Overall tips for essay-based exam questions
Essay-based exam questions when you don’t know what the questions will be can be daunting. Sometimes when you first open the exam book, the essay questions can be worded in a way that might throw you – you might worry that you’ve only revised a very specific part of that essay question, for example. This is a completely normal, and a sometimes inevitable, reaction. Because you have spent a long time revising a topic in a specific way that’s best for you, thinking about it in a different way (that reflects how the question has been worded) can make you question whether you know how to answer the question and get a good mark. If you’ve revised the topic broadly with some key specific information about a topic, then I can assure you that you can answer the question.
Overcoming this initial worry is entirely possible. In many ways, you can do this by turning the question into something you have revised, and answering the question accordingly. This can take a bit of practice, so it’s important to do some practice exam questions before your exam day.
The way to do it is simple: pick out the key parts of the essay question. Sometimes questions can have superfluous information, so the key parts you want are the topic of the question and how to answer it. Remember: You don’t need to talk about everything you’ve revised or covered.
- If the question says compare and contrast or critically discuss, you know how to write the information. (I’ve provided a couple of definitions below for these key terms below.)
- If the question mentions a broad topic/phenomenon (e.g. language disorders), then talk about the key aspect of that broad topic that you have revised.
Before writing the essay question I recommend always creating a plan structure for your essay question. (You can scribble it out at the end.) This is a brief structure for the main points in your essay. Doing this at the start can actually help trigger your memory for some other pieces of information you could talk about. I’ve provided a general structure below that you can use to help start planning for any question.
A general structure to use for every essay-based exam question:
- What is a definition of the topic?
- This should be a brief overview of describing what the topic in the question is.
- You could mention an implication of why its important to study this topic.
- What is a theory of the topic? Or why does it happen?
- Brief summary of a theory or two of the topic.
- What is the evidence for the topic?
- Are there any clinical case studies to use as an example of how this approach has been tested?
- You could consider how difficult a topic it is to study. Is getting good quality evidence for this topic an easy or a hard thing (and how?), for example.
- Are there any other ways of assessing or understanding this topic?
- What assessment tools can we use to understand this topic, are there any other theories you could mention here, any other studies?
- Conclusion
- This should always summarise an answer to the question and be reasonably conclusive. You could reiterate all of the key parts of the essay structure above.
- For example, if your question is asking about compare and contrast two theories, make sure to summarise which you think is better in the conclusion.
What do the key terms mean?
- Critically discuss/evaluate – go beyond purely describing a theory or an approach. Critically discuss/evaluate means evaluating what our current understanding is of a phenomenon: is the quality of the evidence good, do we have a lot of evidence (if not, what are we missing), are many of the studies outdated, how difficult of a topic is it to study?
It can mean using a clinical case study to demonstrate the existence of an approach, and then critically evaluating whether a case study is a good source of evidence.
I have a whole blog post on how to demonstrate critical evaluation here.
- Compare and contrast – Describe two theories/approaches for a topic, and then use critical discussion of which is more effective at explaining a phenomenon. A conclusion should be clear as to which is more effective.
Some pointers to help prepare:
As a general rule of thumb, try to do these things (in order):
- As it’s impossible for anyone to remember all of the information across a set of modules, which can be overwhelming, it pays to spend time before you start revising to look over your lecture notes and format the information to revise in a way that’s easy for you to read and understand.
This might involve creating a mind map or a table of information on a topic that you feel comfortable revising from. It should include (at minimum) all the parts of the general structure above:
- A definition for the topic,
- A description of theory of the topic,
- A study exploring the topic (which you can critically evaluate in some way and cite; you could search for one that you can remember in detail on Google scholar). This is where you can show further reading (by finding another study not mentioned in the slides), and
- An alternative piece of information that you can use to contrast the topic (e.g. a theory, another study).
- Think about any general difficulties of researching each topic. For example, studying language disorders is difficult because they could be a rare phenomenon. Therefore, we rely on case studies to understand the disorder, which do not provide us with a generalizable understanding of the disorder that may apply to everyone with the disorder.
Spend time creating this information for each module is important before you start revising.
2. Use general revision techniques to remember this information. Read and make sure you understand the topic.
3. Use practice exam questions and test yourself. Put yourself in the environment you will be in in the exam. Create your own questions based on the information you’ve revised. If you want to write your own questions, keep them reasonably broad for the general topic. Get in the habit of writing the same information twice but in slightly different ways (e.g. to compare and contrast or to critically discuss). You can create practice questions easily by going through your lecturer’s slides.
Want to know what you need to definitely pass?
A final way to help prepare is to know what you’re being tested on. You can usually find this information by looking at the overall learning outcomes for the module. This may include, demonstrating knowledge of the topic, synthesizing literature on the topic, and critically discussing the evidence for the topic. Make sure to include this information in any mindmap/table of information you use for each topic in your revision.
Other useful sources:
Rosie Psychology: Your online tutor 