Preparing for Tests in an Online College Degree
A lot of college students really struggle with test taking. If you are pursuing an online college degree, test taking will be a different experience, but you will still need to know how to prepare.
Many instructors at online colleges allow open book exams. In an online format it is impossible to enforce a closed book exam, so most online college professors don’t even try. Instead, they may give you a timed test that is set up so that you don’t have enough time to look up the answer to every question. If you know most of the material well enough to answer the questions quickly, you should have time to look up the answers to a couple of questions that stump you.
When you are preparing for an online exam, your goal should be to learn the material as well as you would in an on-campus class. Read the text, do the lessons, and study just as you would otherwise. You may also find it’s helpful to create a “cheat sheet” — a one-page list of notes to trigger your memory and help you with the things you find hardest to remember (such as dates). Since you have only a very limited amount of time, this could mean the difference between being able to answer a question or running out of time and having to skip it.
The goal of most online schools is to offer the same quality as any other educational institution. This means that the coursework has to be adapted to the online format. It’s harder to make sure that a student learns the material when a course is in an online format, and many of the requirements of online classes reflect that fact.
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