Top Tips for the Day of Your MCA Oral Exam

The big day is fast approaching, the oral exam looms in the distance and the tension is building. You begin to feel overwhelmed. Don’t worry, we’ve got you! Here are our three top tips for the last 24 hours leading up to the exam.

1) Stop studying the afternoon before the exam.

At some point, you simply need to stop revising. You’ve put a huge amount of work in and at this point, working late into the night is not going to help. In fact, it’s likely to make things a lot worse.

So, the afternoon or evening before the exam, you need to try to stop studying and relax. Go for a walk, walk the dog, exercise, go for dinner; do anything that you can to try to separate your mind from the exam and to get a good night’s sleep.

2) Try not to study the morning of the oral exam.

You’ve woken up and you know you have the exam that day. Your instinct might be to keep studying until the last second, but try your hardest to have a relaxed cup of tea or coffee, read the newspaper, go for another walk or watch some TV. Basically do whatever you can to try and remain relaxed.

If you think of something and you just want to check quickly, that’s okay but don’t go down the rabbit hole of frantic last-minute revision. By this point, it’s not going to help you and getting into a panic certainly won’t. You just need to chill out and enjoy the few hours that you have before the exam as much as you can.

3) You’ve made a mistake, but you haven’t failed.

The examiner is trying to assess holistically whether you’re a good enough candidate. They will not be purposely trying to trip you up and fail you. They are also not expecting you to get everything perfectly right.

You will make a mistake in your MCA oral exam, so it’s best to come to terms with it now. The important thing is not whether you make a mistake but what you do afterwards. If you hang onto it, panic and fear that you have just failed, that can cause a downward spiral from which you won’t recover.

The best approach is to correct yourself immediately (if you know the right answer) and, either way, try your hardest to put that mistake behind you. Take the next question as if it was a brand new exam and give it your best shot. You haven’t failed yet!