Introduction: I am writing this as a general guide to studying for one of my exams: what I say here will be generally applicable to the entire semester. This is not a review. However, there are a few “hints” that I hope will guide your study time. You can pick up a copy of a previous exam here. My warning is that I did not write this exam, and it covers material which I will not cover in our first exam. Our first exam will cover exactly the material in Chapters 1-3, no more. Sometimes the recitations have given you a “sneak preview” into topics we will cover later. We do this so that you see some of the important topics several times during the semester. However, I will not test you on this preview material –for example I will not test you on circular motion.

Doing your best: The best way I know of to ensure your best performance on an exam is by doing problems. The only way you can know that you know something is to explain it to someone else. After studying the text I recommend that you give brief “lectures” on solving various problems. You might lecture to a buddy, or to no one at all. The trick is to hear yourself talk –if you find yourself needing to refer to the text or your notes you probably need to do additional problems. When you are ready, pick an end-of-chapter problem at random and work through it. Either have a friend choose the problem for you, or pick one yourself. Try to work the problem for your real or imagined friend on the “black board,” real or mock. Since you are pretending to solve the problem in a teaching context, don’t forget to draw all the diagrams, explain what you are doing, etc. Articulating physics out loud forces you to admit where you need to study more and will bring you great confidence when you can go through a problem from start to finish without having to look back at the text or your notes.

Avoid Post Exam Shock syndrome: “We didn’t do any problems like that in lecture, homework, or recitation”. Every physics concepts can be viewed from many sides. Except by doing problems, there is generally no way that you can otherwise view a subtle or abstract picture of a physics concepts in its entirety. It is likely that we will test your understanding of a concept by asking a question in a way you might not have seen before, at least, not if you study exclusively questions we have already asked you in homeworks, lecture, and recitation. You truly understand a concept when you can apply it in a new context, or recognize its when it is presented from a different side. In lecture and recitation we can expose you to only a small number of problem scenarios. Once again, you can increase your facility with problem solving and understand concepts better by working through as many problems as you possibly can –until they are straightforward for you.

Psych me out: The test is one hour and forty-five minutes long. I can’t ask you about everything, and I can’t ask you a lot of long and hard questions. You will do well spending some time looking over all of the course material: text, lecture notes, homeworks, recitation material (including pretest and tutorial book). What did we spend the most time on? What is repeated? Identify a topic: if I talked about it in lecture, I probably think it is important. If you had a homework problem or a few on it, I probably think it is important. If I think something is important, I probably want to know that you know it, so it will be on the exam. I can’t cover everything in lecture, and not even everything that I think is important. For example, I spent rather little time on the {i,j,k} component representation of vectors, but it’s important. Yet, you can hedge your bets by ensuring you know those topics that I emphasized. Do know that I never intentionally ask trick questions, or word them in an intentionally misleading way, and I never intentionally choose problems that cover obscure facts. So don’t waste your time looking for obscure facts to memorize.

“I understand the concepts, I just don’t understand how to do the problems; I don’t know how to get started”. If this is your voice, you may find some of the exam problems difficult, particularly the non-multiple choice problems and the problems involving math. I wish I knew the clues to make things easier for you. There is a standard set of recommendations that virtually all physics instructors tell virtually all students who make this statement. Draw a picture, label everything, write down everything that you know. Be thorough and be neat. With respect to “getting started”, understand that the “pros,” like you, don’t necessarily see their way though to the solution ahead of time either. They choose a path, follow the road, and see where it takes them. If the road is a dead-end it is time to back up and choose another route. Just like chess, however, a pro can see further ahead than a novice and very likely follow a good path. But don’t fear choosing a wrong path at first. If you are facing a problem involving math, write down a formula that at least has some of the quantities given in the problem. Also, seek a symbolic solution first, plug in numbers only after that.

Other than this standard set of recommendations we cannot tell you how to correct your difficulty directly, only indirectly. YOU have to assess your own personality, your own personal blocks to better performance. Do you have math anxiety? Do you have trouble with math concepts? Do you try to work through a problem to quickly. Do your eyes go over and over the text but the words refuse to sink into your brain. Do you easily become distracted as you attempt to read or do problems? Need to change scenery often? Are you nervous? Do you feel under pressure to do well, or have a lot of other stresses? Do understand that your personality, learning habits and characteristics will affect your ability to absorb and learn the things you need to to succeed in physics (or any class). You will do well to spend some time understanding how your own personality and circumstances affects your ability to learn. I’m afraid it might be too late to do something about it for this upcoming exam, but you can do something about it before the next one. Yet in any case, your physics instructors are not in a good position judge who you are and mitigate barriers you may have to learning the material. Our suggestions will have little to do with your personality: Hire a tutor, utilize an auxiliary text, find a book of problems and solutions on the topic or find them online. Take advantage of the many online simulators to help you see the relationship between concepts and their mathematical embodiment (like the PhET and Active Physics sites linked from the Phys 1110 home page).

What to read to know what to study. While my lectures do not regurgitate the text (at least I hope they do not), there are nevertheless tightly aligned with the text. Therefore, so will be the exam. I assume that you have read the text. Look very carefully over the summary sections of each chapter –that’s what I do before making up the exam. Notice, for example, that several of equations that I said in lecture you had to know are also in the summaries. Look at Chapter 3 summary: notice that it covers vector components. Remember how we spent a reasonably large amount of time on finding vector components parallel and perpendicular to a plane? I recommend practicing finding the components of vectors along various sets of axes (i.e., coordinate transformations). Makeup your own problems if you like. By now you probably notice the answers to odd-numbered problems are in the back of the book: having the solutions makes life a bit easier. Again, use the chapter Summaries to guide your study time.