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I have to take two exams in November - serious stuff, three hour, closed book, essay form handwritten legal exams.
I need to do them to be able to continue in my chosen career due to changes in legislation.
I took them last year and failed narrowly, mainly because they are very factual and involve remembering hundreds of clauses, precedents and supporting cases.
Has anyone got any tips on remembering lists of stuff, I've tried reading them over and over, writing them out time after time, and taping them and listening to myself reciting them but they don't seem to stick.
The assumption being that you are studying something you enjoy, there shouldn't be a problem remembering. Keep on reading the info and relax, it's fun. If you don't believe me, think about a hobby, bikes for example, then try to remember details to see how easy it is.
If that doesn't work, some kind of association to things that you genuinely like and enjoy.
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By far and away the most effective way to remember stuff (for me at least) is to explain something to someone else. Find someone who'll put up with you and rabbit on about the stuff you'll cover in the exam.
I always found that things need to have context, simply writing the same thing out over and over again doesn't work. Are there old/practice papers you can do? I found that to be my revision method of choice for exams.
Explaining things to other people is a good way of understanding stuff.
But I do maths, so don't have to remember anything really. But when I do, I will usually stare at it for 10 minutes before I go into the exam.
Or you could just sneak some paper into the exam, write it on your arm, or sneak your phone or ipod in and just go to the toilet half way through or something.
However, if you write something down enough times, you can write it down by like, muscle memory, or something. Depends on how much you need to write though.
Write it all out in different ways. One of the ways will stick.
There are, as I'm sure you are aware, different proclivities towards learning styles depending on your subject choice and learning style. Generally learning preferences tend towards one of the following; aural, visual and kinaesthetic. So, as mentioned above, listening to the information, seeing it represented (either in lists or some kind of mind map)or working with the information in a physical way. I guess from your post that you're already some way down the educational highway, so you should already be aware of what works for you. The key thing about the information you're currently processing seems to be that you are processing it in a disjointed rather than connected manner, which makes understanding it as a whole more complicated, and therefore recalling tricky. Rather than trying to recall by rote, is there a way of reorganising the information into logical groupings. And now for the good bit, practice makes perfect, so given that you've already come within spitting distance, you're more likely to be successful next time! Good luck
Thanks for the suggestions so far. I think that the problem that I have is that there is a real disconnect between my day to day job and the examinations.
Day to day I deal with people, I explain this stuff to them and hopefully help them with their situations. The stuff in the exams is the foundation stones of what I do but in the real world has nothing to do with the day to day - it's purely academic.
My major problem is that I have been in the 'real world' for too long - I finished my formal education over 20 years ago, these are the first proper exams that I have attempted since then.