Study Tips

Nala

Just wonderin what's everyone's advice on studying well? Seeing's how it's *that* time of year again.

Red Alert

menus!

I make a 'menu' of instructions for standardised questions and then i apply it as best i can. try to have every method down to about six-eight basic points and learn those inside out.

doesn't work for solid state electronics or physics, as these two seem to go out of their way to prevent one having a standardised answer strategy.

vinks

my tactic for final year physics and maths was to systematically do every single possible question and paper i could get my hands on for the past 5yrs (including repeat papers if they existed) and did all of them, and now i have like a book of solutions for the maths stream and the physics stream on the ft222 course in dit

Chinafoot

for essays i tend to do out the plan with the main points and learn it off.
then when u get into the exam write out the essay outline staright away and the main points will come back to ya straight away.

funktastic

Still learning off entire essays? Thought people finished doing that with the leaving cert, you're better off just learning a set of points which you can use no matter what the title is. Loads of people just get stuck by learning an essay off that they're not able to adapt to the question.

leeroybrown

I always found that the best way to do a days good study was to make sure I got some productive work done in the first hour. Taking a break (e-mail, coffee, web, etc) that early in the day always seemed to end up resulting in a new record length study break (The record was 9.05 am until 9.55pm - The library opened from 9am to 10pm).

If a course was theory based I used to review the notes and produce written summaries of each area. That way I missed nothing. For mathematical courses I just attacked the exam papers and problem sheets to ensure I had a broad knowledge of the course.

My ultimate aim was to produce a managable set of well organised material I could review the night/morning before the exam to ensure I knew the area very well.

Tom Dunne

The way I learn is in short, sharp bursts of 10 to 15 minutes, followed by a break of about five minutes.

Do this by breaking topics down into managable chunks, the smaller, the better. If you get frustrated at not understanding something, walk away. Come back later and you will see things in a different light.

Past papers are a very worthwhile exercise. Go through them in detail and make sure you can do most, if not all. Having said that, don't fall into the trap I did - I was doing a relatively "young" course that had only three years of past papers. I did all past papers and unintentionally omitted a small part of the course, which came up in one question in the exam.

Woden

always be writing, if you're just sitting there reading you feel like you getting nothing done and that you are learning nothing, however if you are writing even writing out the notes its seems sometimes i think you remember it a helluva lot better then if i've just read over it.

and yeah i like to have a bunch of nicely written out answers i can review the day before and that should theortically be enough to get ya through

tammy

I think everyone works differently. personally i find 1 hour study , 10 min break works for me. Its important to involve your senses when your learning, all that repitition in school did have a purpose. So on very important points I will repeat them to myself and write them in a colour pen or something. Its alot easier to remember something if you actually understand it aswell though this can be hard to achieve with difficult material. well thats my 0.02$

Hecate

As vinks said do every exam paper you can find, even repeat ones. On the whole lecturers tend to take their questions from previous years papers, with small variations on the questions.

It may sound obvious but I also find reading all the available notes right through does help. Its good for covering those obscure things that sometimes come up.