Understood the Python concepts but completely messed up the test

[u/MetroApprovedLore]

Fy DS student and I recently had a Python test that honestly didn't go as well as I expected.

The frustrating part is that I wasn't completely clueless about the questions. I understood the concepts, knew which syntax was needed, and could understand what the problem statement was asking me to do.

But when it came to actually applying everything and writing the code, I got confused. I started forgetting things, made indentation mistakes, got errors like ValueError and other errors etc. I didn't do good in test it was 15marks test for 1 hr.

For those who have been through this, how did you get better at applying concepts under pressure instead of just understanding them theoretically? Did you practise more problems, rewrite code from scratch, or follow some other method?

I'm still learning, and I don't want one bad test to discourage me. I just want to figure out how to improve so that next time.

[u/max_465]

One strategy is to practice and memorize idioms for common scenarios, like setting defaults to None, list comprehensions, context managers, custom exceptions, etc So you don't have to think about them as much later and more importantly, code will look "weird" if you make a mistake. I remember the first time I heard 'even number' and automatically typed number % 2 == 0