• Please help the student assemble all the required materials.
  
  
• Anxiety is a normal and a healthy feeling in any such preparation. It will be good if the parent can reassure the student that the skills needed to succeed in the exams is not INTELLIGENCE as much as DISCIPLINE. The exams are aimed to see if the student has a basic understanding of the grade material. It is very common for the students to assume that you have to be very smart to succeed. Please alleviate this anxiety with some good advice.

In this stage, the student is making a plan for the study. Here, the parents can help in the following ways:

• The students are prone to make a plan that is very aggressive. Parents should contribute their suggestions and make a more reasonable plan that is in line with previous performance and the demands of the exam. A very aggressive plan is quite likely to fail. So, the parents can help in making a good plan that is acceptable.
  
  
• Students are sometimes tempted to skip the planning stage and go to execution directly. The student is prone to "making it up as you go".
  
  

  An approach such as this is very poor. This means that no one will know how many hours the student should spend every day. Any number of hours is ok in this approach as there is no plan. As a parent you wont know if the student is 80% close to the schedule or 10% close.

  Parents should insist on a plan that is previously agreed upon. The only allowed deviation should be to do more than the plan calls for, not less.

In this stage, the student is now executing the previously agreed plan. Now, there are the common pitfalls that the student will run into, which the parents can help.

• In the initial stages of the execution, the parents have to keep a close eye on the students timing and how close they follow the plan. It is a common error to skip a few sessions in the beginning with the assumption that he/she will compensate LATER. As a parent would know, "LATER" never happens. Parents should ensure that COMPENSATIONS are not allowed. Tasks for a day are for that day. Not for the next day. It is crucial to insist on this.
  
  
• It is also crucial to prepare the student to face weaknesses directly and work to improve on the areas that the student is weak. A student usually assumes that he/she is either very good or very bad. So, once she finds a problem that he/she cannot solve, he/she is very worried. We suggest that the parents help the student in making balanced assessments of the results from training. It is quite normal to find a lot of questions to be tough at the beginning and to find the same questions to be easy at the end.