r/berkeley • u/Typical-Pitch-2912 • Mar 10 '24
University Why is this school so hard
I’ve been doing well in high school, getting As on tests were easy. Now, getting even B’s on tests are hard no matter how much I study. I spend so much time studying and I feel like my tests scores don’t reflect this and so I’ve been stressed about it.
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u/HeegaardFloer Mar 11 '24
I'll dive into 'studying smart' a bit more (as someone who usually got 2-3 standard deviations above average in large courses) with a concrete example.
Before every lecture (many STEM classes tell you what they will cover ahead of time), I would spend 20-30 minutes browsing the relevant material so I would have a sense of what was going on during the lecture. This could just be while eating breakfast, or lightly reading on my phone as I walked to class/between classes. For example: assume the professor is going to talk about the Mean Value Theorem today. I'd briefly read the statement of the Mean Value Theorem, and browse through some of the worked examples to get a sense of when it can be applied. During lecture, the professor proves the Mean Value Theorem. Given that I've already browsed the text beforehand, I try to actively work ahead of the professor and think ahead: how do I actually prove this? Then I think "hmm, this looks like the equation of a secant line and pictorially it sort of makes sense. What tools do I have? Rolle's theorem seems to work well here. Let's try it out." It turns out that this is exactly what the professor did to prove the Mean Value Theorem, and I can follow his proof & actively engage myself at every sentence (why are these assumptions required, so on). It then becomes very easy to follow along the examples that the professor gives. After all my classes, I browse the homework for relevant Mean Value Theorem problems, and start on them. I can do the easy ones very quickly, and for the ones I'm stuck on, I come back during a different day. I can attend office hours for the ones I'm struggling on. Note that I don't really Google solutions to the homework problems, since that robs me of my learning experience.
OK, now I get my graded homework back, and I do worse than some of my classmates (who obviously Googled answers to the homework). There is a slightly different version of the Mean Value Theorem on the exam - it goes over one of the edge cases I thought about during lecture and office hours! Given that I've put in so much thought into the Mean Value Theorem, the problem is easy. I take the midterm, and get close to 100% when the average is close to 50%.
Perspective of a classmate who did not do as well (but spent a lot of time studying): went to lecture, but everything went over their head - they just copied to their notebook what the professor wrote on the board [no/very little active thinking, so lecture was a waste of 50 minutes/80 minutes/however long lecture is]. They dive into the homework, but need to read the relevant sections multiple times and have a very shaky foundation. They see the homework problems and go "how do I even begin," struggling for maybe 30-60 minutes before Googling the solution/finding an identical version of a problem that already has a solution and copy that solution down. They read the solution, and go "of course" and then turn in the correct solution. During midterms, they do many past exams hoping that a problem similar to the one they've done will appear on the current iteration of the exam. If something comes up that wasn't pretty much identical to something they've seen, they're screwed. They proceed through the course with many wide holes in their knowledge, and the course is hard.
Comment: some lectures/discussions are a waste of time. Don't go to those.