How to study maffs effectively

Starting this week, I'll try to write a somewhat long blog post every Saturday.  Mostly about studying maths, preparing for exams and so on, but may also include tips on taking care of yourself during the exam season.  We never know. Let me know if you have any suggestions! c:

How to study maths

Have you ever spent sooooo much time revising for a test without making any progress?

Have you ever felt that maths is too hard and you can never know maths well?

Have you ever had false confidence the day before the test that you could answer virtually everything but couldn’t recall anything on the day of the test?

This post aims to make your study sessions more effective and eventually increase your confidence in maths.

 

Disclaimer: I’ve tried all of the methods I outlined in the upcoming sections but it doesn’t mean the tricks that work for me would work for you. If you’ve had a study method that you’re happy with, perhaps read this article for inspiration. If you aren’t happy with your current study method, maybe it’s worth considering some ideas I’ve thrown here.  And if you don’t wanna do work and still want a decent grade, just get out. Honestly.  There’s no free lunch.

 

1.      Take notes!

Some people say that taking notes isn’t necessary because they can find better notes online. Fair enough, but you’ve lost yourself opportunities to engage with the maths. This is especially true when you’re studying the material on your own.  You have to spend time with the maths, engage with the maths and specifically note the things that usually catch you off guard.

 

2.      Do your homework

In IB, and later in university, many teachers and instructors will assign you a fair amount of homework, perhaps 10-30 questions per week, if not more. If it’s somewhere between 10 and 30, I’d strongly advise you to do all of them. If it’s more than 30, your instructor probably assigns homework just for the sake of it. Pick around 20 of them to do and honestly, use other tools to answer the remaining questions. Practising is good but over-practising can be a waste of time.

 

3.      Making homework more bearable

You’ve finally found thirty minutes or so to crack on with the homework.
Now we have two problems to solve:

• How to make the most of the 30-minute session?
• How to make homework more bearable?

 

First question: from your own experience, design your own study space that you’re most productive in. For me, when I’m doing maths homework, I tend to listen to EDM. Sometimes light, say, Kupla, or sometimes more intense, say,  YOASOBI. No Camellia please; that’s too much for me to handle along with intense cognitive work. And I usually put a single song on repeat. Once you get into the flow, you stop paying attention to the music. It’s just a mechanism to get you started. And you never know, perhaps you get half the PSet or the entire PSet finished.

 

Second question: I’d use questions that have an answer key. Not worked solutions. Here’s why. When you’re just starting out, your confidence in a topic is pretty low because you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t think you know what you’re doing. It’s perfectly okay to take a peek at the answer key to know whether you’ve answered the question correctly. If you don’t, either check your calculations or reread your notes. Worked examples in textbooks are also very useful, so go over them if you feel like you’re lost.

 

When you have a worked solution in front of you, there’s a tendency to copy the solution or to nod along while you’re reading and think that everything makes perfect sense until you realise you couldn’t reproduce the work at a later time.

Pro tip for uni kids

If your school uses Webwork, pay attention to the number of attempts the instructor allows you.

If it’s unlimited, you may consider giving it an honest try then try all the possible options for MCQs. Series questions can be a fucking pain in the ass, as you’re asked to test for convergence for 6 series and if you get one wrong you might not get any credit. Just think about the trade-off between your time answering the question vs testing your luck.

Also don't try to do the entire problem set in one sitting! Split them up and give yourself some motivation (besides grades, of course, we know you're all obsessed with it) to get the bread.

 

4.       How many exercises should I do?

This is entirely subjective.

Personally, I’d stop doing exercises when I can answer three or four of them confidently without errors. When you’re making errors, it’s a sign that you’re experiencing cognitive overload because you’re answering the question (the most extensive part) but losing accuracy in the minutia (tiny details) because the latter isn’t too important.

 

Secondly, if you can answer questions harder than the ones that would show up on your tests or exams, you’re golden. The exam will take care of itself if you’re way higher than what’s expected of you.

 

I’ll write another post on revising for tests and exams, but here’s an advice that has worked for me: practise until you can answer a question within ½ of the allotted time. If you’re given, say, 5 minutes for the question on the test, answer it in 2 ½ minutes when you’re practising. This will give you a lot of buffers for test anxiety and you’ll have time at the end of the test to double check everything.

 

Last notes.

None of my advice would work if you don’t bother spending time doing your homework. I can guarantee you that most people who don’t do their homework fail the course, and this is even more important when you’re in uni. If you don’t do your Webworks kiddos, you’ll fail the course. Point final.

 

Best of luck with your revision!