Chemical Engineering Education, 48(1), 57-58 (2014)

Dear students,
In our combined 88 years of teaching, we noticed that many
of our students made some serious mistakes when preparing
for and taking our exams. They knew the material, solved the
homework problems, and studied hard for the test, but their
grades didnt refect their knowledge or effort. We eventually
put together a handout with some tips on exams and passed it
out in our classes a week or two before the frst midterm. We
heard back from some students that the ideas helped them,
and later heard from others who had ignored us and bombed
the frst test but then took the handout seriously and did much
better on the second one. The tips followcheck them out
and use what seems relevant.
Preparing for the test
1. Avoid cramming. Grinding away on problems for hours,
especially the night before the exam, is a recipe for fail-
ure. Your brain needs time to process information, and
a lot of the most important processing occurs subcon-
sciously during sleep and breaks from studying. If you
food your brain with non-stop information, not much of
it is likely to be stored in long-term memory and most
of what is stored is unlikely to be retrievable on the test.
Instead:
2. Start studying early and take breaks. Starting a few
days before the exam, set a timer for about 30 minutes
and focus exclusively on studying during that interval
no phoning, texting, surfng, email, computer games,
TV, or anything else but studying. If possible, fnd a
place to work where those distractions cant tempt you.
When the time is up, stop, even if youre in the middle
of a problem, and reward yourself with a break. Get a
snack, take a walk, work on another course, or just re-
lax. When youre ready, do another half hour. Youll be
amazed at how often something that baffed you before
seems clear now.
3. Dont waste time on useless activities. Several common
test preparation strategies have been shown to have little
or no effect on grades. Highlighting sentences in texts
and passively reading worked-out problem solutions
top the list. Highlighting is quick, and if it gives you the
illusion that youre accomplishing something useful, go
for it. Reading old solutions chews up time, though, and
there are much better ways to spend the limited amount
you have. So how should you prepare?
4. Practice solving as many different problems as you
can. Work through old homework problems, unassigned
problems in the course text, and old exams. Set up the
solutions, but dont bother doing all the algebra and
Richard M. Felder is Hoechst Celanese
Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineer-
ing at North Carolina State University. He is
co-author of Elementary Principles of Chemi-
cal Processes (Wiley, 2005) and numerous
articles on chemical process engineering
and engineering and science education,
and regularly presents workshops on ef-
fective college teaching at campuses and
conferences around the world. Many of his
publications can be seen at <www.ncsu.edu/
effective_teaching>.
Random Thoughts . . .
TIPS ON TEST-TAKING*
Richard M. Felder
North Carolina State University
James E. Stice
University of Texas
James E. Stice is Bob R. Dorsey Professor
of Engineering (Emeritus) at the University of
Texas-Austin. He was the founding director of
the UT Center for Teaching Effectiveness. He
has been chairman of the Chemical Engineer-
ing Division, vice president, and active in the
Educational and Research Division of ASEE.
He has received 12 awards for engineering
teaching at UT, and the Chester F. Carlson,
Donald E. Marlowe, Lifetime Achievement
in ChE Pedagogical Scholarship, ERM Dis-
tinguished Service, and Benjamin Garver
Lamme Awards from ASEE. He is a Fellow
and a Life Member of ASEE, a Distinguished Alumnus of the University
of Arkansas, and of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Copyright ChE Division of ASEE 2014
* Some of the ideas to be presented were inspired by material in Oakley,
B. (in press), A Mind for Numbers. New York: Tarcher-Penguin.
Vol. 48, No. 1, Winter 2014 58
number-crunching. Those things take a lot of time and
you dont learn much from them.
5. If you have old exams, dont limit your studying to
them. The problems on the test coming up will almost
certainly be different.
6. If youve been told to draw a diagram for a type of
problem, do it again and again. While its tempting to
skip the preliminaries and just start writing equations,
taking a few minutes to sketch that free-body diagram or
fow chart or any other recommended visualization tool
can turn killer problems into trivial ones.
7. After youve worked out a really hard problem, try
outlining the solution without looking back. Once you
can do that, you own that problem and others like it.
8. Study in small groups. Make sure your study group
contains only students who are serious about studying,
ideally including some at your ability level or better.
Leave the beer in the refrigerator until youre done
studying.
9. Make up a one-page summary sheet of the key terms,
ideas, formulas, etc., that you might need to know on
the test. If the test is closed-book, know whats on the
sheet. If its open-book, bring the sheet with you and
add page numbers of key fgures and tables.
10. Try to get a reasonable amount of sleep the night
before the exam. (See Item 1.) If thats not possible, at
least try to get a brief nap: it might be enough to keep
your brain functional long enough to get through the
test.
11. If the exam is frst thing in the morning, set up back-
ups for your alarm clock and transportation. Set a sec-
ond alarm, or arrange for a wake-up call. If you live off
campus, leave early so you have time to call someone to
pick you up if your car wont start.
12. Bring everything you need to the exam. Make a list
the day before and go through it before you leave in
the morning. Include your text if the exam is open-
book, several pencils with erasers, handouts, and a fully
charged calculator, smartphone, or portable computer if
youre allowed to use one on the test.
Taking the Test
13. Read over the whole test before writing anything.
Choose the problem or question that seems easiest to
you and do it frst, then choose the next easiest, and so
on. Youll get the easiest points quickly and gain conf-
dence as you move into the harder stuff.
14. Read each problem/question carefully and make sure
you deliver everything asked for. Few things are more
frustrating than wasting time on an impossible problem
because you ignored a small detail in the problem state-
ment, or losing major points because you forgot to do an
easy calculation.
15. Show your work. Give enough detail so that the grader
can easily see what youre doing. Even if you can do the
problem in your head and just write the answer down,
dont. If youre wrong, you get a zero; if youre right,
you could be suspected of cheating.
16. Watch the signifcant fgures. Some instructors dont
appreciate answers like 23.694028, even though its
exactly what the calculator says.
17. Think partial credit. Try to put something down for
every part of every problem. If you dont have time to
completely solve a problem, outline what youd do if
you had more time.
18. STAY IN MOTION, and budget your time. Work on a
problem until you get stuck. Think about it for a minute
or two, and if nothing comes to you then drop it and go
on to another problem. Dont spend 30 minutes sweat-
ing out an additional fve points on a problem and run
out of time, leaving a 40-point problem untouched. You
may have time to return to the frst one and youre much
more likely to see how to do it then.
19. If you dont understand a question, ask the instructor/
proctor for help. You might get some, and it never hurts
to try.
20. Dont panic. If you feel yourself blanking out or hy-
perventilating, put down your pencil, close your eyes,
take a few deep breaths, and consciously relax clenched
muscles (jaw, neck, stomach) for 1020 seconds. When
youre calmer, go back to work.
21. If you have time at the end, check your solutions.
Did you answer every part of every question? Do your
answers seem reasonable? Can you check them?
22. Hand in your paper when time is called. Nothing ir-
ritates an instructor/proctor more than having to wrestle
you to the foor to get your paper.
Good luck.
RF/JS
P.S. What if you do those things and still do poorly on the
test? Try flling out the questionnaire at <www.ncsu.edu/
felder-public/Columns/memo.pdf>. If you check more than
one or two no answers, you may get some insights into
what you did wrong this time and avoid doing it next time. p
All of the Random Thoughts columns are now available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.ncsu.edu/effective_teaching and at www.che.uf.edu/CEE.