IPHY 3410 Instructor: Dr. Leif Saul Fall 2023

Exam Tips

Last updated 10/2/2023

Scroll to the bottom of this page for advice for struggling students.

General

• Memorize as many of the details from the slides as possible. The exam questions are written from the slides.
  
• Use the textbook mainly for in-depth learning of confusing topics, realizing that exam questions are not written from the readings.
  
• Exam questions will be similar to the online practice questions.
  
• Although some of the clicker and homework questions may be similar to exam questions, many of them are of a very different style or purpose and are not suitable for exams.
• If you study long and hard, it is still possible to fail a course. Often the missing ingredient is accountability. The only way to know you are prepared is to test yourself repeatedly, in the most difficult ways, on the most difficult topics possible.

Study techniques

• Flash cards can be helpful tools but only if you find time to use them, and don't waste too much time making them. A printout of the lecture slides may work just as well.
  
• Learn the tricky concepts better by teaching them to someone. Teaching helps you learn by forcing you to confront any gaps in your own understanding.
  
• Try regurgitating everything you know about a topic onto a blank piece of paper (e.g. flow pathways, diagrams, lists of features).
• Quiz yourself frequently. Stop every couple of minutes and ask yourself to recite and explain what you just read.
• Make tables to compare the features of sibling categories (for example, list the features of each of the three types of muscle tissue). The study guides are good for this, but you may be able to come up with additional tables.
• Make lists of shared items that are scattered throughout the slides. For example, list all the tissue types that are vascularized, or all the organs located in the mediastinum, etc.
• Take note of similar-sounding terms (e.g. elastic connective tissue vs. elastic fibers), and devote special effort to understanding their differences, to avoid confusion on exams.
• When given a term or idea out of context, be able to recognize what slides it came from. This is a crucial step in answering exam questions. To practice this skill, you can build a list of terms, and alphabetize or randomize them. Pick a term at random and see if you can remember the slide it comes from, and any categories or lists it belongs to, its place in a sequence, and/or definitions/functions etc. if relevant. A list of all the terms would be overkill, so focus on the more obscure terms, like "insula", "macula", etc., and also terms that sound confusingly similar, like "epinephrine" and "norepinephrine", or "cerebrum" and "cerebellum". If possible, just have a friend pick terms out at random from the slides and ask you about them.
• Many students find the study guides useful. However, be aware that exams are written from the slides, not from the study guides. The study guides tend to focus on major concepts from the slides, but all the details from the slides are testable.
• Some students have had success by typing out all the information from the slides into one long outline, and then memorizing it.
• Students who do well on these exams see the bullet points on the slides as absolute, clear-cut information that they know perfectly. Strive to memorize the details as perfectly as you would memorize a phone number. To do this, focus on manageable chunks of information, for example, knowing everything that was presented about the cytoskeleton.
• Whatever you do, make sure it is organized around the slides, which are the source of the exam questions.

The pros and cons of social learning

• Explaining the material to someone is an excellent way to solidify your knowledge. Trying to make it clear for someone else exposes the gaps in your understanding. Also, speaking out loud creates a redundant memory trace. (And even if you are alone, it can help to speak the terms out loud.)
• Having an arrangement with another person to study regularly together is one way to ensure regular study habits.
• Having somebody to test you, and hold you accountable for your mistakes, will help motivate you to study.
• On the other hand, studying with others can be very inefficient. Use the time together to quiz each other or take turns explaining different topics. Many study activities are best done alone.
• What works for your study partner may not work for you. I have met students who studied with a partner, but did much more poorly than their partner.
• A tutor may provide valuable advice or explanations, but be aware that each lecturer teaches a slightly different set of material so ideally, you should have a tutor who was a student in my course. Also, it is vital that you play an active role in studying; the tutor is merely a supplement to that. Don't let yourself fall into the role of passive listener.

Memory aids (mnemonics)

As you practice and test yourself on things like lists and sequences, note any that you have special difficulty with. Use mnemonics (memory aids) to help you remember:

• Memorize the number of items in the list. This will help you to be sure you have recalled all of the items.
• If a list is long and seems arbitrary, look for subgroups to divide it into. For example in the list of bone functions, there are some that are functions of bone tissue, and some that are functions of non-bone tissue. Sometimes adding information like this instills more meaning and thus makes things easier to learn.
• If items in a sequence go in alphabetical order, make a note of that.
• If the number of letters in some of the terms tell you the length of a list, or the correct order, or something else worth knowing, make a note of that.
• Look for word roots that carry some meaning to jog your memory. (e.g. Vagus nerve -> related to "vagrant" which means "wandering" -> it's a long, winding nerve -> that's why it's the one that provides most of the parasympathetic innervation.)
• There's a list of word roots in the endpapers of your textbook, also in the "Resources" section in Canvas.
• Don't try to memorize all the word roots. Instead, every time you notice the same root occurring in multiple words, look it up and learn what it means.
• Also look for similar-sounding words that can jog your memory (e.g. "cingulate gyrus" sounds like "sing" which helps you remember it’s involved with emotion).
  
• Make an acronym of the list (e.g. dura mater, arachnoid mater, pia mater = "DAP") which gives you a word or sound that can help you remember the whole list.
• Make a sentence out of the acronym (e.g. "good skin gets loving care" for layers of epithelium; g = germinativum, s = spinosum, etc.).
• Use textbook figures, or make diagrams of your own, to help you visualize the terms, so they're easier to remember.

Organizing your study time

• Find more time to study. It takes more time than you think.
  
• Study frequently, in different ways, and in different locations.
  
• Early on, look at just the first few online practice questions to get an idea what to expect. Then, at least two or three days before the exam, answer the remaining practice questions as if you were taking a real exam; give yourself 90 seconds per question. Your percent correct will be a good indicator of what score to expect on the real exam. Make sure you do this early enough so that you'll have time to remediate any deficiencies in your knowledge.
• Although there is an initial phase of reading the slides and figuring out why things make sense, and possibly making lists, tables and such, by the time you are a few days away from the exam, your time should be spent primarily in testing yourself (e.g. reciting lists or pathways, sketching diagrams, having a partner ask you to explain a term, etc.).

What to expect

• Often, while studying, it is possible to guess the likely questions that you may be asked. If a slide (or series of slides) describes the flow pathway through a structure (e.g. heart, digestive tract, nervous pathway) then you are very likely to see questions about that pathway (e.g. "Which of the following places the structures in correct order?").
• If a slide lists layers of tissues in a particular order, then you are very likely to see exam questions about listing the layers in correct order.
• Whenever you see "sibling" categories in the slides (i.e. categories that sit at the same level in a hierarchy, such as different types of connective tissue, or different organs in the digestive tract), you can expect to see questions like "Which feature is found in the large intestine but not the small intestine?". A good way to prepare for this is to make tables to compare the features of sibling categories.
  
• Some exam questions link different topics together. To prepare for this, look for topic linkages as you study. For example, the circulation of blood and the circulation of lymph each have their own pathways, but they also connect, so you may be asked to trace a pathway that involves both systems. For another example, you will learn about the components ABC of smooth muscle, and elsewhere you will learn about organs XYZ in the body that contain smooth muscle. An exam question might hinge on deducing that organs XYZ therefore contain components ABC.
• Although it's a good start to "memorize what's on each slide", it's important to realize that many lists extend over multiple slides, so you need to know how each slide fits into the larger context. For example, you need to be able to list all the connective tissue types, each of which is on a separate slide.
  
• Be aware of synonyms; these often show up on exam questions, making them more difficult if you are not aware of these relationships. For example, "axon" is equivalent to "nerve fiber". Any slide that says "An axon has features XYZ..." can be translated to "A nerve fiber has features XYZ..."
• Be aware of nested categories. Often, information is given about the larger category that you can then apply to the smaller category. For example, you are told that adipose tissue is a type of connective tissue proper. Elsewhere you are told that connective tissue proper contains fibroblasts. You can conclude that adipose tissue contains fibroblasts.
  
• Be aware of each slide's heading, which tells you the scope of the details given on the slide. Use the outline at the start of each powerpoint file to understand where each slide fits into the larger context.
  
• Realize that familiarity is different from understanding; everybody's heard of "vocal cords" but do you know the details of how they work (for Exam 3)?
  
• Because of choices like "a and b", "None of the above", etc., each multiple choice question can be a lot like five true-false questions. To do well, you need confidence, which comes from thorough memorization of the slides, and in some cases, targeted readings in the textbook.

Taking the exam

• Exam questions are written from the slides, so if you can figure out what slide(s) the question is based on, and you have learned the slides well, then the answer is usually straightforward. Sometimes, students try to answer the question based on a slide that is only distantly related; usually that doesn't work very well.
  
• Read each exam question multiple times, looking for crucial terms that can change the whole meaning, like "not", "always", "never", "directly", etc.
• For some students, it helps to cover the answers at first, and try to just answer the question mentally (or on paper) to yourself. Then look at the choices, and see which one best fits your answer. This may be helpful because you are not distracted or confused by the choices presented, until you have taken time to think about your answer.

After the exam

• Learn from your mistakes. After the first exam key is posted in the glass case opposite the anatomy lab (N276) in Ramaley, study each question that you missed until you understand how to do better next time.
• The posted key will be removed a few weeks later, after the following exam, so make sure you use this resource while it is still posted. If you need to see the key after it is removed, you can schedule a meeting with me.

How to Study the Slides

How to Learn the Slides

Advice for struggling students

Many times I have met with students who did poorly on exams (scoring perhaps in the 40s, 50s, or 60s), to analyze what questions they missed and why. Invariably the main thing we discover is that they simply didn't know enough of the facts (bullet points) to do well. There are a lot of details to master in this course, but there's no getting around it. More advanced courses in the IPHY program require an equal amount of memorization, and add more conceptual complexity on top of it. The skills you develop now will serve you well as you advance through the program (and beyond, if you pursue graduate study).

Attending the lecture is only the first step. It is my opportunity to make things interesting so you will feel motivated to study it further, and make it seem straightforward and clear so that you can start to understand how everything fits together and learn some of the major concepts. But I think what some students don't realize is that the real work comes afterward, where you need to spend considerably more time than you do in lecture attendance, studying and testing yourself, and really teaching yourself the material.

To a large extent it is like a language course, where you need to memorize a lot of details. Recall a Spanish or French class where you had to memorize the conjugations for dozens of verbs. For that kind of thing, you just need to schedule a period of time, hopefully every day, to drill yourself repeatedly: “Can I list all the functions of the liver?”, "What is the path of bile flow when there is no food in the GI tract?", etc. You need to look ahead and determine how much time you need and how many days are available. For example Module 3 has around 130 slides, so if you started the Monday after Exam 2, you'd need to memorize about 5-6 slides per day, which is feasible if you don't put things off.

For some of us, time management is the most serious hurdle. Numerous self-help books tell us that will power and strong motivation, by themselves, are not sufficient to make things happen. You need to arrange things so that you are practically forced to study on a daily basis. It can help to bring in a tutor, study partner, or academic coach, simply to hold you accountable for making progress at regular intervals. If something is important to you, assign it a firmly scheduled time block in your day. And schedule it early, before other things can get in the way. Bring materials that you can study in your pocket or on your phone so that you can put fragmented time to use as you are waiting for a lunch date or a bus. Above all, do not wait for the elusive "perfect studying conditions" that may never arise.

It's important to realize that it's not the amount of time you spend "reading" or "immersed in" the material that counts. Even if you're understanding it and it all seems very memorable when you read it, you may still not remember any of it when you take the exam. The most important thing is to be repeatedly challenging yourself to recall the material, especially the details. Choose a few slides that appear to fall naturally together as a unit, and strive to completely memorize what's in those slides, to the point where you could teach it by heart to someone else. What I used to do as a biology student was pull out a blank sheet of paper and write down everything I could remember about a topic. Students often use whiteboards to talk through the material to themselves, like teaching. Teaching is really the best way to learn.

Obviously you don't just want to memorize words on a slide, you want to understand it too. Try to jot it down in a meaningful way, like a concept map, e.g. for “hepatocyte” you could have one arrow going to “functions” and then listing the functions; another arrow goes to “location” and you list “liver lobule”. Maybe next to the function “bile production” you have another arrow going to “flow pathway” and list the steps of how bile gets out of the liver: cytoplasm of hepatocyte -> bile canaliculi -> bile duct (in portal triad) etc. Then you have a couple arrows going to the two scenarios that were listed for the gallbladder (i.e. slides 15 & 16 in 10Digestive2).

It's important to actively seek out "connections" among the different slides and units, because this is what I do when I am writing the exams. For example, notice the overlap and connections between the liver and gallbladder slides, regarding bile flow. Earlier in the semester, we saw how the Integument slides overlapped with Body Cavities & Membranes, and with the Epithelium slides. Be ready to make deductions by considering these connections.

The more it all makes sense to you, the more you will insist on internal logic and coherence to what you learn, giving you a sense of "ownership" of the material, meaning that it stands on its own in your mind; it is not dependent on what you are told by me, by a TA, or by the textbook. Ultimately, it is all just facts, and anybody can learn them as well (or better) than the instructor knows them. This will solidify your learning and give you greater confidence on the exams. I do try to emphasize the "logic" of the slides/material as best I can in class, and I think one thing that sets good students apart is they demand that things "make sense", and refuse to "just memorize it". If things seem a little arbitrary, trivial, etc., then it may help to read the textbook section on that material, until you understand the importance of it and it will be clearer after considering multiple explanations.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the topics appear in random order on exams. So don’t get used to studying it in a linear fashion, be prepared to jump around. Have someone ask you random terms, pulled from the slides, and see if you can remember the context where that term was presented.

Another important step is to go over the key that’s posted in Ramaley (across the hall from N276) after each exam. Bring the printout you received in class listing the questions you missed. If you took version B, use the index of question numbers posted there to find the relevant questions. For each question you missed, find the information in the slides that explains the correct answer choice. Don’t give up until you understand. Ask me if anything still does not make sense. If you are thorough in studying the exam keys, you will start to notice certain very common types of questions. Really there are only a limited number of ways one can write exam questions about this material. Good students start to develop an intuition for what sorts of questions to expect, even on new material. This is explored in the “exam tips” above.

After a few weeks into the semester, a "Grade Estimator" file will be posted on Canvas that you can use to see how you are doing in the course. Plug in some numbers to see what scores you need for the remaining exams. On each exam there are always a few students who did much, much better than on their earlier exams. I once had a student who scored 44 on Exam 1, and 88 on Exam 2.  There are always at least a dozen or so who increase their scores by around 20 points or more; and usually a few who increase by more than 30 points.  I am sure it didn't happen by accident; they must have made a real, concrete change in their use of time. Perhaps they started studying/practicing in a serious way, three weeks instead of three days before the exam. Or perhaps they dropped some activity that was taking up hours each week, so they could dedicate it to this course. Or perhaps they started doing a lot more self-testing, in place of more passive study techniques. Or maybe, they did all of the above.

See also "Resources for Academic Success" - in the Resources section near the top of our Canvas page.