get it right you lose a fraction of a point if you get it wrong and if you leave it blank if you don't answer it at all what happens nothing they don't count it well that's pretty rare right usually if you leave it

blank it's automatically wrong but all it takes is one so again that's why you want to notice those words number seven the word is sum which I have up here number eight I'll skip for a second how about nine and ten what are the words there never and all okay so again these lists can be much longer these are not the only words but this idea of qualifiers hundred percent qualifiers in between qualifiers is very important to look out for okay and then the other thing that I want to share with you about true/false and

then we'll get two essays and other writing that will be our last topic today number four and number eight we skipped and that's because they deal with something different if you got number four and number eight right either you were a lucky guess er or you knew what to do with them most people miss one a lot of people miss both and the reason is easy if you look back at them you can't even figure out what they're saying they're very confusing the way they're worded and the reason for that is because of this problem

that comes up a lot in true/false and that is double negatives so that means when you see two words or parts of words that are in the negative in a statement it makes your brain kind of twist like a pretzel and it makes it hard to even figure out what's being asked and so when you look at number four I want to encourage you to do something usually you can't do what I'm about to ask you to on the test because teachers don't usually want you to write on the test booklet you just have to

do it mentally but you can do it physically because this is yours I want you to cross out the two negatives in sentence number four and those are not and on just the unpark those are the two negatives so if you take those out and you read what's left it says monopoly is a suitable game for children age six and under and if you don't know much about monopoly that wouldn't help but monopoly is a pretty complicated game some adults can't even figure out how to play it so it's not really good for very small

children that's why that's false and number eight is even more extreme than that you could cross out the word not and the out part of without because that's the negative and when you do that and you read what's left it says a test maybe with or have poorly worded questions is that true that a test may have poorly worded questions yes like that one and so that's why that's true and when people see that they think why didn't they just say it that way then I would have gotten it right I don't even know that's

what they were asking again it's confusing so as I said usually you can't do it physically by crossing out but you can take words out read what's left and just see does it make more sense now this won't always work like it won't solve the problem every time but a lot of times it will and once you take the negatives out and read what's left you think okay now I know what it's asking and hopefully you studied correctly and as a result you do well on that okay so there's a lot more that I could

explain about true/false but these are I think some of the the most important ideas so we're going to spend the last part of the workshop talking about essays and that this is most people's least favorite kind of test if you love writing and every time you get an essay test you get excited that's good but you're kind of in the minority most people would rather fill in a bubble on a scantron any time rather than write so I'm going to give you some ideas and I have to tell you one really quick thing before we

start this and that is everything that I'm going to tell you in the next 10 to 15 minutes has nothing to do with English teachers okay all of you have had English teachers before and you know the way they are with your writing they get out a magnifying glass and they find every little thing and they're very picky about everything and the reason they are is because they're trying to turn you into good writers okay so that's their job but most teachers when you write for them in college they have a different way of looking

at it than English teachers do and so the first thing that I wanted to tell you is this I don't know if you're familiar with these terms or not but this is always an important place for me to start when it comes to essay tests there are two types of test questions that you get in your life objective and subjective okay every question is one of those two some tests have both on them depending well objective the best way to remember that is that any question that you can answer by filling in a bubble on

a scantron is considered an objective question so that would normally be multiple-choice true/false that kind of thing a subjective is totally different and the most common type is essay although it can include any kind of written assignment or report or anything like that and the reason that I think this is important to know is this all of you have done scantron test before and when you get your scantron back you see pink lines hopefully not too many of them but pink lines right those are all the wrong answers and then you see a score stamped

on there that's your score it has nothing to do with the teacher's opinion view anything else it's just whatever you get you get and that's why it's called objective but subjective is totally different from that it is up to the mood and the opinion of the teacher and they're looking for certain things but there are certain things students do all the time in writing that Drive teachers crazy and if you drive your teacher crazy what happens to your grade yeah it just starts pretty soon it's circling the drain at the bottom so if you know

ahead of time what bothers a teacher you'll try not to do it and then hopefully that should help your grade to be better so that's my job in the next several minutes is to tell you some of the things that teachers really hate to see in writing and then if you know those you'll be careful to avoid them and that's the whole point okay so the first thing is this I want to ask you this from your own personal experience or just a guess if you got an essay question on a test and then you

had room to write on the front in the back or a blue book or anything else what do you think most students do as soon as they read the essay question what's the very next thing they do yeah they start writing which sounds like the right thing to do but usually that's a huge mistake they read the question and think and then they just here we go they start writing but the problem with that is unless you're the greatest writer in the world what ends up usually happening is that you write about something and then

you think okay that's about it about that and then you go on to something else and then half way through that well you remember something else about the first thing and your paper starts turning into a mess if your I always tell students this if you're ever with a teacher and you're watching them watching their face while they correct your writing and you see them there on the second page and you see them do this like that you can just sit there going they're wet my grade right down the tubes because they're looking thing wait

a minute he talked about that over there and now he's talking about it again and you're making the teacher work way too hard okay so a much better thing to do than this is this you get the essay question from the teacher and you're ready to go and before you do anything before you write any part of your answer it's a really good idea for you to write a really short really short outline and I don't mean Roman numerals and all nothing complicated like that but just maybe up in the corner of your paper somewhere

you can just number from like 1 2 3 and then jot down a phrase here and a phrase here and a phrase here and what are these things that you're writing yeah they're the main ideas the topics that you want to make sure you include in your answer okay if you do that if you spend like 30 seconds to a minute sort of planning okay these are my three and I'm going to do that one first that one second and then I'm going to finish with that one then what you did is you took a

minute to plan and you've heard the saying it's really good to think before you speak and we'd all be in better shape if we remember that it's also good to think before you write and so you take one minute doing this everybody else is just writing like crazy but when you start writing you write about your first topic you write about the second one you write about the third one and then when you turn it in even if your writings not perfect it's so easy for the teacher to follow it's like you're guiding them through

and if you were a teacher and you are correcting a lot of papers and you had to try to figure one out I think you'd have the same reaction so if you just deliver it in a way that's very clear and organized that really helps and so just writing a brief outline can help a lot especially if writing is not your greatest strength okay the other things that I want to share with you over these last few minutes are on this handout and I'm not going to be able to go through all of this you

can certainly take this with you and read through it a little bit more at a later time I think there's a lot of good advice on here but I just want to hit on about three or four things that I think are maybe the most important on here the first one when you look at the top of the page is it says the most crucial task you have when preparing for and then taking an essay exam is to ask your teacher exactly what he or she wants you to include in your answer and how you're

supposed to write it and this is extremely important because essay tests are subjective as I mentioned and each teacher is unique in terms of what he or she wants to see and doesn't want to see on your paper if every teacher had the exact same rules for writing life would be a lot easier but every teacher has different rules and again we're not talking so much about English teachers here okay so here's what I want to show you a couple of things first of all I have talked to a lot of teachers who are not

English teachers but who have their students right and I've asked them what bothers you the most about student writing number one is what I just explained here writing this just all over the place and not organized but the second thing that drives teachers crazy so this is good for you to know has to do with number one under the general guidelines it says read the question carefully and watch for instruction words okay what are those well turn over to the back and I want to show you some examples here this is not a complete list

there are a lot more than this but you see the words compared down to summarize and you see the meaning for each one every essay question you ever get in your life is going to have one of these words in it or another word that means something similar and what most students do which lowers their great every time is they ignore that okay so here's my example look at the second word on the list it says contrast and you see the meaning of that okay here imagine you're in an English class it's a literature class

you've been reading stories and books all semester long and on you go in for your final exam and here's the final exam teacher says contrast this character from this book with this character from this book so that's your essay well if you're like most students you ignore that word and you write everything you know about that character and everything you know about that character you just throw it all on the paper and then when the teacher reads it they read it they think loo this is all good stuff good stuff good stuff D or C

or whatever and why are they giving you a bad grade if everything you wrote was good because what did you do wrong yeah we didn't follow the instruction they didn't want the whole life story of those two characters they wanted you to think of maybe three or four ways in which they were different and do that so whenever a teacher uses one of these words they're not just sort of throwing a word out there they want you to answer in a specific way so one of the smartest things you can do is before you've ever

even done this before you ever do your outline read the question really carefully a couple times and ask yourself where's the instruction word and when you see it think for a couple seconds and think what exactly does that mean and then try to answer it that way and if you're able to do that you usually can get a higher score because you're following a simple Direction okay back on the front side I want to give you a couple of other ideas number four under the general guideline it's says incorporate the question into your first sentence

and briefly state your answer to the question and so a lot of teachers really like this if I give you an essay question that says list and describe several reasons why you enjoy living in the Southern California area okay assuming you do the way you start your answer is I enjoy living in the Southern California area for several reasons including the nice weather the nearness to the beach and mountains and the closeness to my family and relatives so you repeat the question and you kind of give your answer but if you do that you gave

it all away in the first sentence what are you going to do for the whole rest of the essay you kind of gave it all away so what do you do right yeah write more but what kind of writing do you do well number five in the rest of your essay develop the points that explain your answer and provide enough details to show that you know the material well this is something that I always think is good news for everybody to know about I've talked to teachers a lot and I've asked them when you're reading

a student paper and it's you're impressed it's good how do you decide whether to give the person an A or B because those are both you know really good grades and the answer almost every teacher gives me is the D word which is details if a teacher gives you B on something that you wrote they're basically saying there's nothing big that you did wrong at all it's strong good paper but how do you get from there to there it's by slowing down and giving more details and examples because that shows that you know more about

the subject and it's not just writing forever for the sake of writing but it's giving more when it's person is really brief and quickened to the point most teachers don't like that as much as someone who develops their points and so I think this is good for you to know and then the last thing that I wanted to mention is over on the back side on the bottom and again many things I could say here but I just wanted to mention the bottom two number five and six these are kind of favorites of mine to

talk about number five says is the writing mechanically grammatically and stylistically correct what does mean well again we're not talking about English teachers here I've talked to some teachers and I say what bothers you about student writing and you know what some teachers say first thing besides what I said here they say spelling I hate spelling mistakes okay this is their own sort of pet peeve well if you're not the greatest speller in the world and your teacher hates spelling mistakes that's not a very good combination and if you have to do writing in class

what should you do to solve the problem well one of them is to ask the teacher can I bring a dictionary to use when I'm taking it if they say yes then that solves the problem but what if they say no close book closed all books then what do you do and here's the answer I know this sounds dumb but it works only use words you know how to spell okay so while you're writing and you're about to write a word you're thinking is that e aí or IE i'm going to don't use it you're

just trying again to keep the teacher sort of in a good mood while they read your paper and if you do things that that just kind of jab at them it tends to affect your score at least a little bit and then the last part of this is number six is the writing at least fairly neat or legible one of my skills as a teacher as I can read almost anything after all these years but some students I'm convinced are training to be doctors you know what doctor's writing looks like no other human being can

read that and if you're at a point where you finish an essay and you have five minutes left go back and reread it and I know you can read your writing I don't know how many other people can it depends on how nice it is but if you end up looking at a couple of words on there and even you you're thinking what is that word try to fix them and these are just minor things but again you're trying to deliver a paper in such a way that the teacher can very easily and comfortably read

they don't have to strain and that tends to help your grade even a tiny bit and you're looking for every advantage you can get okay so lots more I could say but well you can read through the rest on your own like I said and I appreciate you coming today next week a multiple-choice test anxiety kind of all of that that we'll talk about so I hope to see you then you