This'll Be On The Exam

By James C. Lee

Never flunk your math class again

 

Stressing over exams, pulling another all-nighter, or blankly staring at a textbook for hours on end, it makes sense why you would hate math and science. Even with all that work, there's still a chance you won't get the results that you want.

 

But this doesn't have to be the case. With simple techniques, you can study STEM courses effectively and efficiently, without dreading the beginning of every semester or exam.

 

With this guide, you will discover:

• Techniques to memorize endless amounts of info, including vocabulary, formulas, and concepts
• Tools to help you remember what you learned forever
• How to maximize studying productivity
• Steps to learn how to learn
• How to absorb the info in textbooks
• The biggest myth in learning that will stunt your progress and how to avoid it
• Methods to address feeling stupid and demotivated
• Actions to avoid physical and mental learning roadblocks

This is for students who struggle with math and science, despite the long hours that they put into studying. It'll show you already have the ability to succeed in these subjects, regardless of how you performed in the past. Use it to internalize the topics, ace your exams, and excel in these fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cerise Falcon Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735869919

Book preview

Introduction

AT ONE OF THE MANY SMALL WOODEN desks in the campus library, I looked over the vocabulary and equations in my textbook for the umpteenth time. The moon peeked over an outline of a cloud as if to check if I had left yet. I meticulously read through each paragraph on the page, only stopping to remember what my professor had mentioned in the review session last week.

My goal was straightforward: cram as much information into my head as possible to pass the midterm the following morning. Unfortunately, the voice in the back of my head was starting to complain, I’m tired and hungry. I’m sure we studied enough, let’s call it and go to bed.

I managed to ignore the temptation and pushed through the contents of my textbook. I could recite entire passages and write out every equation in my notes, yet I didn’t feel confident or even prepared for the exam. Instead, the information felt fleeting, waiting for the right moment to dart out of my grasp. It just didn’t click. The paranoia convinced me to review my notes one more time, which turned into a second time, a third, a fourth, until I could no longer keep my eyes open and finally called it a night.

The sun now peeked over the clouds. I scribbled furiously on the exam paper, vomiting out information about electric dipoles, Maxwell’s equations, and anything else I could scavenge from memory. After checking my work once, I walked to the front of the room and placed the packet of papers on top of the pile of other completed exams. It was a Thursday afternoon before a three-day weekend, and my biggest worry for the week was gone. To celebrate, I decided to take the next couple of days off. I figured keeping my mind off of studying over the weekend would let me reset and feel refreshed before I had to go back to class. I played video games, hung out, and watched movies to my heart’s content until Monday arrived, and I trudged back to the library for another study session.

There was a quiz that upcoming Friday, covering material that included topics from the exam I had recently taken. As a starting point to prepare, I began to look over the notebook I used the previous week. I might as well have been reading a foreign language. A cold sensation of panic started to creep up from the base of my stomach. Why did I write this down? What does this mean? Did we even go over this in class? The cold sensation began to heat up. How could I forget this? I went over it a million times just last week! The sensation had made its way up, now burning through my chest and the back of my head. What was the point of all that studying last week? My professor doesn’t know how to teach. Why I am wasting my time with this stupid class!

I sat back and took a deep breath, setting my phone for five minutes to cool off. As the sensation began to settle down, I logged on to the learning management system to see if the grades were up from last week’s exam. I scrolled down the page to the most recent assignments to find a big fat C staring at me. The burning in my chest and head flared back up. I slammed my laptop shut, shoved everything in my backpack, and stormed out of the library. As I stomped back to my dorm, the voice in the back of my head decided to pipe up, You know you eventually have to go back, right?

* * *

Math and science have undeniably been one of the leading factors behind the modernization of human civilization. Jets have allowed us to travel to different parts of the world in mere hours rather than months. Mobile devices and the internet have allowed us to connect with our loved ones thousands of miles away. Modern medicine has allowed us to stay healthier and live longer. However, modernization gave rise to new issues. Entire ecosystems fall apart from invasive species. Immunological diseases arise from the convenient access to junk food and the accompanying sedentary lifestyle. Hackers take advantage of modern technology for their own malicious desires. It all comes down to present and future scientists and engineers to address these issues.

Sadly, my story at the beginning is not unique. Many of my classmates joked about similar experiences with their STEM courses, recounting difficulties from as far back as middle school. Some became so frustrated that they quit pursuing a degree in the STEM field altogether, believing they would never be able to learn the sciences, let alone make any significant contributions to solve today’s issues.

But the truth is, learning these courses is no different than learning any other skill. It’s difficult at first, but with the proper guidance, everything begins to piece together. Think how you first learned to drive. Turning the steering wheel felt foreign and awkward, and cruising at 30 mph felt terrifying. Yet eventually, with the teachings of your driving instructor, you were able to speed along highways with no issues at all. That is the purpose of this book. To provide a guide for learning subjects in the STEM fields with minimal frustration. This is the information that I used in my own studies, allowing me to earn a physics bachelor's in three years despite a deteriorating health, complete the International Baccalaureate Programme back in high school, and excel in graduate-level courses covering subjects that extended beyond physics.

I can’t guarantee that this guide will make learning the sciences easy (learning something new is never easy). But this guide will make studying them easier than before. Throw away the notion that you need to have the natural aptitude or the right genes to thrive in the STEM fields. You are capable of solving long complicated equations and understanding the mechanisms of the universe just like your math-loving friends and favorite geniuses in movies. You have the ability to become a professor and give wonderful lectures that inspire new generations of researchers. This is the steppingstone to achieve these aspirations. If you are ready, then let’s begin.

PART 1: THE TOOLS

1

Quintuple Your Memory

THE USA MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIPS IS A competition that pushes one’s memory to the extreme. Every year, participants from all over the nation come together to determine whose brain has the largest data storage capacity. Each memory athlete, as they are called, starts off the contest with four events: memorize randomly generated names and faces in 15 minutes, a series of numbers in five minutes, a deck of playing cards as quickly as possible, and a poem exactly as it was written in 15 minutes—including spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.¹

The world records for these events are as follows: Nelson Dellis with 235 names, Alex Mullen with 483 digits, Alex Mullen again with 18.653 seconds to memorize a deck of cards, and Katherine He with 335 points in the poems event (points relating to how accurately the poem was recalled). And that was for the qualifying rounds. Those who make it to the championship rounds undergo another series of challenges: memorize 300 words in 15 minutes, memorize two decks of cards in five minutes, and 15 minutes to memorize eight pieces of information of six different people, including their names, birthdays, addresses, and phone numbers.

Imagine taking a class with these abilities. You could memorize whole textbooks and spend significantly less time studying for exams. These people must’ve hit the genetic jackpot, possessing a superhuman brain since they first learned how to walk. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. A study conducted at Radboud University Medical center examined the brains of 23 memory athletes and 23 regular people of similar age.² The brain activity of both groups were analyzed by measuring how well different brain regions communicated with each other. The results? The brain structures were virtually identical, aside from a small set of neural connections. In another study, the researchers had a group of mental athletes and a control group memorize three digit numbers, pictures of faces, and magnified pictures of snowflakes while their brains were being scanned.³ The scans revealed that the memory athletes were using different areas of the brain, which accounted for the small regions that were not lit up in the control group.

So what does this mean for the rest of us? It means we can also develop these incredible feats of memory. As the grandmaster of memory Ed Cooke says, In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us [memory athletes] here have average memories.⁴

The Three Ingredients for Unlimited Memory

Think back to a memorable event in your life: a surprise birthday party with all your friends and family, your graduation, or waking up on Christmas day as a kid. It’s as if you can relive the experience all over again. You can call upon it on command despite the months, even years, that have passed. Now try to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday or who you passed on the way to work. That memory is long gone. Unlike your daily routine, those special memories are jam-packed with sensory overload, like the smell of candles on the cake or the sudden scare followed by a warm wave of happiness at your surprise party. All of these senses that you experienced activate multiple pathways in your brain, resulting in a strong, singular neural pathway. A memory is essentially an electrical signal that travels throughout your neurons. Similar to how multiple smaller streams can come together to form a raging river, activating multiple neural pathways in your brain will create a huge stream of electrical signals, creating a solid memory. This is the idea of Hebb’s law, first proposed by Donald Hebb in his book The Organization of Behavior: ⁵

Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or trace) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. ... When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

Or in layman’s terms, cells that wire together, fire together, meaning the key to remembering information is to use as many neural pathways in your brain as possible. There are three main components to accomplish this: associating with information you already know well, visualizing the information, and integrating senses.

We’ll begin with associations. This step is very similar to looking up at a strangely shaped cloud and thinking, That looks like an elephant, and the one next to it looks like a frog. You are taking what you are learning and associating it to something that is familiar to you. The association can be from any aspect of the information, like how it sounds or how it looks. It might remind you of a word. It might remind you of your favorite dessert. Or it might remind you of something you saw on a commercial or cartoon. The idea of associations is to piggyback off of preexisting neural networks in your brain. You are taking the tiny electrical pulse created from the new content you are learning and incorporating it into the larger neural network from