#exam experiment, anticipating questions.

This week, I had a Chapter 7 exam in Japanese 102. It's one of my hardest courses, since there are too many things to memorize and understand at the same time. I, therefore, always felt so frustrating before the Japanese Chapter Quiz. This time, however, I learned how to prepare for an exam at CLS 105 class. At the LAME (Learner, action, material and evaluation), I knew that I was an idealist and kinesthetic learner. I'm a student who needs to focus on learning things by doing actual activities and need to try something that I haven't done before. Therefore, I used was the anticipating of an exam question. I never did this strategy before. I realized at this time that this really helped me to prepare for an exam. I first checked the date of my test as D's and Do organizer and made sure the date I needed to study the test. Then, I used problem solving strategy, and made a list of things to choose what I needed to study first. Then, I highlighted all the important information at the syllabus. Then I could be sure about format of the test, and what would be covered on the test. By looking at highlighting the JPS 102 syllabus, I made sure that the format of the test would be writing the correct grammar and therefore I needed to focus on grammar, not really the vocabularies. After knowing all the information, I made a graphic organizer. I wrote all the grammars I needed to know in one chart.
I did the graphic organizer in two ways. One way was to put important information in the chart, and the other way was to put information in the connecting circles. The first way, to make a chart, was more helpful to me because there was a limit to draw the connecting chart and it was clearer to put information in the chart than the circles. Before, I just went over the pages of the book and I couldn't really concentrate on it. By organizing information with the graphic organizer, it made me much easier to study, since I could see all the grammars at one time and I only put the important thing that I needed to know.






Then, I started to anticipate the question. By doing a graphic organizer, I was sure what the important information was. I used the text book, class notes, and the previous exam I took to anticipate the question. For Japanese exam, even though I was taking only Chapter 7 exam, I needed to cover all the information from Chapter 1 to 7. Therefore, looking at previous exam and what I got wrong on that test was very helpful to prepare an exam, and also to anticipate the question. I especially looked at the high-lighting part at the text book and the class note. Then, I put some anticipated questions on the notes.

What I surprised was that there were some questions come at the actual test, which I anticipated. I really found out the strategy of this anticipating question, because if I hadn't done this, I would write some wrong answers. It took much more time to study with the anticipating test questions, because there were many things to organize, but as a result, I got much better grade. Also, combining three strategies, D's and Due organizer, problem solving, and the anticipating questions, it became much easier to study effectively. I no more needed to waste time now!