Endsem tips
Aishwarya and Harish present a few tips to ensure you crack your endsems, even if you haven’t done the midsems too well
- Certain courses have completely separate portions for midsems and endsems, so this presents a new opportunity to start afresh, without having to try hard to cover ground on what you've presumably not understood well in the pre-midsem portion. These courses offer the best opportunity to maximize your grade.
- Try and analyze where was it that you faltered in the midsem, even though you may have devoted sufficient time to preparation. Were there some tables or graphs you didn't know how to read from, or doubts on a few essential concepts you hadn't bothered to comprehend in depth, and just skimmed through a few questions containing basic applications of the same? Get these cleared as quickly as possible.
- Identify emergency courses, where you've fared the poorest, and work extra hard on those.
- Familiarize yourself with your calculator really well, especially for papers containing lot of numericals. Any calculator, even the 991-MS, can perform a lot of time saving operations such as matrix inversion and solving cubic equations. Learning it might seem like a waste of time initially, but it pays off later.
- The cheat sheet: In a course which allows cheet sheets, the fundamental premise is that writing any amount of matter on these cheet sheets won't ensure that you complete a single question, since no solution can be directly derived from whatever formulae/solved examples you manage to fit in. In fact, it becomes rather counter-productive trying to decipher your tiny handwriting in the exam. So, what should one ideally include?
a) Tough to remember formulae, especially those applicable under specific conditions, with the conditions mentioned, of course.
b) The sheet should serve as some sort of "memory map", allowing you to recollect everything you'd prepared about a given topic, say steam turbines, with only a couple of lines or a diagram/flowchart. Essentially, it should be a very concise version of the notes you've prepared yourself/the DR 1 has prepared himself, and not a word-to-word reproduction of class notes, replete with solved examples.Contrary to popular belief, a ‘cheat sheet’ exam requires just as much utilization of your memory skills as a normal paper, it's just that you have a catalyst to aid the recollection process. It's never possible to include everything you've learnt in your cheet sheet/s -- the instructor will make sure that he/she allows only a fraction of the number of sheets required!
(Editor's note: sometimes, it is possible to include quite a bit in the cheat sheet, as this, this, this and this (made by the editor for a recent exam) will prove.)
Aishwarya Sharma and Harishchandra Ramadas are 9 – pointers.
