There is something to be said about cramming for a test. Hmm let’s see I have 20 chapters to cover for the final exam. How should I attack this one? I could read a chapter a day then go over the homework one time. Yeah maybe that should cover it. Or battle plan #2, you do a read-a -thon and plow through the book until you reviewed all the topics. Even stuff that you didn’t pay attention to the entire semester. So you take chapter one through 20 and put it between two sesame seed buns and devour it. Yum! You have been up all night and you still don’t understand the sum of squares. Or logistic regression. Never mind what chapter 5 is about I will just keep studying because that is what I am suppose to do.
Listen, it’s a few weeks before your final exam. Let’s jam! What you should do – try to understand the purpose of each topic. Why is that topic important? What does something like the sum of squares or logistic regression give you? Can you interpret an example? Another words, can you read a word problem and decipher what needs to be done? Can you interpret the calculations? Please recognize when you are wasting your time. If you master a homework problem, maybe you don’t need to practice that same type of problem until midnight? I can say this is true particularly of a statistics class. Because an outcome variable can follow different types of probability distributions – you can run into redundancy a lot. So here is what I suggest…take a piece of blank paper and write down the equations for each chapter (along with an example). Go over that ‘summary sheet’ until you know it cold.
If you enjoyed this short blog there is more to follow.-Amy
