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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading