You get your test back, and you can’t believe you got that one question wrong. You ask you prof, “Isn’t my answer correct?” and you show your prof the highlighted textbook passage that proves your case. Your prof says, “Yes, your answer is correct, but it’s not the best answer.” Your silent response: WTF??
The “best” answer: the bane of conscientious students. How are you supposed to judge what’s best and what’s merely right? What does it even mean for one correct answer to be better than another correct answer? For all of you who have fallen victim to the best, I offer this taxonomy of the less-than-best.
- The uninterestingly true answer. Any halfway decent exam question is trying to get at some halfway interesting scientific point. If you read an answer to which your first reaction is, “Duh,” keep looking for better answers. Look for the most interesting (and by interesting, I mean most relevant to other scientific concepts and explanations) answers. Hint: interestingness is occasionally positively correlated with wordiness. Example: Oxygen is (a) a substance, (b) an element, or (c) a highly electronegative element.
- The partially true answer. If an answer gets at only part of what’s interesting about some concept, expect other answers also to be correct — and then look for an answer that reads, “All of the above,” or, “A, C, and D are true.” Example: Ribosomes are (a) made of amino acids, (b) made of carbohydrates, (c) made of RNA, or (d) made of amino acids and RNA.
- The accidentally true answer. Deserts (a) tend to have high biodiversity, (b) can be found at high latitude, (c) have very low precipitation, or (d) have intermediate to high precipitation. Clearly (c) is correct. But the Antarctic polar desert is also a desert, so (b) is also technically correct. Will your prof remember that there’s a desert at 90 degrees south? It depends on what sort of class it is, but I guarantee that the prof remembers that deserts have low precipitation. So choose (b) at your own risk. You might get the points or not, but at least you’ll know deep down that you got it right.
The main thing to keep in mind is that you must read all of the choices before choosing one. Don’t despair of having to read the prof’s mind, because you don’t have to. Simply remember that scientists are less concerned with true and false than they are with more interesting and less interesting.
Filed under: tips | Tags: concept maps, definitions, exams, sleep, The Big Picture
Students here are starting to think about final exams. You’ll get no lectures from me about how the time to think about finals is all semester. In my mind, in the ideal world you work your butt off for all the quizzes and midterms, and then the final is cake.
That’s no consolation for those of you who don’t live in my pedagogical fantasy world, so here’s concrete advice for your concrete world.
- Party. Get three or four of your classmates together. Order a couple of pizzas. Resolve to talk about nothing but science, and then do that: talk about nothing but science. Quiz each other. Predict exam questions. Find a blaockboard and draw a few concept maps. There’s no substitute for studying in a group, partly because you keep each other awake and engaged, and partly because the only way to see the gaps in your knowledge is to have other people point them out.
- Think big-picture. The final exam is the prof’s opportunity to pull some threads together, to explore how entire textbook chapters relate to each other. Think about some of these big-picture issues. A good way to start your thinking: try to figure out why you were required to learn what you learned. How did learning about polar covalent bonds help you later to understand protein structure? How does understanding protein structure help you understand Mendelian genetics? And why bother understanding Mendelian genetics, anyway? Sometimes the real answer is, “Because it fills out the semester,” but usually it’s something like, “Because it’s part of understanding some other big thing.” Like inheritance patterns of human genetic diseases.
- Study sentences, not definitions. The time for definitions is over. It’s now time for you to which contexts call for which words and phrases. (Even if you’re shaky on the definitions, learning how scientists actually use the words will help you shore up the definitions.) Read textbook chapters out loud, and pay attention to how the boldfaced words are used. Look for fine distinctions among related terms, and try to internalize them. Practice using the terms casually in conversation.
- Teach. During your pizza party, take turns teaching key concepts in detail and at length. Do it as an imitate-the-prof contest, play Keyword Bingo, whatever. Nothing is as good at moving information into long-term memory as forming sentences and then physically saying those sentences.
- Sleep. No all-nighters. Questions on final exams are frequently big synthesis questions, so the most important thing is to keep your mind sharp. A good night’s sleep does that.
