Reviews before exams

[hdu]

Do you have before exam Reviews in your school? What do you think about them?

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[DoctorFunk]

Some of our classes have reviews, which I find mostly worthless. They are entirely unstructured, and serve as simple question & answer sessions. Turns out that there are two kinds of students at these "extended office hours": those who don't understand even the simple concepts that are going to be tested, and those that understand everything so well that they ask questions about minutiae that the profs didn't even mention in class.

 

[SoCuteMD]

I don't go to all of them, as I think my time before a test is better spent reviewing material I'm not comfortable with. I try to divide the lecturers/lectures they gave into two categories: a) I need to know EVERYTHING is this lecture, so the lecturer is just going to review everything he/she taught me in the original lecture or b) This lecture had a lot of "fluff" and the lecturer is probably going to drop hints as to what he/she will ask.

I go to the b's...I skip the a's unless I need clarification on the material.

 

[SoCuteMD]

Some of our classes have reviews, which I find mostly worthless. They are entirely unstructured, and serve as simple question & answer sessions. Turns out that there are two kinds of students at these "extended office hours": those who don't understand even the simple concepts that are going to be tested, and those that understand everything so well that they ask questions about minutiae that the profs didn't even mention in class.

Everything DoctorFunk says is true too!!!

 

[fun8stuff]

Some of our classes have reviews, which I find mostly worthless. They are entirely unstructured, and serve as simple question & answer sessions. Turns out that there are two kinds of students at these "extended office hours": those who don't understand even the simple concepts that are going to be tested, and those that understand everything so well that they ask questions about minutiae that the profs didn't even mention in class.

This is for the most part true at my school as well. The type of review I like is when the professor goes over all of the material again, only focusing on the most important topics. We have had a few profs that did this and everything they highlighted had a question on it. We have had a few of these profs who actually brought their exam questions with them so they made sure they talked about everything and have also had profs that have listed off the topics we should concentrate on.

 

[Gimlet]

I got to the same school as Doctor Funk and have noticed the same thing about the students that attend. This makes the "Q&A" style review sessions essentially worthless, but in my mind, firing off questions to the professor shouldn't be labeled a "review session" anyway. Our Physiology tutor does a very good structured review every Saturday before our exams where he covers all of the take-home messages from that block. Those are infinitely more helpful than the ones run by professors.

 

[Law2Doc]

Some of our classes have reviews, which I find mostly worthless. They are entirely unstructured, and serve as simple question & answer sessions. Turns out that there are two kinds of students at these "extended office hours": those who don't understand even the simple concepts that are going to be tested, and those that understand everything so well that they ask questions about minutiae that the profs didn't even mention in class.

Couldn't agree with this more. Lots of folks religiously attend out of paranoia that some gem useful for the pending test will be dropped by the prof, but generally it is a few hours of your life you should have better spent studying.

 

[sga814]

Agreed for most classes at my school (reviews suck).

However, for Anatomy- we have the greatest prof in the world (sorry guys, but it's true- there is NO DEBATE). He holds 4-6 hour review sessions every other week, on SATURDAYS and reviews EVERYTHING IMPORTANT that was covered, followed by an extensive lab quiz, which pretty much hits all the important structures. I'm pretty sure I would have barely passed anatomy without those reviews... turns out I did just the opposite (and I'm pretty sure the same is true for the 30 people or so who consistently went to his reviews).

 

[Kazema]

Yeah we get two kinds of reviews, either Q&A or just a rehash of lecture material. Which we get depends on who's in charge of the course.

I've found reviews to be mostly a waste of time. I used to go sometimes to eat my lunch and then leave after I was done eating. I don't think I ever got anything out of them - mostly it was people asking questions about something in way too much depth or the professor going over stuff he'd already gone over in lecture (and we have lecture recordings so...).

Some people find them useful but the vast majority of people are always annoyed at themselves for going to reviews even after finding them consistently useless. But like the obsessive fools that we are, we keep going back JUST IN CASE!

Actually once there was a review that was useful. And I skipped out on that one. Go figure. Studying on my own has always been a more effective use of time for me.

 

[fun8stuff]

Yeah we get two kinds of reviews, either Q&A or just a rehash of lecture material. Which we get depends on who's in charge of the course.

I've found reviews to be mostly a waste of time. I used to go sometimes to eat my lunch and then leave after I was done eating. I don't think I ever got anything out of them - mostly it was people asking questions about something in way too much depth or the professor going over stuff he'd already gone over in lecture (and we have lecture recordings so...).

Some people find them useful but the vast majority of people are always annoyed at themselves for going to reviews even after finding them consistently useless. But like the obsessive fools that we are, we keep going back JUST IN CASE!

Actually once there was a review that was useful. And I skipped out on that one. Go figure. Studying on my own has always been a more effective use of time for me.

This is where streaming lectures come in handy. You can just simply watch them at 2-2.5x and slow down for the useful stuff. This mainly applies to the review types where they go over the lecturers. I like these kind the best because I have found that the topics the profs hit on are normally the topics that they ask a question about..... other than this... the reviews are generally a waste.