As I was studying for midterm #1, one thing that that stood out for me was that the practice midterm was focused on problem solving, rather than memorization. Before I attempted the practice midterm, I reviewed all of the lecture slides in order to remind myself of the content that had been covered and to re-answer questions that were on the slides. At this point, my aim was to memorize what we had learned in lectures and to practice data interpretation and problem solving.
Then, I attempted the practice midterm. When I looked through the questions, there were fewer questions about the content presented in lectures than I expected. I had anticipated that there would be questions about the honeybee papers, but instead, there were questions about an imaginary organism. Thus, I realized that the questions that we were given for practice were meant to help us practice applying concepts and solving problems, rather than memorizing facts presented in class.
After completing the practice midterm, I decided to adopt a different study strategy. Instead of trying to memorize facts, I focused more on answering practice questions. By doing this, I hoped that my studying would be more effective. However, after completing the actual midterm, I felt that I put less emphasis on memorization than I should have. Although the actual midterm was focused on problem solving and interpreting data that we had never seen before, some of the problem solving required knowledge of techniques. I think I made the right decision to focus less on memorizing facts in general, but I should have put more emphasis on memorizing techniques in order to more effectively answer questions that ask to propose an experiment. By shifting my study strategy, I wanted to optimize my studying by focusing on what I thought was most important (answering questions), but I put a too much attention into one aspect of studying, which led me to have gaps in other aspects. For the next midterm, I will aim to more carefully evaluate what the most important concepts are in order to make my studying more balanced which will hopefully allow me to perform better.