Butler reacts only

If you’re an English major facing a literature exam, or a classics major facing an astronomy exam, or any other writing-heavy humanities major facing any other kind of exam, there’s a decent chance you’re currently panicking about it. This is pretty understandable – you’ve trained yourself to make arguments in Word documents at 2 am, not in little blue books, and test-taking is a skill best honed with practice. To help assuage your despair, resident science/humanities double major Betsy Ladyzhets has some studying advice.

1. Re-type all of your notes. By not only reading through your lecture (or seminar) notes, but also re-typing them, you’ll really engage with the material. If your notes are sparse (or if you tended to take a brief nap around forty minutes into every class), find a friend to share notes with.

2. Make flashcards. Tons of flashcards. Mounds of flashcards. Mountains of flashcards. Every class can be a flashcard class if you believe it can. You can use up all of the paper in Butler to do this, or, if you’d rather not cramp up your wrist, use Quizlet.

3. Explain big concepts to a friend. Not sure you remember the plot of that complex novel you read two months ago? Try to summarize it for someone who isn’t in the class. The places they have questions that you can’t answer are places where you need to study more.

4. Find a huge whiteboard and cover it in diagrams. There’s a certain kind of unique satisfaction associated with filling a large blank space with an organized, maybe even color-coded summary of your course. You can find these blank spaces in the Diana, LeFrak, Lerner, Lehman Library, and no small number of unused, unlocked classrooms around campus.

5. Watch some relevant videos. After you’ve reviewed your notes a few times, it can be helpful to look at the material in a new way – through watching Crash Course, Khan Academy, or, if you have a literature exam, a film adaptation of a book that you don’t remember well.

6. Get enough sleep. While, with papers, you can finish the assignment and then fall into bed from 4 am to noon, with exams, you’ll still have to get up and go write several in-class essays on symbolism in War and Peace after a late night of studying. Fake as this might sound, it really is better to get a decent amount of sleep than it is to go through every single page of your notes.

7. Leave at least an hour before the exam for last-minute review. If you have a 9 am exam, don’t get up at 8:30 – get up at 7:30, or better yet, 7. The material you review right before the test will stick in your head better than the material you reviewed the night before. And you can drink a substantial amount of coffee while you review.

8. Cry a little bit. It’s healthy, I promise. Just let it out. You’ll be okay. It’ll all be over soon.

Exam purgatory via Wikimedia Commons