For 40 years, I have told my students that, the day before their exam they should pack some sandwiches and a can of drink, and go for walk in a high and windy place, with a friend. Forget all the exam tension, ensure that they are fit, and give all the knowledge they have acquired time to sort itself out.

Yet when I come in on an exam morning about 7am to check on everything, I invariably find all the students sprawled over the stairs, red-eyed and yawning, in a cloud of (illegal) cigarette smoke, poring over their notebooks. Some of them have been there almost all night. I can't think of a better way to reduce your efficiency, and indeed some fall asleep during the exam.

If you must revise at the last minute, the evening before would be better, so that you will be fresh in the morning.

John Anderson, Warsaw, Poland

Neither. It's too late by then. If you don't know it by the night before the exam, there's nothing you can do apart from try to relax a bit and rely on all the hard work you've done before. (You have done all the work before, I hope)

Gail Volans, Brean, Somerset, UK

Cramming for an exam by swotting frantically up to the time one enters the exam room certainly suggests that something is seriously wrong. However, there not only is more than one way to skin a cat, but some cats are better skinned in different ways. Some subjects are cramming subjects, including subjects that their professors would insist to be material for intellectual comprehension rather than memorisation, while the exams they set are the purest cram-work.

Students also differ, not only in industry and application, and not only in aptitude, comprehension, and mental retention. There is little point to telling all the others how YOU did well and therefore they will do well the same way, when your way of doing things fits your mind and attitudes. You should have learned all the material long before? Nice. That should render it unnecessary to do any last minute revision? Pull the other one! For most minds there is nothing that triggers useful recollection of facts, and mental organisation of vital principles and key points, better than that last-minute skim through the notes or books.

Then there are some subjects and examiners that involve facts, values and formulae that you are not allowed to take into the room with you. There are some movements afoot to eliminate those by permitting the student to take notes into the exam room, but those are not universal, partly because it takes a lot harder work on the part of the examiners to set effective open book exams. Anyway, for such exams, if you are not one of the photographic memory brigade, a useful trick is to prepare a list of the crucial values that you memorise in the last few minutes, discard on the way in, write down what you have memorised before reading the paper, and then settle down to writing the exam.

Never mind the other folks; make sure you understand your subject and your own talents and weaknesses, and adapt your strategy to suit. Whatever else you do, that is likely to work best on a basis of long, sensible preparation.

If you can’t do that, then drop it and do something else with your life.