talkmagic.co.uk

Has anyone heard of this? I think Dee Christopher has put out quite a few good things, but when the tagline goes like "I'm here to help you discover the REAL secrets to passing exams. " I'm being a bit skeptic. I can't really see how there is a secret to passing exams, since it's pretty straightforward how you should achieve that. But since I am a student and could be interested in how to enhance your ways of studiyng, I'm curious to see if there should be useful advice in this? It's probably not a holy grail, and it's only 6.95 gbp, so I might pick it up anyway, I just wanted to see if anyone had any info.

You can find it here:

http://www.mindlapse.net/pages/pass-exams" target="_blank

Nick

No idea about this one Nick but there are several different ways of preparing for exams. One I found to be useful was to make crib sheets, the sort you try and use to cheat your way through the exam. Spend a lot of time condensing the essential information into as few headings and notes as possible, rewrite and check the contents then, the night before the exam, you burn them! By then you've mentally programmed yourself with the basic bullet points and should be able to remember more than enough to pass an exam. Easy enough to expand and waffle on those basic notes as you write the exam.

Doesn't work for all subject of course but worth a try.

Hey Mandrake, and thanks for your reply.
It's not that I've so far had any problems with passing exams, I was just wondering if this had any "sauce" in it. I'm already familiar with the loci system and chaining etc. So so far I'm good, and thanks for your advice.

Yeah sounds very dubious to me. To pass exams you need to (1) learn the relevant information for the exam; and (2) be able to apply that knowledge to answer a problem, discuss an issue, etc. Memory techniques are useful but they aren't a substitute for actually understanding what you're learning about, as otherwise you can't apply the knowledge effectively to the questions in the exam.

Having said that, a book I found useful for exams was Tony Buzan's Mind Maps. The effectiveness and the application of mind maps is very overstated in the book - he describes them as 'a swiss army knife for the brain' - but they are a useful way of clarifying information. I was really struggling with some of my law exam finals on wills and probate, and making mind maps for revision really did help to make sense of the various rules and steps involved.

Good luck!

There are people who are just really bad at taking tests and it is psychological. They know the info, they know how to apply it but for some reason in an exam situation they just can't perform.

Many of these types of exam help items are geared towards these people. How to relax, put things in perspective. how to prepare in the least stressful way or environment.

Also many tests are standardized and there are set ways one can prepare to make things easier. Will everyone find these useful? No. Are they for everyone? No. Are there an abundance of scams are the market targeted to this segment of the population? You betcha. When fear is involved there is somebody ready to pounce and take advantage.

Go the the library of your school they usually have all sorts of 'study aids' that can help. Personally I have found that learning these methods are more difficult and time consuming then the exams themselves. But then I'm a sociologist by education so every answer I had to give was pretty much..."well it depends on the situation and the perspective of those involved, but if we use the Marxian dialect to present all sides of the situation we can usually find, not only the root cause but a plausable reason and a workable solution to reach a satisfactory result" my other favourite answer was. "For this we must take the Nietchian approach and stare into the problem until it consumes us and we can turn it into a boiling pit of lava that turns inside our gut until we all get sick and die!" Okay never used that last one but I should have.

Hey Guys,

The pass-exams package I've put up is some ebooks that I've sourced and bought resell rights to - that's why I can sell it so cheap, It's a pitch package for the public, not a magician's product. That's also why I've kept it separate to the store page where all the magician's products are!

There's some good content in the package for anyone interested in time management, speed reading, memory techniques etc. though, so I threw out a mailer about it yesterday. The ad copy I've used covers most of the stuff in the package, it's an all round package to teach people some skills that could help them take in information they're learning more efficiently, recall it under pressure and the like.

It'll eventually have it's own site as I've invested time and money into the idea as a little sideline business, but with all the students going back to uni now, I figured I'd put it up on my site for the time being!

Hope that clears up any confusion!

Rock 'n' Roll,
DC

It's certainly changed since I were knee high to a grasshopper! When I was doing O levels and then college exams, nobody though to teach us how to sit an exam. The assumption was that regurgitating as much knowledge as possible would be enough. There was no mention of time management, no concept of how to approach an exam, other than a few hints and tips by the decent lecturers who recognised this as a problem which needed to be removed.

This is the sort of thing that preys on vunerable people, or people at a stressful time in their lives.

How to get your wife/lover back
How to stop your divorce
How to get out of debt
How to lose a dress size in 6 weeks
How to stop smoking

We all know the answers to each question, but when desparate we clutch at straws. An ebook may be just what we think we need but the only problems they solve are the author's cash-flow problems.