How to study for an online exam you have never sat before

An online exam is two things at once. It is the same test of whether you know the material that it has always been, and it is a piece of software you have probably used once, under time pressure, while being recorded. Most people prepare hard for the first and not at all for the second, and then lose fifteen minutes to a browser.

Here is a plan for both halves. Four weeks is the shape; compress it if you have two.

The one idea the rest of this is built on

You remember what you have pulled out of your head, not what you have put into it. Re-reading notes and highlighting feel productive because they are fluent — the material looks familiar, and familiarity gets mistaken for knowledge. Testing yourself feels worse and works better, which is the most robust finding in the whole of study research and the least popular.

So: almost everything below is a form of asking yourself a question with the notes shut.

Week 1 — Map it, do not learn it

Write out the syllabus as a list of topics, in the exam’s own words where you have them. Then mark each one honestly: could I explain this to somebody, could I half explain it, or have I never really understood it. Three columns, no more nuance than that.

This takes an hour and it tells you where the next three weeks go. Nearly everybody discovers that the topics they have been revising are the ones in the first column, because revising something you already know is pleasant.

Week 2 — Make the questions

Turn the middle and right columns into questions. Not summaries — questions, with an answer you either get or do not: what does this term mean, what happens if this value doubles, which of these two processes produces that.

Past papers are the best source if you have them, because the wording of a question is half of what makes it hard. Where you have none, write your own from the learning outcomes — outcomes are usually phrased as verbs (“describe”, “compare”), and each verb is a question shape.

Week 3 — Test, space, repeat

Work through your questions in short sessions, spread out. Two twenty-five-minute sessions on different days beat one fifty-minute session, and the gap is doing the work: forgetting a little and then retrieving it is what makes the memory durable.

Keep a list of what you got wrong. That list is your revision material for week 4 — not the notes, the list.

Week 4 — Rehearse the exam, not the subject

In the last week, do at least one full-length run under the real conditions: the same time limit, in one sitting, no notes, at the time of day the exam is at. This is where people discover that they are fine on any single question and 20 minutes short over forty of them.

If timing is what falls apart, the fix is usually mechanical rather than academic — there is a separate post on where the time actually goes, and the short version is that most of it is not thinking.

The software half, which nobody rehearses

A week before, spend twenty minutes on this list. Every item is something that has cost somebody an exam.

1. Open the platform and click around. Where is the next button, how do you flag a question, does it show you a list of unanswered ones, does it auto-save. Do the practice test if there is one, even a trivial one.
2. Check the rules, in writing. What is permitted, what is monitored, whether a second screen is allowed, whether anything has to be installed. If it is proctored, find out what the proctoring software does before the day, not during it.
3. Test the hardware you will use. Camera, microphone, and the browser they ask for — some platforms refuse anything but Chrome, and some refuse a virtual machine.
4. Have a wired or tethered fallback. Know what you will do if the connection drops, including who you email and what evidence you would need.
5. Quit everything else. Notifications from any app can cover the screen at the wrong moment, and on some proctored setups a background application is a flag.
6. Know the clock. Whether it counts down on screen, whether it keeps running if you close the tab, and what happens if you submit late.

On the day

Sort before you solve: go through the whole paper once, answer what you know, flag the rest. Bank the easy marks while the clock is still generous, and use the flags to spend the last fifteen minutes where they are worth something. Do not change an answer unless you can say what was wrong with the first one.

Where a tool fits, and where it does not

While you are revising, having an answer available in seconds is genuinely useful — being stuck for ten minutes on a practice question with nobody to ask is how an evening gets wasted. That is the case we built OneTapAnswer for: you press two keys over the question and the answer arrives as a notification, without leaving the question or opening anything.

In an exam, whether anything like that is permitted depends entirely on your institution’s rules, and that is a question to answer before the day rather than during it. The honest version is the one at the top of this section: the plan above is the part that makes the difference, and no tool replaces having pulled the material out of your own head twenty times.

If you want to practise the format itself, the practice quiz on this site has every common question type on one page and needs nothing installed.