My Dirty Little Secret For Cruising Through Finals Week Like A Champ

(Image courtesy of Norris Wong.)

I stayed up all night reading through my notes, making my equations sheet and going through the review problems.

But when I walked into my Diff Eq final, none of it mattered.

Problems seemed to come out of left field, and all the equations in the world couldn't have helped me pull out an A on that exam...

This was me in Sophomore year. After that semester, I knew I had to do something differently.

And as it turns out, I never had to go through it again.

Finals week can be one of the worst times of year, especially as an engineering student. Projects, last-minute homework assignment, last-minute quizzes from unscrupulous professors...

(Image via memegenerator.net)

All of this on top of unimaginably difficult cumulative final exams that leave you wondering if you actually learned anything AT ALL throughout the entirety of the last three months.

For some of us, the pressure can be almost too much to handle. But we somehow manage to scrape by and not flunk out of college.

That said, we do it by the skin of our teeth, and the holidays become more about recovering from that final push than actually being able to enjoy family and friends during the break.

Is this what life has to be like to get through this friggin' degree?

Does every semester have to end in such a disastrous, caffeine-infused, mad dash of all-nighters? Thankfully, no.

My dirty little secret for studying? Solve exam-like problems by any means necessary. Do very little else.

When it comes to studying for finals, your first instincts are usually wrong.

What's the first thing we all do when it comes time to "study"?

We grab the ole' notebook and start at page 1 (or the Prof's lecture slides, the textbook, etc.). We figure, "Well they said the final was cumulative, so I'll need to know all this stuff."

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for getting through the first two weeks’ worth of notes, becoming exceedingly bored, confused, and frustrated, and then squandering away the remainder of our study time on unproductive activities that have nothing to do with scoring well on the actual exam itself (did you seriously just re-format the x-axis on that graph in your notebook?).

This can quickly become demoralizing and de-motivating, knowing that whenever you have to study for finals, you have to go through this painful, tedious exercise that seems to have no relationship to the grade you actually end up with on test day.

What should we do instead?

If you're reading ENGINEERING.com there's a good chance you are too. And I wanted to learn everything, leave no stone un-turned, cover all my bases.

My problem was, I'm a perfectionist.

But this clearly wasn't working for me, so it was time to make a change.

Here's what I did to fix it: I started with the problems first. And not just any problems - problems that I could identify as a realistic option for the professor to throw at me on the final.

This is painful. You feel like you need to "know it all first" before jumping in. But time is at a premium. You've learned what you've learned up until this point in the semester, and now it's time to get down to business.

So for me, I tossed aside my notebooks, my homework assignments, textbook chapters, and everything else that I had done throughout the semester in the name of "learning."

Instead, I pulled problems from:

Review materials provided by the professor, Previous exams I had taken that semester, Example problems covered in class, and Past exams from other similar courses (either from the test bank at my university, or online at places like koofers.com).

This is the starting point.

Then, it's just a matter of figuring out how to solve those problems.

Yes, this will involve reviewing notes, concepts, and other resources, but here's the difference: everything is aimed at solving ACTUAL exam problems, making your study time far more efficient.

This is the approach I used to close out my engineering degree with a 3.9 GPA, and is the same approach I now use to great success with tutoring clients and students I work with at WTF Professor.

This is in stark contrast to the chronological, notes-first approach we're all tempted by.

Yes, reading through your notes and drilling textbook problems over and over again can make us FEEL LIKE we're being productive. But in the end, we're doing little to nothing to advance our ability to solve the problems we're going to see come test day.

If nothing else remember this: whatever you've done up until this point in the course is what you've done. With only a week or so left to go, there isn't much that you can do now in terms of learning additional concepts or building long term knowledge.

What you can do though is to take the information that you HAVE learned, and convert it to a form that you can use to solve problems on an exam.

By having a laser-like focus on the exam problems to the exclusion of everything else, we can ensure that we're using our study time in the most effective way possible. And that means less stress, more sleep, and a more tolerable finals experience.