How to Pass Courses at UNISA

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Studying at university is really difficult compared to studying in high school, for one the content is more difficult to understand and the quantity is usually more when compared to high school. In high school we are mostly spoon fed, so if you had good teachers and you paid attention passing was fairly easy. In university you have to be more independent and disciplined, normal varsity where you have to attend lectures and tutorials is hard enough but UNISA is a different story because you set your own study pace and it’s up to you whether you attend lectures if they are available at a Unisa campus near you. You are basically your own teacher and are responsible for yourself, there is no one checking if you are studying and no one cares if you are far behind schedule. Studying at Unisa will force you to learn time management, teach you to be responsible and teach you to develop the right study technique that’s best suited to you, if you want to pass and pass well that is.

4 Study Tips to Pass All Your UNISA Modules

Here are techniques that I have found to work well and produced excellent results for me and I have taught them to others including my mother who have used these techniques to gain good results at UNISA. This strategy you will find will produce good results at any institution, distance learning or at a normal full time university.

Is to start reading your study guides early as soon as you have registered and gotten your course content and start doing your assignments ahead of time. This will help you to figure out things you do not understand so that you can ask for help in understanding them while it’s still early and not right before exams. This will also help you get a better class record/ or year mark which I will discuss later.

The best way to figure out whether to buy the prescribed textbook or not is to read the study guide and assignments as early as possible and see if you can find all or most of the answers to the assignments in the study guide or if most answers are in the prescribed textbook. As students we don’t want to waste unnecessary money on books we don’t need or books that we will only use for a semester. If you find that you need a book, see if you don’t know anyone who has done the same course before who can lend you the book or visit your local library and check the availability of the book. If you need the book to answer most of the questions in the assignments then it’s a good idea to buy the book especially if you are going to use it for more than one course/module and more than one semester. Having the books necessary to answer greater than 80% of the exam will help you get a good year mark and do well in exam.

By following step 1 and 2 you should be able to achieve step 3 which is getting a high year mark or class record. This helps make it easier for you to pass the course and to get a distinction which is getting 75% and above. Usually the year mark at UNISA counts 10-20% depending on the course/module. A high year mark makes it easier to pass because let’s say if you had a year mark of 80% for a course and the year mark counts 20%, that means you already have 16 out of 20 for the course and the exam will count the other 80% of the course mark, you need to get a 50% to pass so you only need 34/80 which is roughly 43% to pass the course in the exam to pass that course. So if you have a high year mark, even if you fail the exam you can still pass the module/course.

Once you have read the study guides and prescribed books that you actually need and answered all your assignments early long before their due dates, you must make yourself a memo by downloading past papers from the past 4 semesters for semester courses and past 4 years for whole year courses and using the study guide and textbooks to find the answers to those questions. Most lecturers say do not focus on past papers but that’s often misleading as most lecturers always bring back questions from past papers, there is a limited set of questions they can ask for each module so if you have covered the past 4 years of exams or 4 semesters of exams its highly likely that the same questions will come out even if they are asked differently just to trick you. If there is a new question it still won’t be enough to hinder your progress as you would still know how to answer the rest of the exam paper. Studying past papers is much better than just reading a whole textbook over and over again, trying to cram everything in. Once you have created a memo for yourself, that is all you need to study over and over again until you understand it properly and you can explain things in your own words and can make relevant examples in essay type questions, practice as many examples again and again in calculations questions so that no matter what the question is you have experience using the method that it becomes instinctive to answer. Multiple choice at UNISA is always the same questions I have found if you cover the past four years of multiple choice and you find the answers to all of them, you will get a distinction in multiple choice only exams and you can get a total in the multiple choice section of exams where half the exam is multiple choice the other half is theory, so you would have passed already and use the theory to get an excellent mark.

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