Hello everyone:

So, here you are, just days away from the big exams. What do you do now? I recommend going over all of your summaries a few last times and then taking the night before the exams lightly. That is, don’t try to cram a bunch more stuff into your brain, just review the basics, and then go to bed in a timely manner. Not early, not late, just try for the normal bedtime with as much normality as possible. Keep to your normal routine at bedtime.

When you arrive at the testing center, get your geese in a row. If you have been allowed to bring in food, do so. Organize your things as much as possible. We were allowed to bring in food, drinks, and notepads and pens. As soon as the exam begins, do a brain dump before you even look at the questions.

Is there something that you want to make sure you remember? Don’t be distracted by looking at the questions before you jot it down. Maybe you are required to list authors and their works in all of your answers. Write down names and books/articles as quickly as you can. Dump everything on the notepad that you think will be helpful to mention in your replies. This will take several minutes. Take this time because it will pay off later.

After you have done your brain dump, now look at the questions. As you go through them, go ahead and type the basic questions into your answer pages. Then, go back through the questions and start actually answering them, one at a time. If something suddenly “comes to you” about part of the answer, go ahead and jot it down. When you have written all of the sources that you want to use in a specific answer, go back and begin writing your own thoughts on the topic, making sure that you support everything that you are saying with quotes or paraphrases from your sources.

If something does not seem immediately obvious, go ahead and work on other parts of the answer, but be sure to return to the area that you drew a blank on earlier. The thing is to make sure you go back and answer the question. If you are still uncertain and time is running out, try to answer around the question as best you can. Happily, we had oral defenses of our written exams and I was able to answer the question at that point in time.

If you still have time, go back and polish the writing. If you run out of time, just make sure that you are at least basically understandable. We had four hours of testing, one hour for lunch, and four hours of testing for two days. Do not waste energy by kicking yourself for something you forgot.

BTW, my professors really liked it when we could take information from one class and apply it to something in another class. Since my knowledge of philosophy was particularly strong, I took a philosophical approach to all of the questions I was asked. That worked very well.

I wish you well with your upcoming exams. If you have any questions or comments, please use my name or this specific topic in your comments so that I know you are not spam.

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

Here is the information I promised you on studying for individual topics within your qualifying or comprehensive exams.

Take all of the books and articles you had for this class and make a summary of them. If you have a study group, assign each team member a specific book or group of articles to summarize. Begin with a 20-page summary of a given book, focusing on the main points that book has. Is there a particular point of view expressed by the author? What is the bottom line that the book offers?

Work through your summary slowly, encapsulating the theme of the book until you can get the summary down to one or two pages. You don’t have time to write a 20-page summary on exam day, so what is the author saying, in a nut shell? Are there any specific quotations that you can pull out of the text that explains it completely? That is what you are trying to distill from the book.

Move on to all of the other books from that class, doing the same 20-page summary, and then work at condensing it to one or two pages. Don’t do a copy and paste job here, but type the summaries up by hand. This makes the information go into your brain and through your hands in a way that a copy and paste job won’t.

Do the same thing with any articles that were required. Obviously, an article will be shorter than a book and the summary will be shorter as well. Give the articles the same treatment and condense them into one page summaries.

Next, place the information on 3×5 or 4×6 cards and keep them with you at all times. During any down time, such as waiting for a class to start, waiting at the doctor’s office, or waiting for anything at all, pull out your note cards and study them.

I am a treadmill runner, so I blew my Word document summaries up to about 16 point font, taped them to the wall in front of my treadmill, and had 1 1/2 hours to stud each day as I ran. That means that, before I even had my shower for the day, I had already studied for 1 1/2 hours.  The exams where I went to school cost $1,000 and could only be taken twice. I didn’t want to waste both time and money, so I studied and passed the 16- hour exams (and the 2-hour oral defense) the first time.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns that I haven’t addressed herein and I would be happy to write about them next time. Please use my name in the body of your comment, so that I won’t think you are spam. Thanks!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

A couple of my online graduate students were sharing their mutual concern about their upcoming comprehensive exams. Since I went through my qualifying exams a couple of years ago, it seemed like a good idea to share some tips with you, my readers, on how to successfully go through these difficult tests.

First, check any recent written material you have from your university that states what the exams will cover. For example, we had a handbook that indicated that every assigned article and every book for every class was fair game for the examinations. This also included every discussion board topic.

Next, go back through all of your classes and print out or save as a Word document everything that has the possibility of being on the exam (ideally, you would have done this as you took the courses, but this is not a perfect world, so get together everything you or your classmates have on a given course).  Save this to a thumb drive or other storage device, in case your computer crashes. (I lost two computers to the black screen of death during my graduate programs).

If you have other people in your classes that have the same work ethic that you do, offer to join a study group with them. Do not latch on to non-productive classmates. Stick to the serious students who want to pass these exams the first time. Agree to meet on a regular basis, giving one another homework assignments to summarize various books and articles so that you don’t have to do all the work yourself. (One of my classes had 11 books, so sharing the summarizing load was absolutely a must!) Share notes generously with others in your group. Be prepared to explain your summary during group time. If you can teach it, you really know it.

Set up a timetable for getting the studying done. Work backwards, starting with the date of the tests and then figuring out how much time that gives you to study each class. For example, my study group decided to spend two weeks on philosophy but a week and a half on some of the other classes because we felt like we had a good handle on those classes. You will be doing a personal every-other-day review of the classes that you aren’t focusing on while studying as a group, so that you won’t forget the information.

Keep in mind that you will be studying on your own for many hours when you aren’t with the group, especially if you have some classes that you alone took. Other teammates may have courses in common that they want to study for outside the larger group.

Finally, practice writing the answers. For example, my program had two-hour questions for each of the 7 topics in the qualifying exams, so I prepared sample questions based on the discussion board topics and practiced sitting at my computer, writing answers for two-hour blocks of time. It was very difficult at first, but got easier as I practiced writing for extended periods of time. I used my notes at first, just to get the swing of things, and then gradually made myself answer questions without my notes.

This blog is getting rather long, so my next part in this series will discuss how to study for an individual subject. If you would like to comment or ask a question, please use my name in the body of your comment, so that I know you are not spam. Thanks!

Best,

Dr. Sheri