Exam
I’m having my exams right now, tomorrow I have an exam on topology which will be my last exam in my undergraduate studies (If I pass it, which hopefully I will). I’m not proud of this but I’ve not spend a lot of effort in coursework during college. Like most of the people around me, I often opened the book only few days before the exam. Many of these times, when I read the subject I realized that it is pretty interesting and I should have spent more time on it. Such situations leaves me with two options:
- Quickly mug up as much syllabus as possible before the exam
- Take a smaller portion of the syllabus and understand it properly in whatever time that is left
I’ve chosen both the options at different times, option one is not enjoyable at all, you cannot exactly mug up maths, so what I do is: read the definition, read the theorem, read the proof, if some step is tricky, skip it, try to remember everything and move to the next definitions, theorems and proof, and hope that you will be able to reproduce everything in the exam. Our professors are kind enough to not to give many new problems to solve in exam so this method is good enough to get us a passing grade.
The way to go about the second method is: Read the definition, read the theorem, close the book, try to work it out yourself, compare your approach to the one given in the book, then go the next theorem and the next definition and so on. This method method takes a lot of time but it is much more fun, it is like solving puzzles. Even in the first method I have “understood” things but the maths you study at college level is very abstract and unless you work on it is hard to make sense of what you are reading. In the first method I forget a lot of things in the exam, in the second method I know less in terms of number of topics but I know them well, so they end up being similar in terms of marks. After the exam I know nothing in the first method, in the second method I at least know something.
