Final Exam prep

[fides]

How do I study properly for my finals, I am trying to make notes and study from them but I’ m not retaining anything. I have seen many different techniques such as people using PowerPoint presentations as guidelines and textbooks together to make notes, or make primary notes with a combination of all 3. Problem is I’m making notes for the first time so….
My mom suggested that just highlight key points in the textbook and just read the textbook for the final examination.

Anybody have any suggestions to study effectively for final exams, considering my situation (minimal notes and studying habits). Getting my life back in gear and trying to transfer into YorkU for Chemistry and hopefully BioMed/BioChem.

Thanks.

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[Lifeman]

youve never made notes before and your mom is giving you giving you advice about classes...?

 

[ShoTyme]

Finals should be an overall test of your complete understanding of the material learned over the entire semester. It is not the time to cram a bunch of crap into your brain. It is a time to go back, review, hone, and integrate concepts. Your mom's suggestion is a good one, but should have been implemented from day one. At this point, my suggestion would be to duck and cover, and await the impending fallout.

 

[Amphitrite]

Anybody have any suggestions to study effectively for final exams, considering my situation (minimal notes and studying habits). Getting my life back in gear and trying to transfer into YorkU for Chemistry and hopefully BioMed/BioChem.

There's your problem. Try to fix that for next semester; there's not much you can do at this point.

 

[Amemus]

How you study depends on the type of course and lecture format. Making and reviewing your own study guides is probably the best way to make sure that you know 100% of the material, but it's not the most time-efficient. Given not a lot of time, I would recommend going over your class notes multiple times. This is assuming you have a good set of class notes. If your professor posts Powerpoints with all the information you need to know then this isn't so hard. If your professor is the type to give chalk talks and you have to make your own notes it's going to be a little harder. Most of my undergrad courses were the chalk talk type and I made sure I made a clean copy of my notes within 3 days of the lecture because if I waited any longer sometimes I wasn't able to decipher my scribbles.

If you don't have good class notes, try to borrow notes from someone who took good notes or lecture recordings. Reading the textbook tends not to be very high yield as the books tend to contain a lot of extra information and it can be time-consuming to pick out the important details.

So take whatever source you have, and go through all of it once. For the first time, try to get the big picture. Don't worry about memorizing any of the details. Just make sure that you understand the concepts first. If there is anything you don't understand make sure you get all of your questions answered early, because it can be hard to get in touch with your professor right before the test.

Then do your second pass. Pay attention to what you remember and what you don't. Some of it is going to be intuitive and so you won't have to review it many times, whereas other stuff you're going to need to drill a few times to get it. Go over the stuff you don't remember a little more carefully.

Then do a third pass over the notes. Again identify what stuff you remember and what stuff you don't have down yet. This time, make an abbreviated study guide with all the stuff that isn't intuitive and just needs to be memorized.

Use whatever time you have left before the exam drilling your high yield study guide or doing practice problems if you have any available.

Hope this helps.