Too Soon to Prep For an Exam?!?

It's that time of the semester where everyone has more than 3 exams in one week and/or midterms coming around the corner. How do we really prepare for these exams and what can I do to do well? In order to help everyone with this problem this week's topic is Anticipating Test Questions.

For me, I just went through all of my exams last week so I don't have much to do until after spring break. However, that doesn't mean I should leave all the studying til the night before the exam. At this point as I'm learning new topics for my classes I can start to study by anticipating test questions. For example, using your previous exams to create your own questions, creating your own questions, Looking into your syllabus, taking notes on what your professors ask in class, and using study aids such as study sheets or graphic organizers.

In MAT222 I just recently took an exam and I did an okay job on the test. I have noticed that it is always so hard to predict how the test is going to come out in math because there are so many different ways to give math problems. You have to pretty much know the whole, all around basics in order to solve through any given problems. Previously in order to study for my first exam I simply l

ooked through the class examples and worked on several homework problems before the exam. I guess that worked a little bit but not to the point of satisfaction.

I realized that we got our exam back to keep so I looked back into the test and saw that the questions were all very similar to the textbook problems. This means that most likely, in the next exam the questions will be all similar to the textbook problems. Also a lot of the examples that she gives in class are pretty much the same questions on the exam with different number.

I'm a kinesthetic learner, meaning I have DO it in order to understand a material. What I did this week was looked back into the notes I took and the example my teacher went over in class. Since we did not do work from the textbook in this chapter yet I decided to take some time and work on some extra problems to help me review and understand the section better. After solving few problems I found myself solidifying my knowledge on the topic. That means, since this topic will be in my long term memory I will be able to not struggle as much as if i were to try to relearn all of this right before the exam.

I also revisited my syllabus to see if i could find something helpful. One thing I noticed was "Completing homework to the best of you ability is critical to your success in this class, which is why you are encouraged to work with others to complete assignments and prepare for exams." A lot of the homework problems are given straight from the textbook that means she gave us a hint on where majority of the test will be from. It would have been better to notice these things earlier on but now that I know I could do well on the next exam.

I hope by trying to anticipate questions on the next exam will help me really prepare myself well and do much better on the exams. It is allowing me to pretty much pretend I know what is going to be on the next exam and just simply preparing for it many weeks before.