Alright, so I’m going to do a series of posts detailing how I go about studying for exams. I will try to do one of these for all of our exams from here on out until I’m finished school.
If your getting ready to start PT school hopefully this will give you a feel for what you need to do to be properly prepared for exams. If your in school, maybe it will give you some ideas if your looking to switch up your strategy.
This is the 3rd (and final) neuro course within our curriculum. Our exam was on 2/26/18.
Here’s how it went down:
- The Wed. before (2/21) – read through all 6 of the lectures included on the exam 1x
- Over Thurs. (2/22) and Fri. (2/23) – read through all 6 lectures 1x
- Saturday (2/24) – read through all hand-written class notes and highlighted the important points
- Saturday (2/24) – went through all outcome measures reviewed in class that I thought there might be questions on. Went through these 2x.
- Saturday (2/24) – reviewed/read through all case studies covered in class and all online reference articles our professor(s) had posted on our BlackBoard page up to that point.
- Saturday (2/24) – Went through all 6 lectures 1x
- Sunday (2/25) – Reviewed all highlighted hand written notes 1x
- Sunday (2/25) – went through all 6 lectures 1x
- Sunday (2/25) – read through all online reference articles 1x
- Sunday (2/25) – reviewed all outcome measures covered in class 1x
- Monday (2/26) – woke up at 6 and did one final review of the outcome measures. Also did one last glance through one of the online articles that we were required to read on exercise prescription for geriatric populations.
Test Result: 91.6%
Notes:
- This test covered 6 different powerpoints/lectures from the beginning of the semester up to the last class before the exam.
- Outcome measures included tests like the MiniBEST, FGA, DVA, ABC, etc.
- I would describe my study style as blue collar with a dash of OCD and intuition thrown in. The bulk of my studying is just reading through the power point slides from lecture and memorizing important points by just saying shit over and over in my head until I know I have it memorized. This is the blue collar side of my studying. Just good old fashioned hard work, looking at things over and over.
- My OCD side comes in the form of me generally approaching each exam knowing an exact amount of times that I want to go over each category of material that could show up on the test. My thought process goes something like this, “If I go through these lectures “x” amount of times, go through the online articles “x” amount of times and go through the outcome measures we covered in class “x” times, then I will probably do well on the exam.”
- I also have a pretty good feel at this point for what topics and concepts will be covered on our tests. So, as I am going through the power points I am spending a lot of time on some slides and basically just glancing over others. Or I will completely skip over some slides if I have already been through a certain lecture once or twice already. I also start to get a feel as I am going through the lecture slides for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th time, etc. that I know things well enough to get a high B or A. So if I reach that point, I might not review the material the exact amount of times I originally went in thinking I would. This is the intuition aspect of my studying style.
- I’m also a big mnemonic guy. So, anytime there is a list of multiple words or concepts that need to be memorized, you can bet your ass a mnemonic is going to be created. This will be done for things like “these 4 symptoms are the major identifying factors for “x” injury” or something along those lines. You get the point. The dirtier and more absurd the better.
- Another thing I like to do is hand write notes in class. This keeps me better engaged in class and also helps me to focus my studying when test time comes around. In my notes, I usually will write something like “Slide 21” and then a bullet point underneath might be, “go back and review this” or “this slide will be on test” or I will add other important points our professor makes about the topic that isn’t included on the slide.
So there’s my process. Next up in this series will be our midterm practical in neuro.
DPTreality 