Helping Students Prepare for Exams
With finals around the corner, those of us who give exams are thinking about how to help our students do well. Even if you don’t usually build review sessions into your course, you might consider making time to guide the way students prepare for exams. Your guidance can enhance both their confidence and their performance.
Exam reviews are not all created equal. In fact, there’s quite a bit of research about which strategies work best for learning. It’s not terribly useful to lecture all over again (only faster this time!). Instead, students need to take an active role. They need to be practicing recall, solving problems, analyzing scenarios, or doing the kinds of thinking they’ll need to do on the upcoming exam.
A good exam is well aligned with the goals of the course and with the work students do in and out of class, so ideally students should already have had a good bit of practice with the material and the intellectual skills that the exam will measure.
If students haven’t already had considerable practice in class, it’s especially important for the review to give them familiarity with the kinds of questions they’ll encounter on the exam. This isn’t making things too easy for them, or giving them the answers, but instead helping them to build the skills they need and can only acquire through repeated practice.
In fact, an exam review is also a good time to try some tough questions or problems. Students’ first encounter with challenging problems or higher-order thinking tasks shouldn’t be on a high-stakes exam, but instead in the time leading up to it. In class is a great place to practice more difficult questions or problems because students have support from instructors and peers.
If students are left on their own to prepare for exams, they may resort to inefficient strategies such as only practicing the easier, lower-level tasks or rereading notes. For example, some students might upload course materials to Notebook LM, ask it to summarize those materials, read the summaries, and think they are prepared. Instead, they could prompt Notebook LM to give them practice questions, especially if we help students understand what kind of prompts would make for good practice. When we provide guidance, including guidance on how to use AI to study, students are more likely to engage in effective preparation.
A good exam review also encourages students to practice effective metacognitive strategies. It’s useful to help students reflect on their progress and self-assess. If they have an accurate sense of what they know and can do, they can use their study time more strategically to fill in gaps in their knowledge and skills. We can also share evidence-based study strategies, such as letting students know that spaced practice is better for long-term recall and durable learning, so that students leave a review session with a plan for strengthening their command of the material.
The best way to help students prepare for exams is through course design. Ideally, exam review is built into a class over the course of the entire semester, but even if you haven’t structured your class in this way yet, you can build it into the last two weeks. For example, you can leave a few minutes at the end of each class session to ask students to write down the concept or point they still find most confusing (the “muddiest point”) and what they found the clearest. Or you can ask them to identify the day’s three most important points. (You may be dismayed at first by how these diverge from what you consider the three most important points, but if you share your priorities students will gradually improve their ability to organize their knowledge and distinguish overarching concepts from minutiae.) Every week, one colleague asks his students to generate a question they’d ask if they were the professor and wanted to know if their students really understood the material. Regardless of how you frame the activity, you can prompt students to reflect on and gauge their thinking and learning on a regular basis. In this way you maneuver students into distributed practice and help them monitor their own learning.
Designing class sessions to include active exam prep also ensures that all students get the benefit, which brings us to our last point. Students are juggling many competing demands and are learning to manage their time. Most of them cannot, or will not, avail themselves of optional, “extra” opportunities, no matter how valuable they may be for their learning. Since a good exam review is a learning opportunity, it deserves class time so that all students can benefit.
If you’d like support devising an exam review, or designing an exam that aligns with your goals, we’d be happy to help! Please contact us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu to set up a consultation. We look forward to working with you!
2026 Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching
Friday, April 17thh | 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Strozier Library Basement
Pre-event Social Hour: 11:45 am-12:45 pm | Presentations: 1:00 pm-5:00 pm
Please join us for the 2026 Provost’s Showcase, where faculty and graduate TAs will share their innovative teaching practices. This event will feature 31 poster presentations and 18 roundtable discussions that highlight the impressive advancements in education happening at FSU. Please come to support and learn from your colleagues! Main themes of these presentations and discussions include (1) innovative instructional design and assessment, (2) student success, support, and engagement, (3) experiential learning, professional development, and mentorship, and (4) AI & VR in teaching and learning. The event schedule and program can be found on our PSST webpage. It will be a wonderful experience to learn from each other. The pre-event Social Hour starts at 11:45 am, and will provide a networking opportunity over complimentary refreshments.
No pre-registration is needed. We look forward to seeing you there!