Oct
The Best Advice for Retaking Your Exams During a Gap Year
There are a lot of reasons to take a gap year. Whether it is because you're looking to go out and explore the world or because you don’t know what to do with yourself or because you're looking to retake your exams, gap years are always a great thing to do! Specifically, we’re here to help you with the latter. To help you retake your exams when you're on a gap year; we’ve compiled some useful tips and tricks that we think will be useful for you when you're on your gap year.
Know the Reason You're Taking Your Gap Year
It can be very easy to forget that you've taken a gap year in order to work on retaking your exams. Many people forget and treat this opportunity as a year out. While it may not be as full-on as going to university initially, you need to remember that you are trying to improve your marks and therefore revise. Take this moment to get in an hour or so of revision of whatever subject(s) that you're retaking every night and focus on what you're looking to achieve.
Be Organised
This is a fairly straight-forward bit of advice here, remain organised. The more organised that you are the more chance that you have of passing your exams. Get your exam notes into subject order, start tidying up your work space and don’t forget that you need to practice. Start writing essays to get yourself into the mood, start taking practice exams and you’ll be ready to go! Although revising for exams, can be different from writing essays.
What’s the End Goal Here?
What do you want from your gap year? Is retaking your exams a way for you to go to the university you want to go to, or to do the course that you want to do or is it a way for you to be able to have peace-of-mind that you can achieve what you set out to achieve? Any and all of these reasons are perfectly valid reasons to do so and should be the thing that you are thinking about when you start.
Earn Some Money
Make sure you get a job while you can too. If you're spending all day every day working on assignments or revising it can be a little overwhelming for you. If you can find a part-time job then you may just be able to keep yourself sane! It’s also a good way too to save money, maybe you're thinking of taking a holiday abroad after this, or you're thinking of maybe going to university or you just want some money for the savings, getting a job is a great idea and a good way to start building up the CV too!
If It is Broken, Fix It!
Look at your previous revision techniques and think about why they weren’t as effective as they could have been. Maybe you need to change the length of time that you're revising for. Before you might have been doing two hours’ revision-a-day, maybe try changing it to one hour a day with an occasional break. Also as well, you may have been cramming revision in at the end of your last exams. This time, start revising from the very start; baby steps to begin with and then gradually ramp the revision up a little bit, start adding ten minutes to your revision every two or three weeks or so. Don’t spend your time looking up holidays or gap year agencies or something equally as unproductive.
Try Not to Miss Days
It's easy when you're revising to decide to take a day out, maybe take a whole day off of revision as you don’t feel it's necessary, but that can lead to bad habits, you can start missing out on more days and you can soon find whole weeks missing before you revise. Not a good idea. The best thing to do, is to do as we said and keep a certain period of time that you’ll revise for and make sure that you can achieve it each day. The more days that you miss, the harder it will be when you're playing catch-up.
Ask for Help
Some of your old teachers might be able to help you. They may be able to get you to the next level that you need for your grades too. Most teachers are available to help and will almost always be able to put time aside for you to help out, the best thing to do is not to overwhelm them, talk about the subjects you need help on and see if they can help you on them. If you're resitting Mathematics and English, maybe get a tutor or speak to your old Maths and English teachers and get them to help you.
So there you have it! The best advice for retaking your exams on your gap year; make sure you stay true to the goals you have when you start, you're organised, always have an end in sight, don’t miss any days of revision, try and earn some money while you're at it, fix bad habits and old problems and always ask for help.
For any more advice for retaking your exams or for anything else then check out University Compare, a university comparison website that compares over 36,000 courses across 425 institutes.
Thanks for reading and good luck!
