Chem Exam Prep

[ThunderDragon]

Hey everyone

Would you say writing and creating your own notes for Chemistry is necessary to get a good score or should I just focus on doing textbook work, questions and prac exams at this point?

[keltingmeith]

There is no one recipe for doing well in exams - and I'm sure you aware of this, hopefully I'm not coming across as too rude in saying that. What you should do to prepare for chemistry is entirely up to you and how you work best.

For example, I once used to score really well in English by drawing graphs. I'm not even kidding, I would draw the essay structure of a text response in mathematical form so I could graph it and understand it. The first time I ever did that, I went from a C student to full marks for text response. Nobody could have told me that this was a good idea - my English teacher was even worried about me because I discovered this while having a panic attack IN class.

I just really want to emphasise the point - you should do what seems to work for helping you improve scores. What you should be doing - regardless of the subject - is doing some sort of exam or test. Maybe it's a practice exam, maybe it's an AN topic test, but some sort of evaluation tool with a score that you can compare to. Then what you should do, is do things that you think help you learn. For example - for me, writing notes is incredibly useful, and I find helps me to really consolidate information. But I don't just write things down. I plan out how the notes will look, write headings, colour code everything I'm writing, highlight basically everything in five different colours. I have a friend who this didn't work for. They'd read the material and be able to regurgitate it - but they could never understand from there how to apply it to questions, so they would instead focus on all the types of questions they could find and just do those so he had a better understanding of what was being thrown at him.

So that's what you should do - study the way that you think works for you. Once you've done your first "evaluation test", ask yourself where you went wrong - did you not understand a bunch of basic definitions? Did you just not know how to answer the question? Did you maybe spend far too long focusing on questions instead of being able to click quickly how to do them? Then, focus on study that helps you combat those weaknesses. After you've done that, do another "evaluation test", figure out where you've gone wrong, rinse and repeat.