Selective Wisdom

Some of the hardest lessons I ever learned at University were that a) no, I’m not perfect, and b) even Super Woman couldn’t get all this reading done on time.

You have to pick and choose what’s more important. Look at your course outlines and figure out how the prof handles the exams. What is the layout? How much is each question worth? A perfect example of what I am talking about is my Ancient History course. You want to try reading 50-100 pages of ancient texts for Monday’s class, then 40 more for Thursday’s class? Of course not.

My prof set the exam up so that we had to identify 3 historical readings out of 5. For each, we had to give the name of the author, the historical context, and the importance of the passage. I got away without doing the readings because I knew that the midterm would be OK with only Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch. Now Plutarch only wrote bibliographies, so that was easy. Herodotus wrote everything up to the end of the Persian War, and Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War. Each author only wrote about one topic. Knowing only this, it would be easy in the exam to identify the passage. I was able to pass up on reading hundreds of pages of reading that I had no time for.

Seriously, take a good look through your course outlines, figure out how the exams are done, and see if there are shortcuts. For most of your courses you won’t be able to do this, but if you can, I highly suggest it.