Hi everyone,
It seems enough students are having trouble with the quizzes and exams that I wanted to give
some pointers/suggestions if you haven’t been happy so far with your performance.
What is your goal for this class? Do you just want credit or do you need to have a certain grade
for it? You could speak with your academic advisor about changing to a CR/NC option. This
option comes with advantages and disadvantages so you should consider carefully whether
changing the grading mode would be to your benefit. For one, you must have at least a C (not
C-) in the class to attain a CR at the end of the semester. Without a CR you don’t get credit for
the class. A CR doesn’t affect your GPA at all. If you stay with the letter grade option, a C- or
lower does affect your GPA but you can still achieve credit for the course as long as it’s not an F.
A CR/NC option might also affect how other schools/scholarships calculate your credits and GPA
if that might affect you. Like I said, speak with your advisor about it.
If you want to improve your performance on the quizzes and exams I have some general study
advice and some that is specific to this class:
General Study Tips:
• Write notes/study notes.
Rewrite them. Make flashcards. You will remember it better if you
handwrite it rather than type it. This advice is almost universally applicable,
although there may be some people for whom auditory language is
preferable. In that case, recording yourself saying your notes for you to listen
to again may be more helpful.
• Teach someone else.
Get a study partner (a classmate or other willing victim) and take turns
teaching each other a concept. Nothing helps you realize you don’t
understand a concept better than trying to explain it to someone else. If
enough students are interested, contact me about forming an independent
study group and I can put something together for students to sign up on
Learn.
• Change study environment
Don’t always study in the same place. If you always studied in our
classroom it might be most helpful but since that would be difficult to
accomplish, making sure you study in different environments can help
(your room, a different part of the house, the library, computer pod, a
café, an empty classroom, etc.)
• Avoid distractions
Even music can be too distracting for some people…TV or videos on “in
the background” doesn’t help.
• Don’t cram
This is why your Mastery Training works the way it does. You learn better
by spreading the studying out over time (sleeping in between study
sessions helps too).
• Study challenging topics first or last
• Use mnemonics
• Draw pictures
Study Advice Particular to our class:
• Do your MindTap assignments for each chapter along with our talking about that
chapter in class. Make sure you have at least completed them before the quiz
on that material. If you continue to struggle with learning the material, keep
doing the Mastery Training past the 1.0 goal. You won’t attain further points but
you can keep using Mastery Training as a study tool as long as you want to (up
until the deadline of the night before the Exam).
• You can also use the nongraded assignments in our textbook to test yourself and
see how you are learning the material. Each chapter has what are called
Comprehension Checks. You can find them directly in the Table of Contents or
they are embedded within the text. Click on the little down arrow at the top right
corner of the box to start the assignment. There are other little labs and lab
quizzes you can try out in each chapter. None of these are counted towards your
grade so nothing you do on them can hurt your points.
• Treat your 3” x 5” index card that you are allowed to have in a quiz/exam for
each chapter as a work in progress. Create many of them and study with them.
When you feel like you know certain material on them, take that material off and
start working on creating a final card that has the most pertinent material on it
that you can’t seem to always recall.
• ALWAYS watch the video debrief of past quizzes. On Exam 1 there were several
questions that were directly taken from past quizzes. Still people got those
questions wrong even though I go over the correct answers for all the quiz
questions on the debrief.
• Come to class. Sometimes iclicker questions in class will end up on a quiz or
exam, but whether they do or not, more importantly is lecture will always be
covering important topics that will be covered on quizzes and exams.
• If you haven’t yet, watch the video in Introduction & Orientation to the Course
on Learn about How to Use your E-Book. There are tips in there on how to
utilize your textbook to work better for you, like how to have the book read to
you if you like to listen to text or how to make flashcards from the book.
• If I give an extra credit option after a quiz or exam that is designed to give you
another shot at learning and demonstrating your knowledge of certain material,
take it.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have questions.
Dr. Thomson
