Get It Right: Exam Essays

Understanding what the exam question is asking is just as important as writing your name on the exam paper! In order to decide how to answer the essay question you need to be able to decode the question. It’s important to identify what the question requires in terms of content and style.

For example, a question may ask you, ‘outline the key turning points in the Vietnam war (1959-75)’. In your answer, if you explain why there was a key turning point or narrate all events from the Vietnam War, no matter how long or accurate your information may be, you score an automatic zero!

Here, the problem is not that you didn’t remember the content, but that you didn’t understand the question. The key word here is ‘outline’ NOT ‘explain’ or ‘narrate’ so you could have written the most beautiful paragraph ever, if it is irrelevant to the question, the marker does not care! These key terms in the questions are a good guide to what the examiner wants you to write in the exam. Understand these and you have won half your battle... (the other half of the battle is you studying for the exam!). It also saves you a lot of time and effort, which you would otherwise waste on writing information that does you no good.

This is where I come in. To help you, I have compiled a list of commonly used terms in exam questions and provided simple explanations to guide you. Take these as guidance to prepare for your essay exam questions. Warning: Do not just rely on these words in the exam; make sure to read the entire question and the entire exam paper to know exactly what to write!

References for Glossary List:

Cottrell, S (2009) Planning Your Essay. Basingstoke:Palgrave

Student Study Support Unit Canterbury Christchurch College (no date) Common terms in essay questions. Accessed 10/05/14. http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-2714

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