Setting Goals for Your Exams

• Exam goals relate to how well you want or need to do in a course.


• You might want to aim for the highest marks possible to achieve a high grade grade point average (GPA) overall, or for specific courses that are crucial to advancement through your degree. You might decide that a high grade is not a priority in some courses (such as electives).


• So how does exam goal-setting work?


• First, you need to work out how many marks each assessment task contributes to the total score for a course. In the example below, you can see that the continuing or cumulative assessment tasks - the assessment done throughout the semester - are worth 60% of the course. This means that if, like Sue, you do really well at these assignments, you can walk into the exam confident.


• Alex on the other hand, hasn't done so well on his continuing assessment tasks. He needs at least 23 out of 40 to get a total of more than 50 to pass the course. This means he'll need to put in a much better performance than he has to date, which puts more pressure on this exam.

*See Handy Hint in the case of a compulsory pass

If you're struggling with a heavy load, or running out of time to study for exams, you can use exam goal-setting to work out which courses to focus more effort on in the lead-up to exams.