General Study and Test Taking Tips
Two of the most important skills to help you get good marks will be effective studying and effective test-taking. With the jump in content from high school, you need to become effective at study to learn everything to the level required for A-range grades. Ultimately however, the majority of your grade for each paper will come down to your performance in the tests and exams – it is very disappointing to learn content well but end up with a lower mark than you hoped for due to mistakes during the test. I will give some insight into how I studied during the year and my approach to the tests, and will also give some other possible things you can do. However, be aware that what worked for me will not necessarily work for you. It is important that you try out some different techniques early on and come up with an approach which is most effective for you. Although the jump in content can initially seem intimidating, these are only first year papers and as a result they are designed to be manageable for students fresh out of high school. If you start the year strongly and improve on your study techniques as you go, you will find you manage to adjust quickly.
Disclaimer 2: these approaches worked well for me, but it is certainly not a flawless approach by any means. I hope it helps to give you some ideas that will help you to develop an approach which works well for you, but I would not recommend copying it exactly.
My Study Approach
Before the year started I came up with a study schedule for myself. I put in the lectures and labs, and then planned the other hours during which I would study. I initially planned for 11 hours of study each weekday, 5 hours of study on Sunday and a day off on Saturday. I was good at sticking to this in the first two weeks, but I ended up realising that this was more time than was necessary. As a result, I started to get a bit slacker a few weeks in and put a bit less time into study. I found it was good to overestimate the amount of time required initially, as this helped me to get ahead on the readings and took a lot of the stress out of the first few weeks. I decided that there wasn’t a point in putting in extra time for the sake of it. It can be easy to feel guilty for taking too many breaks in first year, but it is really important to take some time off to relax and get away from study. It can be difficult to strike the balance between putting in enough time to do well, while also taking time off to keep your spirits up and avoid burning out. When tests/exams were coming up I would put in some more time in order to make sure I studied as much as I needed to, but it was still possible to take plenty of breaks and avoid burning out.
In my day-to-day approach, I found it helpful to have a quick (15-30 minute) pre-read of the slides/course guide the night before each core paper lecture. This gave me an idea of the general content of the lecture, and helped me to identify potentially challenging topics. BIOSCI 107 lectures had more content, so my pre-read tended to be longer for this paper than for CHEM and POPLHLTH. I didn’t pre-read for the non-core lectures, as I didn’t want to take away too much time from the more important core papers. If there were any particularly challenging topics, I would often spend a bit of extra time going over these to try and get a better understanding before the lecture. In the lectures, I avoided copying down notes from the slides, as these are provided online and I knew I would be going back over them anyway. Instead, I would listen to what the lecturer was saying and would note down any interesting or useful additional explanations which helped to clarify the content on the slides. Most people take their course guides with them and fill it out as they go. I personally found it more useful to take my computer and type out my notes, as I am far quicker at typing than I am at writing, which allowed me to take more notes.
After lectures, I would spend some time integrating notes from the lecture slides, course guide and my notes from the lecture into a single document on my computer. I would make a heading for each of the learning objectives for the lecture, and write down all of the important points for each objective in my own words – I would often screenshot and paste in diagrams from the lecture slides/Google which helped to clarify the points. I find that I learn best when I combine written explanations and diagrams and take the time to link the explanation to the pictures, but other people will have different approaches which work for them. If there were any concepts I struggled with, I would make sure I looked through the textbook, Google or Piazza to make sure I understood it before moving on.
Most of the courses use Piazza as an online forum for the class, where people can ask and answer questions anonymously. Lecturers and tutors from the paper will also often use Piazza to help students with the more difficult topics. I cannot recommend using Piazza enough. I found Piazza to be very effective study, as other students tend to ask questions about the hardest concepts in the course. I found it helpful to test myself to see if I could answer the question, and if I didn’t I would do further study in order to figure out the answer and then answer the question in my own words using my new understanding. There were countless times where using Piazza helped me to identify things I hadn’t quite understood properly without even realising, and this ended up being extremely helpful for me to gain a better grasp on the content. If I didn’t feel like committing to a proper study session, I would often go on Piazza and answer a few questions instead. This would almost always end up being helpful for learning a new aspect of a topic, or reinforcing concepts that I already knew.
As well as pre-reading and revising lectures, it is important to keep refreshing your memory on previous units. I would often spend some time quickly reading over my notes for old lectures to make sure I kept up with the content. I found this to be very important for tests, as it meant that when a test was coming up the study process took less time as there was less material to re-learn.
When it comes to learning content, memorising without understanding tends to be an ineffective approach to study. We remember material far better when we can link it in to a conceptual foundation. I found that when I took the time to understand why things happen the way that they do, or the reason why certain structures have the features that they do, I could remember the material far better. This is especially important for BIOSCI 107 and MEDSCI 142 – there is just too much content to learn by memorisation alone. The lecturers will often give extra insight beyond the lecture slides as to the underlying reasons for things, so this is why it is really helpful to listen to what they are saying and note down the extra points. I also found that the Mastering A&P textbook was quite helpful for this, as it often gives additional explanations which help you to build that underlying conceptual foundation. It can seem counter-intuitive to learn content beyond the scope of the course, and you will certainly want to not spend so much time doing it that you burn out or don’t sufficiently cover the important material. However it really did help me to build good conceptual foundations that helped me to remember the content of the paper better in a shorter period of time.
In some cases however, there isn’t really time to build the necessary conceptual foundation to link the content with. The major example of this is the Cells and Tissues unit in BIOSCI 107. There just isn’t enough time to fully grasp the functions of all the organs and hence the reasons why they are made up of certain tissues. In some cases it will make a lot of sense to you why a certain tissue type is found in a certain organ, especially if you have studied biology before. In others however, you will just need to memorise that X tissue is found in Y organ. The key is to minimise the amount of content that needs to be learned this way, as it will make your study far more effective. For the cases where it doesn’t work, I personally found flashcards to be really helpful for memorisation – I had a 20 minute bus trip to uni, so I used this time to go over my flashcards and rote learn the minority of content which I couldn’t effectively link into a conceptual framework.
When the tests were coming up, I would often begin my study by putting down all the learning objectives on a document, and filling them in as best as possible from memory. I would then compare this to my previously made documents which had my integrated notes from the slides, lectures, course guide and textbook. This would highlight the material that I had forgotten or incorrectly understood. After this I would then focus most of my study time on these topics. This was far more efficient than simply going over all of the material again, and allowed me to spend more time revising the content that I struggled with the most. After I felt confident with the material, I would then use the past papers as practice in order to further identify anything I needed to work on or learn better.
The approach I took to study ended up working really well for me, and was certainly the biggest factor in how I managed to achieve good marks in OLY1. Having already completed a degree before starting biomed, I had plenty of time to figure out what works for me, which certainly helped to make the year a bit less daunting. I urge you not to just copy my approach, as it will not work for everyone. I mainly wanted to highlight some of the techniques which can be helpful to help you come up with some ideas to try with your own study. I recommend making it a priority early in the year to not just learn the content, but also how to better learn content throughout the rest of the year.
Approach to tests
Most your grade in the papers comes down to how well you do in the tests/exams. As a result, it is really important to minimise the number of marks you lose due to your test-taking strategies. Some of the major downfalls that people may face will be excessive nervousness, running out of time, and making silly mistakes that could be avoided. I feel that this was another area where my previous study helped me. I had done plenty of university tests beforehand which, although unrelated in content to biomed, certainly helped me with my approach to the tests.
One of the major downfalls that people may face comes down to time management. You have a limited amount of time to answer the questions, which means you need to avoid spending too much time on questions. As mentioned above, the chemistry in-course tests are the ones where this is most critical. It is important to keep an eye on the time during tests – you shouldn’t be checking every minute, but after each page of questions or so, having a quick glance to make sure you are on track is a good idea. If you notice that you are falling behind early in the test, you still have time to adjust your approach and speed up slightly. People will often agonise over certain questions, which can really eat into your time. Taking an extra 5 minutes on one question at the expense of having to rush five other questions will really impact on your marks. It is better to make a note of the questions you struggled with and come back to them later if you have time, as this will help you to avoid losing easy marks later in the test.
Doing practice tests in exam conditions is important for being as prepared as possible for the tests. This will not only give you an idea of whether you will struggle for time in the tests, but it will also give you a feel for some of the mistakes you might make under time pressure. Again, this was particularly important for the chemistry in-course tests. Doing the practice tests helped me to identify some common mistakes I might make, and I was able to avoid most of them in the actual test and get good marks. Making sure you take the time to read the question completely and understand it is also important for avoiding silly mistakes. If you have the time at the end of the test, go back through as much of it as possible and check to see if you misunderstood any of the questions. This may also jog your memory and help you to answer some of the questions that you were struggling with.
Finally, keeping calm is extremely important. You are always going to be nervous for these tests – there is no denying that they have high stakes. However, you need to do as much as you can to avoid getting overly anxious, as this can negatively impact on your performance. One way to avoid excess fear is to make sure you do plenty of study and prepare as well as you can. If you have been acing the practice tests and are confident in your understanding of all the content, this will certainly help you to feel calmer in the actual test. It is also important not to let yourself burn out. I would start studying early and aim to get to the point where I felt ready for the test the night before the test day. This way, I could take the time to relax on the day, while doing some extra study to do as well as possible. On test days I would spend most of the day studying at uni, but I would make sure to take some breaks and go and treat myself to some nice food or something to help keep my spirits up. I also made sure to take a relaxing break of decent length before the test so I wouldn’t be too tired. Once you start the test, it can be easy to get stressed out when there are questions that you don’t know. It is important to remember that you don’t need to ace every test to get into med, or even to get an A+ in the paper. If you notice yourself getting stressed, take a minute or so to take some deep breaths and close your eyes, and then get back to the test and make sure you get all the questions that you know, and give the harder questions your best shot.