Exams

 

FRS 100: Freshman Seminar

Lesson 7: Exams
Sept. 30, 2002

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following without consulting notes or other resources:

  • Write a clear, thorough identification.
  • Write a well-organized, detailed, and clear in-class essay.
  • Define or identify relevant terms.

Assignments

Before coming to class on Monday, you should complete the following assignments:

Read “How to Prepare for Exams” in Making Your Mark.

Publish a partial draft of your life plan.

Activities

Our class activities this week include the following:

 

Think Fast: Take the practice exam I distribute in class.

Presentations: Writing Center (Kyle Jackle, Jeff Jerome, Jarrin Josue), Disability Support Services (Chris Korey, Courtney Leone, Jason Locklear)

Discussion: During this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged during the “Think Fast” exercise and presentations.

Think Again: Use this time to work on your Life Plan and post your most recent draft on the World Wide Web.

Conferences: While the rest of you are working on the “Think Again” exercise, I will meet with two of you in one-on-one conferences.  During this time, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you on lesson objectives, and field your questions.

Announcements: We will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as well as other relevant subjects.

Terms

Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:

  • identification
  • essay

Resources

You can pursue the objectives in this lesson further by consulting the resource listed below:

Study Skills for Learning Power discusses, among other things, techniques for taking exams. 

Power Learning, a book by psychologist Robert S.  Feldman, features a chapter on taking exams. 

Updated September 24, 2002
© Mark Canada, 2002
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Introduction

Over the last several weeks, we have examined strategies for learning material, taking notes, and completing assignments.  In this lesson, we will take a look at how you can show off all of the facts, concepts, and skills you have learned and perform well on exams.  During class on Monday, you will take a practice exam on the material we have covered thus far in this course.  You will want to review your text book, my lesson plans, and your notes in preparation for this practice exam.

Discussion

Introduction

To the student struggling to memorize the names of Russian czars, absorb the concept of classical conditioning, and calculate derivatives, tests may seem like evil things—the antagonists in the plot of college.    

Rather than thinking of tests as enemies, you might try thinking of them as partners.  The goal of college is to learn, and tests provide valuable motivation for learning, as well as some feedback on your success.

 

Nevertheless, you may have had the experience of feeling that your performance on a test did not reflect your mastery of the material.  Perhaps you studied effectively, knew the course content, and had developed the skills taught in the course, but still fared poorly on the final exam.  The unfortunate truth is that many classes require on additional skill—the skill of taking tests.  This guide provides some help with handling two common components of college tests: identifications and essays.

Identifications

When you take quizzes and exams in college, you may come across something called an identification. Identifications test your cultural literacy—that is, your ability to recognize important people, characters, terms, places, events, dates, works of art, and the like.  When you respond to this kind of question, you need to describe the item and explain why it is significant.  It may help to answer the "reporter's questions": Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? For example, if the identification is "Mark Twain," you might write: "Mark Twain was an American author who published several important novels and short stories, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," in the late 1800s. A master of dialect, he also is known for his use of humor and his treatment of race. 

Essay Exams

Perhaps more common than the identification—and more intimidating for many students—is the essay exam, in which you must write a paragraph or more answering a question about something you have covered in class. Designed to test not only your knowledge of people, events, and the like, but also your ability to see how such elements interact, essay exams require strong analytical skills.  For example, a question on a history exam might ask you to analyze how the principles of the Enlightenment manifested themselves in American political thought.  When responding to an essay question, you should refer to as many relevant people, places, and events as possible, but you also should concentrate on making connections among them.  Specifically, a strong essay will contain these four components:

  1. An answer to the question 
  2. Clear introduction that states a claim 
  3. Clearly presented, well-organized supporting evidence in the form of statistics, details, and expert testimony 
  4. Clean writing free of distracting surface errors

In their rush to write as much as possible, some students make the mistake of beginning to write right away without taking time to think about the question and about possible ways they might respond to it.  You will write a better essay if you spend some time analyzing the question and organizing your thoughts.  For example, if you have an hour to write an essay, you might divide up the time in this way:

  1. Read the question and highlight key words. (5 minutes) 
  2. Decide on a claim you can make and support with evidence you have studied in the course. Write an introduction that states this claim. (5 minutes) 
  3. Sketch an outline in which you organize your evidence in a logical way. (5 minutes) 
  4. Using this outline as a guide, write an essay that supports the claim you have made in your introduction. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence and use the rest of the paragraph to support the topic sentence. Use transitions to move the reader through your argument. (40 minutes) 
  5. Read your essay. Look for missing words, sentence fragments, and other major errors. Correct these mistakes. (5 minutes)

Conclusion

In completing this lesson, we end our unit on study skills.  If you have been reading the assignments, participating actively in class, and taking good notes, you now should have a strong foundation of knowledge and strategies on which to build a solid academic career—and some excellent grades!  We turn now to our final unit, which concerns life skills.  We will begin with a lesson on relationships.