'STUDY' - the devotion of time and thought to acquiring information in pursuit of some branch of knowledge.
'Revision' - re-visiting work learnt or done to improve one's familiarity with it.
In the slew of articles currently aimed at panic-stricken examination candidates, various recipes are recommended for success.
Several advocate that they ought to have spent their Easter holidays revising for seven hours a day.
Cue hollow and hysterical laughter on the part of those who didn't. It's a bit late now.
'Revision', in practice, is learning from scratch stuff you were taught, but you weren't listening to at the time because you were too busy doodling, daydreaming, acting the maggot or - in this day and age - texting under the desk and coughing to disguise the beep of 'send'.
Now, eleventh-hour paralysis of the brain has set in, exacerbated by heartfelt remorse and blind terror at the sheer physical and mental impossibility of covering lost ground in the rapidly dwindling time left available and the inexorable approach of the days of reckoning.
Proof positive, were it needed, that you have failed to make the transition from dependent spoon-fed pupil to mature self-motivated student and should be ashamed of yourself.
So, cold comfort there then.
What a load of psychological hoohah surrounds our examination candidates these days.
Are our snowflakes getting enough sleep? Eating healthily? Taking vitamin supplements? Sufficiently hydrated?
Home ought to be an anxiety-free, confidence-boosting zone, offering peace and solitude for study, with solicitous parents refraining from pressurising criticism, passing judgment or saying so much as "boo" to them in case they fall apart.
Even in this optimum domestic climate exam success cannot be assured.
A revision timetable is a theoretical document with no guarantee it will be adhered to.
In my dim recollection - oh, so long ago... - I recall focusing for comfort on the stuff I already knew sooner than tackle the stuff I didn't, or found difficult.
I was horrified to read on a current list of approved study tips, this gem: 'Choose and record your revision music.'
Music is a fine accompaniment to creativity but not, in my opinion, to the memorising or absorption of facts - and a closed bedroom door palpitating with pop is a sign there's nothing much being learned behind it.
Music is a fine accompaniment to creativity but not, in my opinion, to the memorising or absorption of facts - and a closed bedroom door palpitating with pop is a sign there's nothing much being learned behind it
Add to that the naive parents' presumption that silence equals commitment to the task in hand.
Not necessarily so. The candidate is more than likely texting or tweeting friends and fellow-students to exchange anxieties, or surfing the net for videos of dogs doing daft things as a displacement activity or deferral technique.
Far be it for me to dish out advice to the current generation of examinees, but there is only one fail-safe recipe for exam success, so far unmentioned by experts.
It is this: in the course of each academic year attend all classes, listen attentively, absorb, make notes, retain information; work consistently and assiduously, meeting assignment deadlines; read copiously around the subject and address weaknesses as soon as they arise - though I never got the hang of working out the square root... Nor subsequently ever needed to.
Adhere scrupulously to all these principles and you will be the pride of your parents, the toast of your tutors and astoundingly unpopular among your peers - but your framed honours certificates will make a lovely feature wall.
However, these are counsels of perfection and I don't know anybody who adhered to them who was any sort of fun.
Were my contemporaries and I paragons of rectitude? With the exception of a studious few, far from it.
Hours were frittered away protesting our ignorance, lamenting our inadequacies, resolving to put our shoulders to the educational wheel. Starting tomorrow. Maybe...
I know it bred in me a pathological incapacity to do anything in time - a trait that affects me to the present day.
And so we trailed, quaking and guilt-ridden, sleep-deprived, dehydrated and vitamin deficient, into the examination hall after a succession of frenetic all-nighters fuelled on black coffee and Mrs Ward's Dundee cake, waiting in trepidation for the command: "You may now turn over your examination papers."
