Exam study tips (Part I)

Watch the rest of the parts here.

Your Engineering Career -- Tour

Study Abroad Preparation tips for Third Year Engineering Students

How to pass freshman engineering

Advisory Content: Some of the content on the page may be offensive to some teens. Highly not recommended for minors or early teens. by mblumber

If you ask most people who have gone though it about their freshman year of college, they will tell you that the biggest challenges they faced weren't in the classroom. Moving away from home and living on your own is a very important part of growing up. Even those who commute from home to college will tell you that they spent most of their freshman year trying to come to terms with being out of high school and being in the adult world.

With that said, passing freshman engineering requires that the student adjust to college in weeks, not months. At any decent engineering school, the work becomes overwhelming by the third week of class. If you're not prepared to keep up, you might as well change majors now and save yourself the pain. If you're willing to constantly be doing homework or studying while everyone else is drinking, smoking, and having sex with random girls, then keep reading.

The first key to surviving your freshman year of engineering is to never get behind. Most classes are fast paced and each successive concept builds on the previous. Once someone gets behind, then it becomes more and more difficult to catch up as each successive topic will make less and less sense. If you feel lost, get help immediately. Most upperclassmen will agree to help you. If not, go to your TA or professor. They will point you in the right direction.

Secondly, don't study hard, study smart. Translation: 3 hours of studying while on Instant Messenger, surfing the web, reading e-mail, and talking on the phone is significantly less valuable than 15 minutes of true studying. When I say true studying, I mean with the TV, phone, e-mail, etc. turned off. It is also valuable to try to make up problems for yourself and then solve them without getting help from anyone else. Group studying can also be extremely helpful, if you yourself have studied beforehand and the group stays on-topic.

Here's a simple one: Go to class! . I really wish that I didn't have to say that because it's so obvious. If you don't attend lecture, then you have no idea what the professor is emphasizing and you'll probably end up studying something that he didn't cover, or worse, leave out something that he spent 45 minutes talking about, saying things like "this is the most important topic of today" and the like. It's crazy how transparent some teachers are about what they will be testing on.

Finally, don't ever underestimate the value of a good night's sleep. Staying up all night studying for tests can seem appealing, but in reality you're better off with a clear rested head. I cannot begin to describe the number of mistakes one makes on tests when he hasn't slept in a while.

So there's my advice. Good luck. If I could get though freshman year, you can too. 

- Mblumber was an Electrical Engineering Senior at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He wrote essays on E2 when he was supposed to be studying. Article extracted from: http://everything2.com/title/How+to+pass+freshman+engineering -

Discover why to Study Engineering

How to Study for Physics, Engineering, and Mathematics Classes in College

- Stevens F. Johnson -

Ask yourself this question. "How do I study for a class? More precisely, how do I get an A, or just a good grade (well, OK, a passing grade) for a class?" Here is one answer:

"Studying? What studying? All I need to do is commit to memory everything the Instructor said in class, what is printed in the textbook, listed on the syllabus, outlined in the handouts, attempted in the laboratory experiments, and rumored to be on old exams (all on the night before an exam). I then merely regurgitate it on the relevant exams. Wait. That's too much effort, unless I'm going for a top-of-the-class A+ (and who needs that?). For an A, I need only an A-. That means I can reduce my effort by 10%, mostly on attendance of the class lecture. Even better would be a 20% cut, that way I can skip the Monday morning or Friday afternoon classes, but make up for it by laughing loudly at the Instructor's jokes and stories or volunteering what I think are coherent and relevant questions in class when I do attend. A grade of B for the course is even easier, since then I can neglect to do a few homework assignments, miss a lab or two, not to mention an exam, or take off a whole week or more for deer hunting or that special October (February) vacation. And a B still looks almost as good on a transcript, I hear. On the other hand, that still requires a lot of effort. A C will let me count that class for the Major, enough to graduate. Anyway, it's worked before, it'll work again. Right?"

All right, I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea. Even so, if I were to reply to the above paragraph, I would say ...

"WRONG! Not in a Physics, Engineering, or Mathematics class (and a lot of other courses, too), at least not if the Instructor has any professional integrity with respect to her teaching and her evaluation of students' understanding of and skill in the subject. (I'm not exaggerating now.) There is not one thing correct in that Paragraph that would help you get a passing Grade, let alone acquire an Understanding of the Subject of that Class."

Does my response come as a shock to you? It certainly would be a surprise to a lot of college students today. (Note: I'm not talking about cheating or behavior unbecoming a serious student. That is a question of Ethics, the topic of a different essay.) There are at least eight Wrong Ideas about studying in that paragraph. I will address all of them, in no particular order. Along the way, I'll be addressing the most common Complaint that I, and most other Science Instructors, have received over the years from Non-Science Majors taking a Lib Ed Science class: "I get A's and B's in all my other classes, but I'm struggling to get a C in this class," or "This is the hardest class I've ever had!"

Memorization?

An outright attempt to memorize this stuff will put anyone to sleep.

Memorization will get you Nowhere in Science, for several reasons. The most obvious reason is there is simply too much to memorize; Any attempt at even a small fraction of it will just get you confused and won't lead to Understanding anyway. Successful intimate familiarity will come naturally from Practice, not from rote memory. After a dozen or so attempts at problems that involve having to solve for the roots of a Quadratic Equation, for example, you will have developed a level of comfort that will be, for all practical purposes, an Effective Memorization of the solution to the quadratic equation "a x-squared plus b x plus c equals zero:" "x equals negative-b plus-or-minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a."

You may thinking, "Yeah, right. That's easy for you to say. You've been using this formula for years, and it's your business to know it. I'm just an undergraduate hoping to graduate someday." Of course it's my business (and it's decades, not years). But it is your business, too, if you want to graduate with a degree in Physics, Engineering, or Mathematics. More to the point, I had the formula effectively memorized before the end of my Junior year in High School. It was the practical result of many hours of Practice at using it. What do we call those hours of practicing? Studying. Lots of Studying. How much Studying? That is the next subject I will address. But first ...

I want to mention a Caveat to my injunction against rote memorization. There are branches of the Natural Sciences that do require a level of memorization higher than for Physics, Engineering, and Mathematics. Chemistry and the Life Sciences typically have a large upfront Vocabulary that must be mastered early before moving deeper into their respective fields. However, Effective Memorization techniques are just as good for them as for Physics. Instead of just memorizing a list of the skeletal bones of the human body, draw the relative location and size of each bone, and label it, as you verbally list all of them, for example. If you have to peek at the text occasionally while doing this, that's OK. What you would be doing is not memorization, but Studying.

I Failed A Subject...What Now?

Inevitably, some students fail subjects. Some fail a lot, others fail one. Some fail for unavoidable reasons, others fail because they are bone lazy or incapable (not the same thing). Regardless, once a student fails a subject they then need to work out the consequences.

If you fail a subject that is a prerequisite for another subject it is VERY unlikely that you will be given a prerequisite waiver to take the next subject. We have tried this in the past and for the majority of students the result is continued failure and a miserably weak degree if they do manage to pass. In most cases you will simply need to wait to pass the first subject before taking the second. Of course you can study subjects that don't have prerequisites, but there will be a limit to how much of this you can do.

There is very little room in the Engineering program to take extra subjects because we have almost zero block mode subjects or multi-semester offerings. This means that to catch up your degree you will probably need to take an overload (five subjects in a semester) sometime. This will only be allowed if you have demonstrated adequate academic capacity in the previous semester by getting four grades of Credit or better - so you will need to improve your game if you have already failed a subject.

The more logical alternative for most students is to be honest about why they have failed a subject (or more) and to accept that a) they need to improve as a student, and b) they may need to take an extra semester or two to complete their degree. If this is accepted then often we can plan a new sequence of subjects that gives you a lighter load in most semesters while getting your life and your academic skills in order ... of course some students don't learn how to be a 'better' student and will simply continue to abuse every opportunity and fail more subjects - they will leave by another door.

If you have failed subjects then you are likely to need to talk to me to ensure that you have a forward-looking study plan that is achievable. All students should complete, and maintain, a "Pathway to Completion" spreadsheet. These are found in Documents>Managing your degree in the Engineering Students community in LearnJCU. There is a new version for students who enrolled in 2010, so everyone should be able to fill in a valid pathway. There will be some errors in the spreadsheet due to the amount of data involved and the recent changes to most degrees, but they are more right than wrong.

If you make an appointment to see me, make sure that you have completed a pathway to completion and emailed me copy (or bring the electronic form with you).

- Message from Mr. Phil. Turner, The Associate Dean of Engineering & Science at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia -