Do your exam techniques work only in Australia?
No, the techniques in "Exam Mastery" work for any exams that include essays and multiple choice questions regardless of geography.
"How to write essays and have fun" hands you the keys to a skill that you can use anywhere that people are able to read.
Who is/was Ned Kelly?
Ned Kelly was a colourful Australian character who made a suit of body armour out of agricultural equipment and took what he wanted at the point of a gun. I don't advise you to do the same, but neither should you sit there and hope that you can pass exams by chance. Go out and take your exam victory. It doesn't matter how many rules you bend if it works!
You know nothing at all about my specialist subject, so how can you have the nerve to offer to help me to pass my exams?
The people who do best in exams are the people who know most about exams, not the people who know most about the subject of the exam. Oh, study is important so I show you how to study efficiently.
I don't give you ready-made study guides. I show you how to prepare your own study guide. After all, you know more about your subject than I do, so you can make a better guide.
There are so many kinds of essay - abortion essays, argumentative essays, capital punishment essays, persuasive essays. How can your little 37-page book about how to write essays and have fun cover everything?
I show you the equivalent of how to lay bricks.
You can build a toilet block or a cathedral from bricks.
Your teacher should show you the details of what he wants from you for each kind of essay. You won't be building a toilet by mistake for a cathedral.
There is a handful of simple rules for each type of essay. You will only have to follow the rules for a persuasive essay when your English teacher tells you to write a persuasive essay. Or when an exam question asks for one.
After the exams you will write many persuasive essays but they won't be called that. Best of all you can break the rules, or learn better rules. They might be called "business proposal" or "sales letter" but they will be persuasive essays.
Will essays be useful to me even after the exams?
Most emphatically yes!
To most people essays will be the most important thing they learned at school.
Oh, they won't be called essays in real life, but letters to the editor or articles about your favourite hobby or business proposals are still essays.
Some exceptional specialist careers use so much maths that it could be as important to you as essay writing. Most people forget maths after they get a job.
Can I make money from my essays?
Yes. Once you reach a high standard by reading "how to write essays and have fun", you can start making money, even while you are still at school
You will find a chapter about making money from your essays in my book.
To make great mountains of filthy lucre from your writing you will have to do some extra study, or be in the right place at the right time. Don't expect to become a wealthy copywriter without learning more about persuasive writing than I can teach you. But how often do you get the chance to earn a few hundred dollars for doing what you like?
Can I use accelerated learning?
If you are a teacher you certainly can, and you will find more about it in "Exam Mastery" It will mean a lot of extra work for you, but you will have the pleasure of watching your students succeed
If you are a student you can only hope that you will find a course that you can afford that offers accelerated learning. You might be clever enough to make up your own materials from the information in my book, but it will take you as long to prepare as it would have taken you to learn in the usual way.
I know someone who can't read. Can you help?
Not really. My books assume that you have already made it to secondary school. You won't have the life experience needed before then.
I can't read fast enough to get through everything that my lecturer wants me to read. Can you help?
Yes. There are two ways I show you in "Exam Mastery"
- Read more efficiently (fewer words for more information). You are taking the exam, not your lecturer.
- Read faster with better comprehension.
I can't remember what I have read two minutes afterwards.
You will probably be as surprised as I was to hear that your comprehension will get better when you read faster. Surprised and unbelieving.
I had to try it before I was convinced.
There is a chapter about memory in "Exam Mastery" and comprehension is at the top of the list for learning things. You'll find more details of how to speed up your reading there too.
I want to cram for an exam, and my final exams are rushing towards me. What can I do?
If you have left it too late, use the exam techniques from "Exam Mastery" to raise your chance of passing.
If you still have time to study, use the highly efficient study skills described in the same book.
I hate learning.
That isn't natural (though it's natural to pretend to hate learning). Perhaps you have had some bad experiences.
Or is it just that you have to drop something fun, to do some boring study? If you develop good study habits as I recommend in my book, you will arrange your schedule so that you are never dragged away from your fun pastimes.
Then you may have to be dragged kicking and squealing away from your study! Hunting is a great sport, and hunting elusive facts is so engrossing that you will lose all track of time.
What is active learning or discovery learning or inquiry learning"
These are all learning techniques where you don't just wait for the teacher to feed you any rubbish he likes. You take an active part in your lessons and learning. You soon may know more about the day's subject than the teacher.
Remember that the teachers have to study up their lectures before they give them - they don't rely on memory, so they don't know much more than they teach you.
That means that if you do any "research" at all, you are likely to know more than the teacher. Think what that will do for your self-confidence!
I had great fun writing misinformation into my essays when I realised that the teachers wouldn't know the truth. Read more about how I got one up on my teachers in my book about exams.
Is it difficult to learn to write HTML pages?
No. You can't do any damage when you make a mistake. It just won't be as pretty, so you look at the display, make a change, look at the display and so on until you are pleased with the result.
I offer a free online ten-lesson course in HTML. The first lesson is at
http://smarthomebiz.com/html1.html and it doesn't need a genius to figure
out that the second lesson will be html2.html
Learning numbers seems impossible
I suppose you mean things like dates and populations and so on. There are tricks that allow you to memorise numbers perfectly, but you have to use them properly.
I once memorised all the figures for a question that I expected in an exam - but I forgot to memorise the units. So I couldn't answer the question.
You will learn in "Exam Victory" how to memorise some things and how to find out more about memory. At one time I learned a trick that impressed everybody - I could tell you the day of the week for any date in the century. It never helped me to pass exams, only to show off.
Are study skills really useful?
Yes. The only teacher at my school who taught me study skills had all his students pass the exams each year.
That made the other teachers respect him, but it didn't seem to occur to them that they could teach us study skills too!
Learn about study skills in Exam Mastery.
Can study skills be used by primary students?
Not usually. A clever teacher could adapt some of the tricks to the level of the pupils, but most primary students don't have a broad enough experience to grasp the techniques.
A parent or even a teacher can teach primary children to do amazing feats of memory, or mental arithmetic, and that raises their IQ so that they perform better when they are older. You can learn more from my book.
I know that study skills are useful for high school students but are they any good for college or university?
They are much more important at this stage. Suddenly you find that you are expected to take charge of your own study. You no longer have a teacher to bully you.
"Exam Mastery" will teach you to take charge of your study habits. If you don't you will fail.
I don't really want to know about study. Do you have any tips for test taking skills or test taking strategies?
Yes. "Exam Mastery" has a chapter about what to do on the day of the exam, a chapter about exam tactics, and a chapter about exam secrets.
These come near the beginning of the book because you might want to take an exam when you don't have time left to study for it.
Would study skills be useful for adult education?
Yes. The most common temptation is to try to study everything. Study skills show you how to zero in on your target. You will study more of what will be useful to you, and less of what you don't need.
The "Exam Mastery" study skills tips also include valuable tips on organisation and memory. These are useful at any age.
Are there any benefits from home schooling/home education?
I think so, though it is debatable. See my web page at http://www.studying-techniques.com/study-home-course.html
Can I use your exam techniques with distance learning?
Definitely. It is an ideal combination.
"Exam Mastery" emphasises taking control of your own destiny instead of waiting to be spoon-fed by your teacher.
If you are using distance learning you have already taken control of your own studies. You will be excited by the increased efficiency that you get by applying the exam techniques and study skills.
Can your studying techniques be used with education online?
Yes. See the last question before this one.
Do you have a study guide for my subject?
No. Study guides are intensely personal so you are better making your own, following the guidelines in my book "Exam Mastery"
Can study guides in your book help me to pass any exam?
The instructions for planning your study in "Exam Mastery" are effective only for exams that test your knowledge.
They don't work for anything that tests you - not your knowledge - such as ski-jumping or wood carving or calligraphy or mathematics.
To prepare for a singing test, or any other test of yourself, practice, practice, then practice a lot more. That is the only study guide that works!
How can I get better grades?
I'm glad you asked. First buy my ebook about Exam Mastery, then apply all the tips and techniques in that ebook.
There is nothing difficult in the ebook. If you have at least reached high school you can understand and apply my ideas. What is better, if you are even slightly competitive you will enjoy the battle to put one over on the teachers/examiners.
Can good study habits give students more time for fun?
Very definitely. Any study habits that you hate won't work for long!
I tossed off my homework, did my music practice, played table-tennis or chess, cycled round, and went out with girls with my studies completed for the day.
I passed 11 ordinary level exams, which was a record for that school. It gave me entry to the University of my choice.
Without that experience I wouldn't have written Exam Mastery, to share my fun with you.
What can your books do for education/secondary school/ higher education?
Take "How to write essays and have fun". Too many people get the idea that writing is a hateful exercise. Their muse has never shown any sign that she exists.
Of course you will hate writing if you can't do it properly. I hate everything that I can't do properly.
My eBook will show you how to start having fun, shock the teachers/lecturers and write exciting essays. Your marks will improve overnight - at least mine did when I discovered some of these techniques as a teenager.
"Exam Mastery" is more advanced, but can easily be understood and applied by students in the teenage to 150 year age range.
It will show you how to stop wasting your study. You may in some cases do more study than you would do without my advice - just for fun - but you won't waste as much time on useless study.
The whole book is targeted at passing exams, but you will be surprised by how much fun you can have along the way. It is fun each time that you beat the teacher/lecturer as you practice techniques that you will use to beat the examiners.
Once you get the hang of it, Web research will become such enthralling fun that you hate to stop when you have to do something else.
Can your books help my career education?
Somewhere all careers need you to write well, so get my book about essay writing.
If you need to pass exams at the end of your career education, then my book about Exam Mastery will be invaluable.
Does gifted education - teaching exceptional children require studying or exam techniques?
I can only speak from experience. I am what the media call a genius but I would have failed my big exams if I had not discovered these techniques.
I didn't discover the multiple-choice techniques until later so it was fortunate that we didn't have MC exams.
If all gifted people are like me, we hate to do anything when we don't know how to do it. Nobody had ever showed me the simple approach to exams that I include in my book. So I was going to fail.
A gifted person can take any tools and techniques they learn and create something outstanding, but everything is built on the backs of those that have gone before. We can't take ideas from a vacuum.
"Exam Mastery" is full of tools that will get gifted students up and running. As with any tool - even a hammer - anyone can use it once they have been shown how, but gifted students will use it better.
I'm looking for teachers' resources that will help me to raise the pass-rate of my students.
"Exam Mastery" is just the resource you are needing.
If the subject that you teach requires essays and Multiple-choice tests you will see an immediate improvement in all your students that apply my techniques.
A lecturer in Electricity wasn't allowed to make my book compulsory reading, so he persuaded the library to get several copies, and encouraged his students to study my book.
Can teachers use my books to help with training their students?
Yes. Make them required reading. Include them in the list of books and other resources at the start of term. See last question before this one.
I can't help with subjects such as mathematics where you are teaching skills, not knowledge.
Are there study techniques for maths?
Practice, practice and more practice is the only one in most cases.
The exception is for mental arithmetic. My book points you in the direction to learn lightning mental arithmetic techniques. Guess what comes after that? Right! Practice, practice, practice...
How can I improve my memory and learning?
Forget the idea that you can dramatically improve your overall memory. You can improve it slightly by using it a lot, because that develops brain pathways and raises your brain weight.
What you can do is
- Learn the difference between learning and memorising.
- Learn memory tricks, each one of which can be used for dramatic
memory results in special circumstances.
For instance you can remember every card that has been dealt face up from a pack, and list the cards that haven't been dealt yet, but you can't use that technique in exams.
My book about Exam Mastery shows you some ways to learn better, and some memory techniques, and points you towards other resources.
How can I beat Multiple Choice exams?
There is a chapter on this subject in my book about Exam Mastery. My contention is that if you attend the lectures you should never fail a MC exam except by sheer bad luck.
If you are very, very lucky, you can even pass an exam in a subject about which you know nothing. Just don't rely on this happening!
What are visual diagrams, and why should I use them?
You have heard that one picture is worth a thousand words. This isn't always true, but visual diagrams can
- help you take notes
- help you with researching a project
- help you with planning an essay
- help you to organise your ideas in an exam.
There is a whole chapter about visual diagrams in "Exam Mastery". Your teachers should have taught you about them, but if they haven't done so my book will help you.
Are study techniques and essays any use with history?
I'm glad you asked (grin).
English and history are among the top subjects for using my techniques. Look at a past exam and ask yourself if you could pass it if you were brilliant at writing essays, and knew more about the questions than your teacher.
My book about essays will help you to write essays, but so will "Exam Mastery" and in addition it will show you how to find these gems of knowledge that will make your essays outstanding.
Can exam techniques help me with online education? My online training seems pretty self-contained.
Yes. Find out whether your tests will be marked by a human or by a computer.
Multiple choice questions will probably be marked by a computer, and essay questions must be marked by a human.
"Exam Mastery" can help you in either case. Just remember that computers are too stupid to accept variations. For instance "if(conditions)" is not the same as "if (conditions)" as far as a computer is concerned.
