Having witnessed this pressure and overcome her own childhood exam stress, Verity Aylward, the head of history at Sha Tin College, set out to smash the myth that spending hours reading notes is the key to achieving good grades. Instead, she argues in her book, Mind Explosion: Max Out Your Brain For Exam Success, achieving good grades is as much about having a positive mindset and a balanced life as knowing your material.

Published last month, the book is based on her 10 years' teaching experience, which includes stints at an Orthodox Jewish school in London and an Arabic Indian school in Abu Dhabi. It stresses the importance of having a positive mindset and understanding how the brain works.

'If students don't have a mindset for success, they don't have concentration, focus and imagination,' Ms Aylward said. 'There's a lot of myths out there about how they should revise .... that I thought they really needed to challenge.'

Ms Aylward said students around the world were similar in that they were all products of their own environment.

'In Hong Kong there's definitely much more commitment to learning and to do well in exams but it's not necessarily in the right way,' she said. 'I think sometimes the pressure is too much.'

Ms Aylward said students often believed that revision was all about memorising as much as possible, trying to predict the exam question and then regurgitating information. However, she said, students needed to be able to apply what they had learnt, especially now that exams were changing and universities were putting more emphasis on thinking skills.

One of the prevailing myths was the idea that students must spend hours studying notes.

'Perhaps it's a generational thing with parents that if your child is not revising for four hours a night something must be wrong, but your child needs regular breaks and they need to look after their health in order to retain information and relearn it properly for the exam.'

This pressure brought out competition between students, which was not always healthy, Ms Aylward said.

'That sort of environment can be good but it can be bad, and we don't want to neglect these students for whom it doesn't work. I do think a lot of our students are out of balance.'

Inspired by the Chinese yin-yang symbol, Ms Aylward said she would like to see students put more effort into achieving a balanced life by also focusing on nutrition, exercise and sleep.

Although Hong Kong students achieved impressive results, Ms Aylward suggested they could achieve even more by taking a holistic approach. 'My message is, let's get back to balance. Let's get yin-yang about revision.'

The first part of her book is devoted to creating a 'mindset for success'. Ms Aylward said it was now more widely accepted that how students felt about themselves and their own abilities could have a massive impact on their learning.

'It's not just genetics, not just your IQ. There's much more to it than that. It's about application and students can learn to be great in exams.'

She acknowledged that there was still fear surrounding exams and that for some students, having sweaty palms and a 'brain freeze' were real problems.

'When you really talk to students and understand why they're scared, you learn exams are frightening and probably, in Hong Kong, there's a reluctance to acknowledge that.'

The second part of the book is devoted to helping students understand how the brain works. 'The students who go into exams clogged up with knowledge and just regurgitate it won't achieve as well as a student who's identified how their brain learns.'

Although a survey of Sha Tin College students found they were knowledgeable about how their brain worked and could recognise whether they were visual or auditory learners, Ms Aylward said when asked how they revised, most said they simply wrote notes.

She said auditory learners could put their information on tapes or use podcasts, while visual learners could use mind maps, condense their notes into graphs and tables or use flashcards. She said studies had shown that students learned extremely well through animation.

Ms Aylward said alpha brain waves circulated in the brain when a person was relaxed.

'Relaxation is the best way to get a peak learning state because you open the pathways between the right and left sides of the brain. You can count on that naturally in the mornings but you can also put yourself into that state through forms of relaxation like yoga.'

She believes all schools should introduce yoga classes.

When it comes to practical tips for preparing for exams, Ms Aylward advises students to consolidate their information, take advantage of online resources, practice exam questions, and create a revision timetable and stick to it.

She advises students to accept that stress is a normal part of life, to remember that they are not the only ones going through it, and to accept that often you need to fail before you can succeed.

'I flunked all my mocks and yet I came through in the end because I learned to identify my strengths and weaknesses, and learned to be honest with myself.'

Ms Aylward encourages students to set goals for the short, medium and long-term, and to put exams into perspective.

'I express to students how fortunate they are, to have an attitude for gratitude. When you think about how many young people in this world would do anything for the privilege that these students have, it's really sobering, but I do think that has quite an impact on students when they start to acknowledge that.'

Unsurprisingly, Ms Aylward advises against cramming but acknowledges that even the best intentions can go haywire.

'It has happened to me before,' she admits. 'It's happened to everybody when you realise you didn't cover a topic properly in your revision. The most important thing is to relax. When your brain is in that peak learning state, when you're calm, that's when you can tap into your creative side.'

Ms Aylward said stress could be a good thing but students needed the tools to handle it and parents as well as students needed to change their attitude towards exam preparation.

'At the end of the day we're talking about young people, children, and we need to be helping them through those fears.'

Sha Tin College has bought a set of the books for Year 11 students and the English version of the book, which comes with a pack for teachers and parents, is available in local bookstores. Ms Aylward is hoping to get a Chinese version into local schools.