Before an exam, do you think it is better to prepare for a long time or only for a few days?

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Before an exam, do you think it is better to prepare for a long time or only for a few days?

Submitted by tomkien on Mon, 05/04/2015 - 12:47

I think it is better to prepare for a long time before an exam because of the three reasons.

Firstly, a long preparation would increase the chance of doing well in the exam. Highly competitive exams require candidates to have a very thorough understanding to get good marks. It is obvious that all knowledge of a course can not be acquired only in a few days. To revise for the exam extensively, candidates need to go through a lengthy process by reviewing lessons, reading books, doing exercises. The more types of exercises or questions they practise, the higher chances they might encounter, as well as doing them well in the exam.

Secondly, the exam formats are often organized to test a wide range of candidates' abilities. Beside the knowledge, they require the candidates to have good skills to do well in the exam. These skills can not be developed only for a few days. The candidates need to sharpen them for a long time. For example: TOEFL consists of four parts to test the candidates' skills of using English in reading, speaking, listening, writing. To get a high score, the candidates who are not using English as their first language can not master their skills in some days. They have to spend many months on learning and training English.

Finally, a long preparation would help us increase our knowledge, which is one of the most important goal of studying. We have enough time to revise completely for the knowledge taught in a course. Certainly, not all of them would appear in the exam but it would be useful in other situations. For example: Preparing for TOEFL would also help improving our command of English after the exam. That would be useful for us to use English in our real-life situations such as: working with foreigners or traveling abroad. So it is certainly worth a try.

For these above reasons, I strongly believe that we should prepare for a long time before an exam. We need to devote much time to having good skills and enough knowledge to pass the exam, as well as increasing our knowledge after the exam. Hard work leads to success as the saying goes.

Votes
Average: 8 (1 vote)
Essay Categories
Independent TOEFL Writing

Comments

flaws:
Sentence Length SD: 4.983 7.5

"Sentence Length SD is low" means that the essay contains lots of sentences with the similar length. More sentences varieties wanted.

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 24 in 30
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 22 15
No. of Words: 368 350
No. of Characters: 1680 1500
No. of Different Words: 176 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.38 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.565 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.485 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 112 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 83 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 52 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 39 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.727 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 4.983 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.591 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.316 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.507 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.147 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5

'will' is for future tense.

'would' is the past tense form of 'will'. Because it is a past tense it is used:

to talk about the past.
to talk about hypotheses – things that are imagined rather than true.
for politeness.

So if this sentence is for hypotheses, then you can use 'would', if you want to use it for future, 'will' is OK too.

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'Could' is the past tense of 'can', it can also refer to something that you believe is likely to be true or to happen, or refer to something you wish to have or do but that is not possible.
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In conclusion: you can use all of them in the view of grammar.