Test Taking Ability: Grad School Lesson 2
I feel lucky to be a fairly good test taker. I can regurgitate facts and analyze figures and end up writing out an essay in fairly logical form. Chemistry required memorization of some constants and formulas while engineering untaught that ability by allowing me to look up that knowledge in a reference book.
There seem to be two extremes when it comes to exams - and ways to deal with them. The extreme where you have to memorize everything, and the extreme where you can't memorize everything, because the problem you will be give will look like nothing you've ever studied before or remotely recognizable to your notes.
I learned early on that working through every problem, even if I didn't know how, would often lend itself to my advantage through partial credit. It didn't matter if I had no idea what I was doing, I had to start somewhere. Some of my best lessons learned are those in which I chose poorly. When failure is just a path to learning a lesson better, it takes out some of the fear.
So before any test, I would put in enough work and studying so that I would always be able to start somewhere. This required a ton of effort and planning on my part. Because of this, I found that my ability to start somewhere on any test problem was often centered in my confidence for the work and effort that I had already put in.
This ability worked out really well for me in my first year of graduate school. We had a series of cumulative exams that had to be passed before we could be admitted as a Ph.D. candidate. These dreaded "cumes" were two hour tests on saturday mornings written about any topic of organic chemistry. There would be mechanism, synthesis, physical organic, thermodynamics, molecule characterization, you name it, and the expectations was to pass 6 out of 16 over the two years. The trick to these though, was that there was no way to study for them. You just had to go in and wish for the best.
To this day, I still feel like the ability to just start somewhere and not be worried if I was wrong, was extremely beneficial to passing these exams. Sometimes, I remember having no idea what to do, but it didn't matter, so I would just do what seemed to make sense with what I knew from my undergrad classes and what I was learning in my grad classes, and it turns out, I would often guess right. Partial credit completely worked to my advantage and I passed enough cumes in my first year to have it out of the way - which was totally awesome. Who wants to wake up on a saturday to take an exam?
In summary: Study. Then, apply what you've learned in the way that makes the most sense. Don't try to reproduce things, but actually think about what the question is asking. If you don't know where to start - doesn't matter - just start somewhere. And finally, when you get the exam back, learn from your mistakes.
There seem to be two extremes when it comes to exams - and ways to deal with them. The extreme where you have to memorize everything, and the extreme where you can't memorize everything, because the problem you will be give will look like nothing you've ever studied before or remotely recognizable to your notes.
I learned early on that working through every problem, even if I didn't know how, would often lend itself to my advantage through partial credit. It didn't matter if I had no idea what I was doing, I had to start somewhere. Some of my best lessons learned are those in which I chose poorly. When failure is just a path to learning a lesson better, it takes out some of the fear.
So before any test, I would put in enough work and studying so that I would always be able to start somewhere. This required a ton of effort and planning on my part. Because of this, I found that my ability to start somewhere on any test problem was often centered in my confidence for the work and effort that I had already put in.
This ability worked out really well for me in my first year of graduate school. We had a series of cumulative exams that had to be passed before we could be admitted as a Ph.D. candidate. These dreaded "cumes" were two hour tests on saturday mornings written about any topic of organic chemistry. There would be mechanism, synthesis, physical organic, thermodynamics, molecule characterization, you name it, and the expectations was to pass 6 out of 16 over the two years. The trick to these though, was that there was no way to study for them. You just had to go in and wish for the best.
To this day, I still feel like the ability to just start somewhere and not be worried if I was wrong, was extremely beneficial to passing these exams. Sometimes, I remember having no idea what to do, but it didn't matter, so I would just do what seemed to make sense with what I knew from my undergrad classes and what I was learning in my grad classes, and it turns out, I would often guess right. Partial credit completely worked to my advantage and I passed enough cumes in my first year to have it out of the way - which was totally awesome. Who wants to wake up on a saturday to take an exam?
In summary: Study. Then, apply what you've learned in the way that makes the most sense. Don't try to reproduce things, but actually think about what the question is asking. If you don't know where to start - doesn't matter - just start somewhere. And finally, when you get the exam back, learn from your mistakes.
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