No matter how many tests I’ve taken, I still get anxious the night before an exam. In school I never pulled an all-nighter, believing that it was better to get a good night’s sleep and that anything I crammed into my cranium late the night before an exam wouldn’t stay with me after I’d handed in my bluebook. But, of course, memorizing the names of the 12 cranial nerves by the memory jogger, “On Old Olympus’s Towering Top A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops,” seems a lot less useful or important to me today than loading the “airspeeds for normal operations” from the Pilot’s Operating Handbook (POH) into my random-access memory.
But preparing for an exam and ultimately going one-on-one with an examiner is an excellent way to upgrade the data and make sure it’s still retrievable. Periodically exposing yourself to evaluation is a great way to fight off the complacency that is bred by routine.
