How I study
January 1, 2009
I’m still studying for my screening exam, and you’re going to see some posts related to my areas of study over the next few months.
How I study
It’s been a while since I posted here, for many reasons. The semester at CGU ended, and, having finished my book, I threw myself into studying for my screening exam which happens on Jan 23, 2009 (note, not Jan 30, as I had thought all this time!). Then the holidays arrived, and I’ve alternated between a few hours of studying each day, working, and spending gloriously fun time with my partner and daughter. I let the blog languish. No more. I’m still studying, and you’re going to see some posts related to my areas of study over the next few months.
The way I learn is to write. Writing is a synthetic activity (by which I mean that you have to synthesize), and I find that doing it helps me to understand things in my own way.
I first wrote out study sheets for each of the topic areas the exam will cover, with the topics broken down in detailed outline form in a way that makes sense to me, and written (mostly) in my own words. Now (hopefully) I need not go back to my primary sources in order to see what I need to know — I have it all gathered in one place.
Next I generated high level outlines, without the details, of the topic areas. I do this because if I know my stuff, I should be able to go through these outlines and fill in the details from memory.
Then I used the outlines to generate question genres: general classes of questions I think will be asked. And finally I generated actual questions from those genres by looking at the specific kinds of questions that were asked in the past and trying to detect tendencies there, and also by trying to put myself in the test maker’s shoes and asking myself what I would ask.
Now I’m in the process of trying to answer those questions in essay form (as I would do when I actually take the test), and doing so while referring to my notes as little as possible. I then critique my essay. I’m doing this to, again, synthesize, synthesize, synthesize, but most importantly to simply get myself used to answering these kinds of questions in essay form and to identify characteristics of a sufficient answer. I want to get to the point that taking the actual exam is just more of what I’ve been doing for the last month, and not a special event. That should take a lot of the stress out.
And I’m posting these answers to the blog because knowing that I’m writing for the blog is reminiscent of knowing that I’m writing for graders.
