Right about now, you're probably facing big exams. Some students are eager to demonstrate what they know – others are worried about clutching at the critical time. No matter what group you're in, mastering these test-taking strategies can help you perform better.

"Exam preparation begins on the first day of class," says Scholarships.com in Study Smart: How to Prepare for a College Exam. "Every class that you attend, assignment you complete, and contribution that you make in lecture will help prepare you for any questions that may appear on an exam in the future." They also recommend keeping your course syllabus as well as copies of papers and, especially, quizzes because "Whatever the topic, if it's significant enough to appear on a quiz alone, it will most certainly appear on your exam."

Penn State's Eberly College of Science offers detailed advice on How to prepare for exams and makes a strong case against cramming.

To keep your nerves in check, continue your regular exercise program during test prep, says University of Texas at Dallas in Self Help: Test Anxiety, and "get sufficient rest and nutrition." Work up your own practice exam, suggests University of Central Oklahoma (UCOK) in How to prepare for test. And during the test, "Breathe deeply and exhale slowly as often as possible to calm your nerves. Making a fist and releasing slowly also helps."

Taking an objective exam? UCOK recommends answering easy questions first and then dealing with difficult questions. They also offer helpful approaches for multiple choice exams — including what to do when you're tempted to second guess your answers — and essay exams.

Double check your answers before you hand in your exam, advises Plattsburgh State University of New York in How to Prepare for an Exam. Then afterward, "Learn from your incorrect answers. If your exam is returned to you for you to keep, review your incorrect answers and study those concepts in more detail."

"Academic readers have certain basic expectations about sources," says author Michael Harvey. "Violate the following expectations and you put your reader on guard. Meet them and you begin to win your reader's trust, making him more receptive to your argument."

Harvey outlines the expectations in his book The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing ((Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 57:

1. Readers Expect Quality Sources
   Needless to say, not all sources are equally credible. Peer-reviewed publications carry more weight than popular magazines. Some journals and academic presses are more prestigious than others.; Newer sources are more up-to-date, as a rule of thumb, than older ones — though some older sources and scholars achieve a kind of enduring authority, and no source should be regarded uncritically simply because it is new. Some literary editions and translations are more scholarly and reliable than others. As for the Internet, it must be treated with great care because there is no quality control for what gets posted online; not only is getting information from the Internet like drinking from a fire hose, but there's no assurance that what comes out is safe to drink. In all of this, of course, undergraduate students are at an immense disadvantage. How to compensate for lack of experience? There are three simple remedies. First, take a short course at your college library on how to conduct research. Among other things, you'll learn how to use discipline-specific, subscription-only references — a filter that will help you limit your search to creditable sources. Second, know precisely what your teacher expects for an assignment – what kinds of sources, how many, and how scholarly or popular they may be. If necessary, ask your instructor. Asking is a sign of seriousness. Finally, take advantage of two useful guides: textbooks, which cite the most important literature on a given topic in bibliographies; and scholarly journals, which include lots of reviews of current literature.
   
   
2. Readers Expect Accuracy
   When quoting a source this means getting the words exactly right: verbatim et literatim ("word for word and letter for letter"), as the Latin proverb has it. Misspelling your own name on the title page is bad, but not as bad as a typo in a quotation. Accuracy also means summarizing sources fairly and not pulling fragments out of context without adequate explanation.
   
   
3. Readers Expect Careful Attribution
   Drawing on other people's ideas is natural and inevitable in academic writing — but you must acknowledge the borrowing. Taking material from another work without acknowledgement is plagiarism, a form of theft and fraud that academics punish severely — among other reasons, because it strikes at the heart of their vocation. Plagiarism includes quoting material without signaling it as such, passing off someone else's idea as your own, and imitating the words or structure of a passage without citation (this last one means that slight changes in wording are not enough to avoid a charge of plagiarism). Even respected scholars can damage their reputations if they are discovered to have been slopping in attributing material taken from other writers. The point of citation is to make it possible for your reader to check your work. Cite your sources according to the standards in the particular discipline for which you are writing.

Find additional information on what does and doesn't need to be cited and Harvey's strong warnings against plagiarizing in The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing.

There's a staggering amount of information available on the Internet... and a lot of it is inaccurate. Online search expert Tara Calishain calls them "Internet facts" and says, "They're not necessarily true."

"They're distributed," she explains in her book Web Search Garage (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 2005), 111, "via both the Web and e-mail. There are a couple of resources that are invaluable for checking out these sites, but in addition to these resources there are three e-mail characteristics that should raise a red flag for you:

1. You're asked to forward the e-mail to everyone you know.
2. The e-mail describes a problem — like a particularly horrible virus — that if it were legitimate would be on every cable channel as an emergency news flash, including the Golf Channel.
3. The e-mail promises you some kind of reward for forwarding/replicating the mail."

Here are three of the resources Calishain recommends for checking out Internet sites and facts:

Snopes — http://www.snopes.com – "Snopes is the first site I go to when I want to check out something that someone has sent me. It's never let me down."
Vmyths — http://www.vmyths.com – Use this one, she says, to learn the truth behind virus warnings.
Evaluating information found on the Internet — http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating/index.html — This site from The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University "discusses the criteria by which scholars in most fields evaluate print information, and shows how the same criteria can be used to assess information found on the Internet."