When I was in secondary school and JC, I scored in some
subjects, didn't score in others. I often wonder why. Looking back
later during my uni days, I realised that there are certain habits
that effective students possess, and by adopting these habits for
myself consciously (instead of unconsciously during my earlier
years), I emerged with a stellar first class honours within the
competitive NUS Electrical Engineering faculty. And I have done
this journey with minimal tuition help.
So here I am, sharing a few tips and habits with all readers.
Hopefully, you will be able to achieve better results than I
did!
1. First and foremost, paying attention in class in important.
During my time, I paid 100% attention to subjects I liked, and was
usually half awake for subjects I didn't really like. Needless to
say, I scored for those I paid attention to with minimal efforts.
This is because teachers usually go through the different types of
questions before your exams. They know what's going to come out,
and what's not, and thus prepare you for the questions during
class. Make sure you revise and internalise (not just memorise) the
example questions beforehand.
2. Complete all your homework by yourself. Try to do as many as you
can by yourself before seeking help. This helps to drive in
concepts and methods taught in class, and assist you in mastering
them well. I have seen people copying homework instead of doing it
themselves. These people usually have to put in a much greater
effort at the end of the exams to score better, stressing
themselves out.
3. Practise even more questions from the same topic. The old adage
"practice makes perfect" holds true. With more practice comes more
confidence, leading to lesser mental blocks. Speed of doing
questions will increase, and number of careless mistakes will
decrease. These are extremely important criteria for you to achieve
spectacular exam results. You can do this by using the Ten Year
Series, past year prelim papers, assessment books, or even free
websites like ExamWorld, which provide some
free questions and solutions for students.
4. Learn from other students as well. You can do this by looking at
good works that have been marked. Look at the different comments by
the teacher, learn the different approaches to answering questions
and essays, and understand the common pitfalls to avoid them in the
future. Afterall, it's always easier to learn from others mistakes
right? This was the main method I used to improve my A level
economics essay from a fail to an eventual A. I photocopied A grade
essays from my classmates to analyse, understand their points,
their argument and analysis, etc.
5. Find and discover various ways to check your answers, especially
for hard sciences like maths and physics. Looking through your
answers and workings again is only one way of checking. Most
questions have more than 1 approach (for maths) and by using a
different approach and getting the same answer, you are more or
less assured of being correct. Other methods can include working
backwards to reach what the question wanted to you too. Or perhaps,
for proving questions, substituting a value to find that both sides
of the equation give you the same results. Or even for physics, by
remembering some constants, you can more or less know whether your
answer is reasonable a not. Example would be finding the density of
oil to be 667 kg per metres cube. Obviously oil is less dense than
water (1000 kg per metres cube), so the answer was reasonable. This
habit is extremely important, and I usually teach my tuition
students how to do so and where to look out for such "free
marks".
6. Make short notes to read an hour before your exam. Realise that
for subjects like physics, knowing and understanding the concepts
well, memorizing the equations and definitions of the different
terms, can suffice in scoring As for your exams. The knowing and
understanding the concepts should have been covered in points 1 to
4 above. The equations and definitions on your short paper are
merely to there to help refresh your memory so that you do not
stumble in exams.
7. Teach other students freely when they ask you for help. If you
can explain the question well, it truly means that you have
internalised and understood perfectly the concepts being tested in
the question. I realised during my JC time that questions other
students ask are usually of higher standards than simple questions.
By helping them, I trained my mind to be able to solve tougher
questions as well. And by being able to explain to them, I became
even more confident and sure of myself in those concepts. Take it
as a surprise test/revision that occurs frequently.
Article also found at
http://examworld.blogspot.com/2009/03/habits-of-effective-students.html
Hi. I was somebody who doesn't pay attention in class.
Fortunately my hardwork paid off.
How about for language subjects like Chinese and English?