Preparing for an exam

When an exam comes up, I usually study a day or two before the exam. I will stay up until around 3 or 4 a.m., studying the materials that will be in the exam. There will be times when I need to struggle with the textbooks and the notes I took in class, because I do not remember most of the informations that are in front of me. I will then grab the book or the note and just stare at it for a while until I understand or remember what the material is. Making a review sheet or an outline? There was no time for me to make those kind of things. I know that this was not the right way to study for an exam, but I couldn't help it. I do not review the materials that was covered in class and do not study until the last moment.

When I was about to change my way of studying, we learned a strategy about exam preparation. I thought that this was a good chance to change my method of studying for an exam: studying the night before the exam to studying about a week before the exam. Luckily, I have an Astronomy exam very soon, so I thought that i would try the exam prep for this exam, since I need a good grade for this course.

This is one of the materials that will be in the exam, an H-R diagram, which is in the astronomy textbook. It is a diagram that shows the temperature and the luminosity of a star. There is pretty a lot of informations to know in this section, so I made study guides about this diagram. I used two strategies for this section: a graphic diagram and making a question.

The first strategy I used was a graphic diagram. Using the note and the informations from the textbook, I made a graphic diagram about the H-R diagram.

This is my graphic diagram that I made; it might be more accurate to say that it is a summary for the H-R diagram. I categorized the main topics into several parts and wrote them in green. I then listed the details of the topics next to the topic. The details are the definition or the information of the topics. The part that is written in red is an addition information that is related to the material. This diagram helps me to look at the materials and the informations more easily than looking at the H-R diagram and the several paragraphs of informations in the textbook. I memorized most of the informations by just making the graphic diagram!!
The second strategy I used was creating my own exam questions. I made 10 questions about the H-R diagram and some other materials that we learned in class. Based on the previous exam that I took few weeks ago, I tried to made the practice questions as similiar as possible. I wrote the question and wrote several choices that might appear. I also wrote down several traps in the choices. I made up some choices; the red choices are the answer part. This was also a big help to me studying because I could guess the traps that might appear in the exam. Also, I could know the exact answer without being confused with other choices.

By using these two strategies, I was able to memorize most of the materials while making the study guides. Because Astronomy is about the universe and the stars that has great amount of informations, there is a lot of methods and materials to understand and memorize. In the previous exam, I spend several hours struggling with the textbooks and the notes the day before the exam, which was not really effectively. The course did not gave out review sheets, so I also had a hard time studying for the exam. However, with these study guides (of course, I need to make more with other materials), I now can look the the materials more easily without going through the large amount of text and notes. These strategies really helped me study effectively, and will try to continue use these strategies.