Revision Techniques

It is exam season so I thought an exam centric post would be quite relevant, yippee! There are times when an eidetic memory would come in so handy for cramming in all of this information that will only ever be useful for a period of up to two hours when I am sitting in the exam hall. I actually cannot think of any possible application for a lot of the stuff I am learning other than perhaps some names and dates that could prove useful in a very difficult and computer science based quiz.

I guess that is the most frustrating thing about the education system. The further you progress, the more specialised and advanced your knowledge becomes and in a lot of areas, science based mainly I suppose, the information is unlikely to be reused unless you eventually decide to go into a field based on the subject/module you are taking. In my case for example, computer science covers such a broad range of disciplines that a lot of courses aim to give you a brief introduction to everything and then allow you to choose which areas you prefer and would like to further specialise in.

My technique for memorising things is very straightforward although not necessarily very efficient. I use the repetition method which basically boils down to going over and over the same piece of information again and again until you remember it. It is how real life long-term memories are formed if you think about it. The way you learn language is by hearing the same noises over and over, you remember peoples names by hearing them and using them often. Of course there are other things that make learning some of these things easier than others, if you were given a paragraph of foreign text to learn by heart, it would take you significantly longer than if it were in English. Significantly longer again if it were in Cyrillics because you have no comprehension of what the symbols mean and thus you would be learning to reproduce each symbol rather than recalling the words. In my case, I have to remember a lot of algorithms and formulae, both containing various symbols which I have to translate into words or stories in order to recall them. One story in particular involves a Frenchman - wearing a beret obviously - who has an argument with his neighbour. This forms the first half of the K-Nearest-Neighbour formula and from there I can remember the rest.

The algorithms are proving much more difficult to remember at the moment because a lot of them are 10+ lines long and like the formula have to be recalled with a very high precision for it to make sense. For this, I am using abbreviations to prompt me for the lines whilst I start to learn it and I hope to be able to whittle it down gradually from a letter per every few words to a letter a line to nothing. The problem I then face is distinguishing between all of the algorithms. Already I am having this problem with the formulae as many of them share the same terms and notation, leading me to add sigmas and square roots where they are not needed. I am not panicking yet though, I still have just under a week to cram it all into my brain before the exam. My one saving grace through all of this is my improvised whiteboards and dry wipe pens that let me scribble down the formula and algorithms so that I can test myself throughout the day. I really do recommend this to people if they are having trouble memorising something because it seems far more efficient than staring at the screen. Try recalling lists and sentences from notes as you might do for a presentation. You can easily erase and change things if you get bit muddled up and it saves a lot of paper so is good for the environment as well!