March 23, 2004
Never cram, always take your exams well-rested
One down, two to go: just finished my chemistry final exam half an hour ago, now time to relax and prepare myself with rest and food before my discrete mathematics exam tonight. I don't believe in cramming: I prefer to clear my mind before an exam, using the store of knowledge I've built up over the school term... that way, I know what I know when I take the test. Cramming doesn't really work, neurologically, though some people never seem to understand that observation.
It was almost funny the number of classmates who nearly physically jumped me on campus during the last half-hour before the exam, asking me questions they should have been asking the teacher weeks ago, e.g. "What does entropy have to do with Gibbs free energy?" or "What is a 'colligative property'?" or "What's the 'steric factor' in the rate constant?"
The best I could do is assure the questioners that they'd do fine, and to stop worrying: they'd be better prepared by meditating to clear their heads than to try to understand material they should have already mastered. I didn't have the heart to say, "Dude, you're so screwed!"
Posted by Russell Whitaker at March 23, 2004 02:08 PM | TrackBackI remember in my college days being shocked to discover how many of my fellow students hadn't learned even the basics of the course. Why would you pay thousands of dollars and then refuse to read the textbook? Even worse, how could you read a textbook and not understand all of the words? What did they do, insert elevator music whenever they reached a term they didn't understand?
I studied very little chemistry, so a lot of Russell's post was a mystery to me when I first read it. However, I was able to locate definitions that explained everything in his post within 10 minutes. If I'm unhappy reading a blog post and not knowing what a "colligative property" is, how could someone read a textbook and ignore the fact that they didn't know what it meant?
Posted by: Bob Tipton on March 23, 2004 07:19 PMGood luck Russell. BTW, when, a gazillion years ago, I took my history exams at the end of my three-year course at Brighton Polytechnic in England, I spent the final day beforehand down at the seaside, went for a swim and did not go anywhere near my books. Like you said, it cleared the mind.
Posted by: Tom Burroughes on March 24, 2004 01:29 PMDiscrete math, eh? Fun stuff.
Posted by: Anton Sh3rwood on March 25, 2004 11:36 AM