Test Prep.

So yesterday I had another Calc exam. Ugh. I hate these. I had this class in high school and passed, but somehow I'm still managing to do terrible. In my math class we have two midterms and a final. The midterms are 20 percent of our grade apiece, while the final is 40 percent (and it's multiple choice :/ ). Anyway, this was the second of the midterms. I got a 58 percent on the first one. That's pretty bad. Somehow it was a B though, so maybe it wasn't just me.

After my dismal grade on the first test, I vowed to better prepare myself for the second one. My preparation for the first test consisted of me waiting until 2 hours before the test and then attempting to learn all of the material at once. Somehow this failed to work. For this test I decided to slowly study the material over several weeks before the exam.

Well, it got to be about 4 o'clock yesterday and I realized that the exam I vowed to prepare for was in three hours. Not counting an hour to eat dinner, an hour to walk everywhere, and probably 30 minutes of screwing around and not studying, I had half an hour to learn all the material for the test. The material we were covering wasn't that bad. I looked at the practice test and I could actually do most of it. The problem was that the test questions tended to be application problems and critical thinking or some weird thing like that. "Test my mastery." Blech. Also, the tests in this class have 7 questions, so missing even one is disasterous to my grade.

So I crammed, ate, and went to the test. I walked away feeling ok about it (better than the last one), but not great. I probably scored somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 percent. The sad thing is that I know I could have scored at least a 90 if I had spent more time studying. The problems were pretty easy but I couldn't remember some formulas. If I had memorized them, I would have aced it.

The lesson here is to spend time studying for tests. If you know you have an exam coming up, take a few hours out of your day to review material for it beforehand. Don't wait until an hour before the test to start studying. It is a lot harder to learn material when you are under a lot of stress. I just hope the rest of the class did as poorly as I did so the curve can help me out a li'l.