A few questions to help me please: What is exactly revision? Doing X Assignments or the QA bank, or the Pastpapers or all three. How many weeks before the exam do you start revision. And what is the state of your knowledge before revision. (Excellent, wobbly, weakish, poor) thanks
Hi, I'd say revision comes after reading the material for the first time, doing the Q&A bank and reading through the material again for understanding. Revision refers to, in my humble opinion, doing the X assignments (of course if you send these for marking, then these would have already been done...it's just a case of revisiting then), doing atleast 4 papers and then reading through the notes again to practise on the proofs/definitions/formulae. If that's not sufficient for a pass, then I'd really be bamboozled on how much studying is really required by a working-studying student... The above should take 2 months to complete if it takes on average 2 working days to cover a chapter (in the first reading) from my calcs. What do your'll think? I also need help on revision time cos that's my greatest downfall at the moment...thus far, I never managed to do more than a single exam paper thoroughly, due to the QA and Assignments...am I a victim of procrastination or underestimation? Goku
I get no study leave from work and my memory is shocking so I would say my current average revision time is around a week... Note: Don't try this at home kids!
lol Good post. So is there a consesus that the QA bank is part of study and not revision? And how much time does it take all you students to do revision per subject and by giving how many hours per day?
Thanks! For my CT4 revision, firstly I started studying only when I got back from an overseas pilgrimage on the 1Aug07. I first read through the material very slowly for understanding - that took around a month to do. So from 3rd September I started with the QA...during all of this I was involved in some major projects at work and things were really hectic at work - working 10-12 hour days was the norm. Anyway, if memory serves me correct, I finished up with all of the QA's in approx 3 weeks (not what I planned for...I actually planned for 2 weeks). So for the remaining 1.5 weeks to exam, I spent around 5 days for revision and then attempted and completed the X Series of assignments. I then spent the last day (yep that's right, quit late huh!) doing a past paper (yep that means only 1) and cramming in some formula's on exposed to risk and most importantly at the time Methods of Graduation and the next chapter (Ch13). So there you have it! I know that my study plan above was not the most efficient (infact, it wasn't efficient at all in my opinion), but what do you do? Ignoring the QA and moving on the X Series would have made more sense but aren't the QA's vital for digesting what was learnt in the initial reading. However, doing the X Series helped ALOT as it was filled with some really mean, nasty questions and gave me a real wake-up call on the level of understanding required. I still feel I should have done atleast 3 exam papers and should have read through my notes one last time, but alas it's over now. I'm glad that this exam had some questions that could be 80% answered, as opposed to the last one where I spent ages thinking of X and Y chromosomes, how reproduction takes place and what the actual state space was. Needless to say, I still couldn't get the state space when I did the exam again during my revision (just shows that for somethings, you either understand it and get 100%, or 0% if you don't). However for the last question and the Deuce-advantage question, I know I could have done better if I applied a student's advice on this forum who said that it's better to do what you know first. But I'd also really like to know how you guys went about preparing for that exam as this exam is generally a proxy for the others such as CT8, CT5 and CT6 i.t.o of difficulty. Please provide as detailed a response as possible - it will certainly benefit us all. Goku
