Exam Day Tips: What to Do the Night Before & Morning Of

Everything you have revised over the past weeks or months comes down to how you perform in the exam room. The night before and the morning of your exam are not the time to cram more content. They are the time to protect the preparation you have already done and give yourself the best possible conditions to perform on the day.

This guide covers exactly what to do in the final eighteen hours before an exam: what to do with your evening, how to handle the morning, and what to do once you are in the exam room itself. Most of it is straightforward. What makes it worth reading is that students who follow it consistently outperform students of equivalent preparation who ignore it.

The Night Before Your Exam

Stop revising by early evening

The single most important thing you can do the night before an exam is stop revising at a reasonable hour. For most students, stopping by 7pm or 8pm and spending the rest of the evening doing something genuinely relaxing produces better results than revising until midnight.

There are two reasons for this. First, new information learned in the final hours before sleep is poorly consolidated compared to information learned earlier and given time to process. You are unlikely to retain anything meaningful from late-night cramming, and the anxiety it creates can actively harm your performance. Second, sleep itself is when your brain consolidates everything you have already learned. Cutting into it to revise is trading long-term memory for short-term exposure.

If you feel you absolutely must do some revision in the evening, limit it to a light review of key facts, formulae, or topic summaries you already know. This is reinforcement, not cramming. Set a hard stop time and stick to it.

Prepare everything you need before you go to bed

Do not leave practical preparation for the morning. The morning of an exam is not the time to be searching for your student ID, realising your calculator battery is flat, or working out which bus to catch. Do all of it the night before.

Eat a proper meal in the evening

A good evening meal the night before an exam matters more than most students realise. Avoid anything very heavy that might disrupt your sleep, but make sure you eat a proper meal rather than snacking. Going to bed hungry or with unstable blood sugar affects sleep quality and, in turn, cognitive performance the following morning.

Wind down deliberately

Anxiety the night before an exam is normal. What varies is how students manage it. The habits that consistently support better sleep before exams include:

• Putting your phone away at least an hour before bed, or switching it to do not disturb
• Doing something that genuinely relaxes you: watching something easy, reading, listening to music, a short walk
• Avoiding conversations that increase anxiety, including those with friends about how much they have or have not revised
• Writing down any remaining concerns on paper before bed as a way of externalising them rather than replaying them mentally

Prioritise sleep above everything else

Aim for 8 to 9 hours. This is not a luxury. Sleep deprivation measurably impairs working memory, attention, and the ability to retrieve information under pressure, which are precisely the cognitive functions exam performance depends on. A student who goes into an exam having slept well and revised moderately will consistently outperform a student who has stayed up all night cramming.

If you struggle to fall asleep due to anxiety, focus on keeping your body still and your breathing slow rather than trying to force sleep. The rest alone has value even if sleep takes time to arrive.

Your Night-Before Timeline

The Morning of Your Exam

Give yourself more time than you think you need

Rushing on exam morning creates stress that follows you into the exam room and takes time to dissipate once you are there. Set your alarm so that you have enough time to wake up properly, eat breakfast, travel without rushing, and arrive at school with time to spare before you need to go in.

For most students, arriving 15 to 20 minutes before the exam starts is about right. Arriving much earlier can increase anxiety as you wait; arriving late is simply not an option.

Eat breakfast

This is one of the most consistent findings in exam performance research: students who eat breakfast perform better than those who do not. You do not need anything elaborate. Something with slow-release energy is ideal: porridge, eggs, wholegrain toast, or a combination. Avoid very sugary foods that produce a spike and then a drop in blood sugar mid-exam.

If you genuinely cannot eat before exams due to nerves, try something small: a banana, a handful of nuts, or a glass of milk. Something is significantly better than nothing.

Limit your phone use in the morning

Group chats and social media in the hour before an exam are reliably anxiety-inducing. Reading about what other students have or have not revised, encountering predictions about what will come up, or simply absorbing general stress from your peer group are all things that will make you worse at the exam, not better. Put your phone away after your alarm and do not pick it up again until after the exam.

Do a brief, calm review if it helps

Some students find that reading through a single page of key notes over breakfast helps them feel settled and focused. If this works for you, do it. If reviewing notes in the morning makes you panic about what you have not covered, skip it entirely and trust your preparation. Know which type of person you are and act accordingly.

Talk to friends carefully

Conversations with classmates outside the exam hall immediately before an exam can be helpful or harmful depending on what is said. Avoid any conversation that involves comparing how much you have revised, predicting what will come up, or expressing significant anxiety. If your friends are in this mode, it is entirely reasonable to step away and spend the last few minutes quietly on your own.

Your Morning-Of Timeline

In the Exam Room

Once you are sitting down and the paper is in front of you, the preparation is done. Everything from here is execution.

Read the instructions before you start writing

Take 60 seconds to read the front of the paper. Check how many questions there are, whether there are sections, and whether any questions are optional. Students who begin writing without reading the instructions occasionally miss a section entirely or attempt the wrong questions. Sixty seconds of reading prevents this.

Read each question twice before answering

Misreading a question is one of the most common and most avoidable sources of lost marks. Read the question once to understand what it is asking. Underline the command word and the focus. Then read it again before you begin writing. This takes ten seconds per question and regularly prevents answers that address the wrong thing entirely.

Manage your time from the start

Before you write anything, quickly divide the exam time by the marks or questions available and get a rough sense of how long each section or question should take. In a 90-minute paper worth 90 marks, each mark is roughly a minute. In essay-based subjects, allocate time to planning as well as writing. Check the clock at the halfway point of the exam and adjust your pace if needed.

Attempt every question

Never leave a question blank. An attempted answer can earn marks. A blank answer cannot. If you are stuck on a question, write whatever you know that is relevant, even if it is incomplete. Then move on and come back if time allows. Spending ten minutes frozen on one question while leaving three others unattempted is a reliable way to lose more marks than the stuck question was worth.

Show your working

In Maths, Science, and any subject with calculation questions, show every step of your working. A wrong final answer with correct working earns method marks. A bare wrong answer earns nothing. Even in subjects where working is not explicitly required, showing your reasoning helps the examiner follow your thinking and can earn partial credit where the full answer is incomplete.

Use any remaining time well

If you finish before time is called, do not sit passively. Read back through your answers and check for anything you can improve, correct, or expand. Check that you have not misread any questions. In Maths and Science, verify calculations by substituting your answer back into the original equation. Even two or three minutes of careful checking regularly recovers marks.

Exam Day: What to Do and What to Avoid

When	Do	Avoid
Night before	Stop revising early, prepare your bag, eat well, wind down, sleep 8 to 9 hours	Late-night cramming, social media, anxiety-inducing conversations, poor sleep
Morning of	Eat breakfast, give yourself time, arrive early, brief calm review if it helps	Rushing, skipping breakfast, checking your phone, stressful pre-exam conversations
In the exam	Read instructions, read each question twice, manage time, attempt everything, show working, check at the end	Starting without reading, leaving blanks, spending too long on one question, not checking