Business Exam Revision Techniques

This section focuses on the techniques that are especially beneficial for business students who must combine their understanding of theoretical concepts, terms, and definitions with a real-world application and understanding of the current local and global business environments. This often includes having to learn sub-topics related to finance, economics, politics and social order. The type of information you have to learn as a business student is often simple in its theoretical delivery but more complex in its application, though it still involves the following types of information that must be learned:

• Terms and definitions
• Theories
• Rules
• Formulas

Your revision must involve a strategy that helps you not only learn these various areas of business, but to take it to the next step and attach these to applications in the business world to illustrate that you understand how they are used and what they are intended to achieve. Making these connections scores well on an exam, but the association aspect of this provides a way to more easily recall a theory, definition, or rule.

Here are 5 top tips for revising for a business exam that you can do on your own, with a study partner, or a with a study group:

• Use a study chart that you can put on a large piece of paper or white board, adding various theories on one side, and then a real-world application on the other. This emulates an often-used process in business.
• Create a mind map on a large paper as is often used in a business brainstorming meeting. Put the main idea in the middle bubble and then draw spokes out from the bubble with related topics and applications.
• Give the business concepts to someone else, preferably someone who may not be familiar with the information so they can ask you a lot of questions. By explaining the concept and providing real-world examples of its application to someone else, you reaffirm your own understanding.
• If you have time, interview or talk to people in the business fields that you are revising for – these discussions will give your brain a different way to process what you are learning and help you to make connections between what you are reading and revising and what really happens in relation to those ideas.
• Refer to stories in the media, case studies, and magazine articles for further ways to test what you are revising for your exam, including looking for how the concepts you need to understand are being used in local, national, and global business environment.