Throughout my time here, I have learned no other advice would be so valuable. At the time, I didn’t really understand what she meant. ![]() She encouraged me to study the concepts as opposed to just knowing how to do the problems. I recalled everything I did to study and was surprised when she told me the way I prepared was ineffective (ouch, right?). The next lecture I talked to my professor. I really thought I had put in all the work necessary to get an A. I felt really upset leaving the exam, I thought “Why would they test us on questions we have never seen before, they’re setting us up to fail.”Ī week later, I got the exam back and I was really disappointed. At the end of the exam, there were problems I had never seen before and had no idea how to solve. As I got toward the end of the exam, problems got harder but were manageable. I remember the first part of the exam was a review of the homework and I felt really good. ![]() I was set and ready to take this exam.ĭuring the exam, I was expecting to see the same problems that were on the homework just with different numbers (because that was how all previous math tests I had taken were like). I went to class every day, did my homework (and understood it), went to tutoring, and studied for about three-ish hours before the exam. So this class I thought was going to be easy just got 10 times harder. Turns out, the entire calculus sequence at Illinois is taught without a calculator (for reasons which I learned to appreciate later but in the moment I was devastated). I had taken pre-calc in high school, so I figured the class would be mostly review and I would do fine. My first-ever midterm was for my pre-calc class. As you can probably guess where this is going, I was wrong! I figured if I just kept my same studying routine as in high school I should be just fine. In high school, I never found exams very difficult. So you might be thinking “I’ve taken a ton of exams throughout high school (or at a previous college for my transfer students), how is this any different?” I had this exact same mindset when I came to Illinois. I was wrong, exams are the same as midterms and vice versa. Tension is high at Illinois as everyone tries to prepare.įun Fact: I had no idea “midterms” was synonymous to “exams.” When I first started at Illinois, I always thought there was only one midterm in the middle of the term and exams were spread out between the midterm and the final. It’s the end of Week 4 and normally around this time everyone has an exam, paper, presentation, etc. It seems like classes started literally yesterday and I am already prepping for my first set of midterms.
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