i think the advisor is an idiot bc heres the thing, my buddy who never went to lab except for the day before an exam, he only studied netters and did questions from BRS anatomy and made med school look easy with his all A's. Actually he never showed up anywhere except for mandatory ones and only barely got B+ in 2 classes. I found that if i didnt go to class, i'd do better and less time wasted when u can do it yourself than have some foreign guy speak slowly. Actually i never went to a single biochem class in 2nd semester and got an A. Freaking A in a US state school.
Hi Jon,
It was a couple days ago when I met with my adviser for about an hour in his office. Some of his advice I've already been following (and some of might fall under the category of "everyone learns differently"), but it went something like this:
- Go to lab at least twice a week for at least 1 hour at a time.
- Take the time to quickly review each day's lecture later on that same day. (10-15 minutes max.)
- Try to review the material again the same day, if not the same day, you must do it on the weekend.
- If it takes you longer than 1 hour to make a study product, you're doing it wrong.
- Practice Questions = Make sure you reason out why each answer choice is either correct or incorrect.
- Practice Questions = Do them.
- If you're having trouble remembering a random fact in a lecture, try making a flash cards. But don't make flash cards for the entire lecture, just those bits of information.
- Just like with Glycolysis (which we've already been tested on), with the TCA Cycle and Oxidative Phosphorylation, remember to chunk the information, make sense of the root words of the enzymes that are used on every step, and relate all the information in terms of the bigger picture of substrates, products, and energy.
A lot of the information he was giving me was based off problems that other repeaters have had in the past. These students struggled with Anatomy or Biochemistry and either ended up either doing very well towards the end of 1st semester or they ended up barely passing 1st and then did great in 2nd.
Mini 3 Biochemistry Lecture Topics:
- Mendelian Inheritance
- Trinucleotide Repeat Disorders
- X-inactivation / Duchenne Muscular Dystrophe
- TCA Cycle
- Linkage Analysis
- Single Gene Disorders
- Oxidative Phosphorylation
- Bayesian Analysis
- Introduction to Receptors
- Neurotransmitter Biosynthesis
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3 comments:
Hello there,
I graduated from Ross last year and I came across your blog earlier today. Reading your post really brings back some good - and a few bad - memories of of life on the Rock!
Anyways, I noticed you've been having a few issues with the minis. You seem to devote a lot of time to studying, but still have difficulty scoring well in subjects like biochem and anatomy. Have you looked at how you approach questions on the actual exam? I used to be a really crappy test taker back in high school, but I changed my approach to how I take multiple choice exams, and by the time I got to Ross I was a pro at them.
It's something worth looking into because you're going to be taking a TON of multiple choice exams in the coming years.
Let me know if I can offer you any advice :-)
Best of luck
C
If Chris wouldn't mind sharing some test taking tips with all of us, I think it would be greatly appreciated!
Good luck with your tests, Jonathan, and please keep writing!
Hey guys,
So just a couple things that have helped me with those pesky minis.
I noticed from my time on the island that many students used to go through the test and answer questions in order. I've always found this to be an inefficient method of tackling an exam. For starters, if you encounter a question that's fairly difficult and you're unsure of the answer, you end up spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to figure it out. This leaves you with less time to answer questions that come later in the test. What I like to do is flip through the exam really quickly and answer questions that I know the answer to immediately. This serves two functions. It builds my confidence and really gets my brain rolling and jogs my memory and helps me answer some of the more difficult questions that I had trouble answering earlier in the exam. I keep flipping through answering questions out of sequence until the entire test is done.
Another important, and sometimes overlooked method of answering questions is the process of elimination. ALWAYS eliminate the wrong answer and physically cross it out on your exam. This may sound silly, but people sometimes forget to to do this. Eliminating answer choices makes you start thinking about the topic (kinda the point of tests, haha) from a variety of angles. Sometimes jogs your memory...
Oh and look for answers to one question in other questions...something that happens when you jump around ;-)
Anyways, those are just a couple quick points that helped me get through Ross. I apologize if some of doesn't make sense or is ungrammatical...im trying to write this out as quickly as possible before my battery runs out! If you want to chat more just shoot me an email at Chrisjacobi227@gmail.com.
Best of luck,
C
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