Helping students prepare for exams
As the end of term/semester draws near, as educators we need to prepare students to sit final exams. And yes, I know that in many areas, exams are not common, but in accounting – the final exam is still a common assessment worth a large proportion of a student’s final grade.
We can often prepare students for exam content, but sometimes forget to scaffold learning about the mechanics to sitting an exam. I polled my students once about reading time in an exam that has MC and written responses. This was part of root-cause analysis to try and understand why students weren’t performing well in written questions. Most thought that they should spend the reading time working out the answers to the MC and paid little attention to the written section simply because the MC appeared first. As a result, I made a series of videos to help students understand the basics of sitting exams. These videos are publicly available and free for anyone to use.
Do you have a useful resource for students to help them prepare for exams? I’d love hear about other practice and share your resources 😊
Dr Amanda White is a lecturer in Accounting at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a mum to 2 boys – Audit Senior and Audit Junior and is an alumni of Coopers and Lybrand and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Amanda has been teaching accounting for almost 20 years and specialises in teaching auditing and assurance. She has a regular audit news show “This Week in Audit” and many audit and study resources on her YouTube channel Amanda Loves to Audit. In 2017 she received a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning through the Awards for Australian University Teaching (AAUT, formerly the Office of Learning and Teaching).