Help Your Students Ace Exams: 3 Must-Try Virtual Prep Techniques

Preparing students for exam season doesn’t have to be daunting for online tutors or online teaching platforms. It certainly doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your existing lesson plans. In fact, effective exam prep should strategically build upon skills students are already familiar with, simply adding a focused emphasis. This guide provides key strategies to enhance your teaching toolkit and ensure your students excel.

Master Test-Taking Skills & Strategies

Some of the most crucial skills for exam season are often unrelated to the core exam content itself. These involve fundamental test-taking strategies designed to help students conquer standardized tests and maximize their chances of achieving high scores. While online tutors may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content to review, overlooking test-taking strategies can be a significant oversight. These skills are just as vital for student success.

The Process of Elimination

This is a classic and essential skill for any online tutor to teach. While many students may have heard of it, they might not fully grasp how to properly utilize it, making a thorough review crucial. The process of elimination is designed to speed up the question-answering process by quickly ruling out options that are definitively incorrect. If a student is stuck and unsure of the answer, employing this tactic can effectively narrow down their guessing field, improving accuracy and preventing them from getting bogged down on a single question.

Pacing Yourself During the Exam

For many students, the time limit is an overwhelming factor in the testing process. Therefore, encouraging and explicitly teaching pacing strategies is absolutely essential. In regular class tests, students might take their time, aiming to complete every question. However, in standardized testing, the goal is to answer as many questions as possible accurately, without getting stuck. The process of elimination is key here, but so is knowing precisely when to skip a challenging question and move on. Teaching students to flag difficult questions, complete the rest of the test, and then return to flagged items allows them to maximize answered questions while still having an opportunity to reconsider missed ones.

Strategic Essay Writing 

Essay writing remains a common source of trouble in standardized testing, but it doesn't have to be. Just as with multiple-choice questions, strategies can be applied to essays. Teach students how to format their essays in the simplest, most effective way: a clear introduction, one or two well-developed body paragraphs, and a concise conclusion. Encourage students to spend 5-10 minutes annotating the essay question and outlining their essay using this format before they begin writing. This ensures they have a general direction, understand precisely what the question is asking, and can respond more effectively. Extensive and frequent practice is key to building student confidence and preventing mental blocks on exam day.

Maximize Content Review with Engagement & Data

When reviewing content for exam prep, always employ strategies that maximize lesson time and truly prepare students. Engagement is paramount. Incorporate small quizzes, memory games, and digital flashcards (supported by virtual classroom tools or Zoom add-ons for tutors) to provide students with an interactive refresher of the content.

Furthermore, leverage lesson data and insights from your online tutoring software to analyse what students have struggled with most in past lessons. Bring a renewed emphasis to these weaker areas. If students are already strong in certain aspects, there's no need to spend excessive time reviewing them, boosting teaching efficiency.

Prioritize Student Confidence

Ultimately, the most powerful exam prep strategy is to boost student confidence. If students enter exam season feeling confident, well-prepared, and supported by their online tutor, they are far more likely to perform better. With robust preparation and a significant confidence boost, your students will be ready to ace their exams!

Finding an online teaching platform that adequately fits your exam-prep needs and supports robust student engagement is no easy feat. Try out the Funclass free trial to discover a virtual classroom tool that truly works for YOU, helping you turn ordinary Zoom calls into interactive lessons for exam success. To hear directly from an online tutor about how Funclass transformed their online tutoring business by attracting and retaining students through engagement, read our latest success story.