As the calendar flips to March, the weather gets a little warmer, the days last a little longer, and classes get a lot harder. It’s time for midterms, and most NYU collegiettes don’t exactly rejoice as the difficult exams/projects/papers approach. Rather than procrastinate and stress over last minute preparation, use these tips to make midterm season just a little less exasperating.
Start Early:
Rather than try to figure out all of the material that is going to appear on an exam the night before you take it, organize your notes before you start the studying process. Go through the syllabus and make sure that you have the full notes from each lecture. If you missed a class, be sure to get the notes from somewhere else so that there won’t be any gaps in your studying.
“I’ve never missed a class except for a lab check…once,” said Nura Anwar, a junior in CAS. Right after the miss, “I emailed my professor.”
Go to Office Hours:
If anything about the midterm description is unclear, be sure to go and take advantage of either your Professor’s or your TA’s office hours. A lot of collegiettes don’t even know where their TA’s office is, but making that visit could be the difference between an A and a B+. Professors don’t intend for midterm assignments to be vague or confusing, but sometimes they just come out that way. Rather than bang your head against the wall trying to figure out what you need to do to pass, go and ask the people that actually know.
“One big problem is that students struggle and they get embarrassed and they don’t come to office hours,” said Daniel DiMaggio, a PhD student at NYU and former TA. “They don’t deal with the problem and it just gets worse.”
Make a Schedule:
Create a plan so that you can make sure you have the necessary time to review all your notes. If you find there are aspects of the material that you still struggle with, a schedule will allot for time to get them clarified.
Make sure to leave time in your schedule for relaxation and stress-busting activities. Go to the gym, go get coffee, go to dinner with a friend. By taking a break, you are giving your mind the opportunity to absorb the material. This could make returning to the previous section a little less frustrating.
Sleep:
One of the biggest mistakes collegiettes can make is not sleeping the night before a midterm exam. According to Jennifer C. Cousins, a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in a 2009 article from the Science Daily, “poor sleep and poor sleep habits are associated with substance use, emotional problems, cognitive problems and a general decline in daily functioning.”
By getting a good nights sleep before an exam, you will be much more alert and able to deal with difficult questions. Going into a midterm exhausted may make you unable to properly follow test directions, cause you to miss an important part of the question, or result in forgetting crucial information that you actually knew. If you still do not know the material by the night before, then you probably won’t know it when you take the test.
Overview:
Midterms are stressful; there is no escaping that fact. However, midterms are not designed to make you insane. Being smart about midterms will allow you to get through them without failing, getting sick, or experiencing overwhelming symptoms of stress.