Critical 27 Taking Online Exam Tips

The bitterest thing about college or school without a doubt is exams and keep getting good grades. Taking online exams is even more stressful since that adds more things to worry about, such as technical issues, and guideline changes.

So, preparing for an online exam is way harder than preparing for an exam that is held in your college or any other physical location. So, most students end up getting much lower grades in their online exams.

However, these 27 taking online exam tips might just help you to prepare yourself and get through an online exam without ending up getting bad grades; you might even get better grades than before.

In This Post

Before Taking the Online Exam: Preparation

01. Go through The Test Guidelines

Online exam guidelines have information about your exam, such as when the exam will start when it finishes. Most things will be similar to your college exam guidelines, but do not skim through the online exam guidelines.

If you do skim through it, you will miss so much valuable information about your exam. It can harm your exam scores and make you end up with bad grades. So, take your time to read the guidelines and understand them.

Keep on watch out for “Need To Know” and Bold/Underlined Sections.

02. Study Harder Evade Distractions

Exams are stressful, and when you are preparing for an upcoming exam, it is much harder to study for it. However, you can study better when you have much fewer distractions.

Evade distractions such as your mobile phone, social media notifications. Turn the Electronics like TV, radio off and let your roommates or family know that you have a test and not to interrupt you while you are taking the test.

Use that time to go through your notes and revisit materials that you do not remember.

03. Go Through the Class Materials

You must have gone a few times through your notes and course materials. Even so, just go through them and review class materials at least one time, just in case to see what you have forgotten.

04. Know the Test Format

Know what kind of questions that the instructor will use on the test- multiple-choice questions, fill-ins, short answers, or essays, perhaps? Maybe it is a combination. So, to prepare well for the exam, you must know what kind of questions you have to answer.

Most of the time, online exam guidelines will have information about this; if not, you could always ask your instructor.

05. Practice Exam and Test Yourself

Sometimes, the instructors will make a practice exam available for you to go through. Even if it is not the real thing, Take it.

If there are no practice exams made available for you, no worries, take a look at your class textbooks or referenced textbooks, they usually have a lot of practice tests.

06. Exam Time Limit

Other than what time the exam starts, you need to know how much time you got to finish the test. Otherwise, you won’t have much time to complete the exam, and it will cost you some scores, maybe the ones that were easy for you to take. So, read the guidelines and find out how many hours you got.

07. Check Other Parameters

Read the guideline properly and get a good understanding of other test parameters such as,

Can you leave the test page when you have started it?
What to do if you have technical problems?
Can you skip parts and answer them later?
How many scores are you going to get for the test?
How many scores do you need to pass the test?
If you fail the test, then can you retake it?

These are essential aspects of online exams, and most of the time depend on the professor or the program.

08. Choose a Good Spot

Some Distractions like a lousy neighbor or the honks are hard to evade sometimes. The best thing you can do is pick a place where you could take the exam that has much fewer distractions to make sure that you don’t get interrupted in the middle of the test.

09. Keep A Water Bottle Close

When you have a test for more than an hour, it is easy to get thirsty—going to the kitchen to take a sip of water now and then can make you lose some valuable minutes. Keeping a water bottle close can solve this problem, and if you usually get hungry, you can always keep a snack pack or a chocolate bar to eat before the exam.

10. Decide When Will You Take the Test

Sometimes your instructors will ask you to take the online test at a specific time. But in some cases, you might be able to choose the time you can start the test, and if so, the test will be available for several hours or maybe a few days.

If you have given a chance to pick the time to take the exam, you should choose a time that you will get much fewer distractions or stress.

11. Keep Everything You Need Close

If you are allowed to keep your books, notes, writing implements, a watch or calculator with you gather them before you take the test and keep them close. So, you won’t have to go back and forth to grab them in the middle of the exam.

12. Check Your Computer

Your computer must have the latest hardware and software, but always check if it has any technical problems and keep an eye out for system updates. Technical issues are the hardest thing to overcome when you are facing an online exam.

Checking the computer before the test begins can help you evade most of the technical issues.

13. Check Your Connection

After you have checked your computer for technical issues, also check your WIFI connection. Also, check your data usage, and speed and if you have any problems, contact your service provider and get them fixed fast before the exam start.

14. Get the Contact Info of the Instructor (other than email)

If you got any technical issues in the middle of the exam, you might have to notify your instructor as soon as possible. Just in case you can not reach the instructor via email, gather any other contact information you can find, such as a work phone number.

15. Don’t Study at The Last Minute

Even if you did not study harder before the exam, do not speed study when you are minutes away from the test begin time. This move usually happens because of exam stress, but studying at the last minute won’t get you higher scores in your exam.

During the Online Exam: Focus

16. Keep Track of Time

If you have a time limit, you could use an alarm to notify you of how much time you have left to finish the paper. Set the alarm to 10 minutes (or 30 minutes) before the deadline so you won’t have to worry about the time.

Also, don’t keep waiting on one question for too long. If you are stuck on one question, skip it for now and go back when you answer other questions.

17. Try Not to Cheat

You won’t get a pass if you cheat on your exam just because it was an online test. Professors and teachers like to see your progress in the course, and they hate it when you cheat. No matter how hard you try, they will know that you cheated. Definitely don’t cheat as a group; also, even if they are multiple-choice questions, they will always know that you cheated.

18. Test-Taking Logic

If you have multiple-choice questions on your test paper and you don’t know the answers to some of them, start eliminating them. Even if you get some answers wrong and lose points, you will get at least some of them right, hopefully.

19. Do not Leave the Test Page

Sometimes even if you are allowed to leave the test page to search the web for information, do not leave the test page. Because if you do, you might lose all the work you’ve done so far. So, instead of using the same tab in the browser, you could open a new browser window for the search.

20. Technical Problems? No Worries

As we mentioned earlier, evading technical problems is a hard thing when you are taking an exam online. However, you should contact your instructor immediately and explain the exact problem that occurred, and taking a screenshot of the errors you got can go a long way.

21. Don’t Be Afraid to Eliminate

When you are facing an online exam due to exam stress, sometimes you won’t be sure about the answer you put in even though it’s the correct answer. Don’t think about it too much, and move on to the next questions.

22. Save The Questions and Answers

You might have a few pages to go through in your online test paper. Before you move on to the next page after answering, you should take a screenshot of the questions and the answers. This can help you if you have technical issues when you are ready to submit the answers.

23. Check Again and Again

Make sure that you have answered every question and appear as you intended if you have some time left before the deadline review the accuracy of your answers. Check grammar and spelling to see if there are any mistakes.

24. Submit Your Answers

After checking your answers, you should submit your answers. You only need to provide answers once, but if there is a problem with the submission, try again, and if it didn’t work, contact your instructor immediately. If you have a document, attach it to the email as well if you don’t ask the instructor if he will accept the screenshots as an answer sheet.

After the Online Exam: Review

25. Check Your Progress

Do you think you did well on the exam? Or did you give it your best? Did you find questions that you did not understand how to answer? If you don’t have an exam again soon, take the time to go through your books, notes, and course materials to find answers to them.

26. Calculate Your Grade

You got the questions and the answers saved as screenshots, you will be able to go through them and calculate your grades. However, written answers take a bit much time since the instructor has to go through a lot of them. So patiently wait to get the accurate score for the test if you cannot determine the grade yourself.

27. Find What You Can Do to Improve More

Now that you have a rough idea about your grade and GPA score, think about the study strategies you used, did they work as you expected, and what you can do to improve your score next time.