Column by Timothy Kroboth

Remember December? Finals Week certainly was fun, wasn’t it?

Do you recall anything from that all-nighter you pulled to study for your geology final exam? Or was it gerontology? How could you have discerned the difference with so much Starbucks coffee running through your veins anyway?

Cramming a semester’s worth of course material in one night is as impractical as it is painful, particularly if you wish to retain and apply the course material after taking the final exam. After paying the university thousands of dollars for your education last semester, was it really worth the cost if you forgot everything soon after handing your exam to the professor and exiting the classroom?

As you abandon your workout and dieting New Year’s resolutions, why not make a few resolutions for this semester so that when Finals Week returns in May, you understand the course material and are ready for your exams instead of dreading them?

Going to class is one resolution you can easily keep. Classes can be so torturously boring that you wonder if they violate the Geneva Conventions, but they can be the best opportunities to learn.

Courses in which professors do not take attendance may tempt even the most dedicated students to skip class. However, professors who teach courses in which the grading does not appear to emphasize attendance usually offer valuable extra credit opportunities in class or rely heavily on their lecture material when writing tests. Thus, attending almost any class consistently will reward you.

You may protest that your time is too valuable to attend class, but consider that a week has 168 hours. If you carried 15 credit hours and went to every class, you would have 153 hours left to do whatever you wanted every week. Is having 154 or 155 hours left worth skipping class?

If you go to class, make it worth your time. Do not waste it on Facebook as you pretend to take class notes. Instead, ask clarifying questions and meet good students to form study groups.

Even if your professors do not encourage in-class participation, lectures combined with note taking are an excellent audiovisual learning combination to improve your chances of retaining information. Relying solely on textbooks or online PowerPoint slides is a not a good learning game plan.

Another resolution is using your textbooks. I am not unreasonable enough to suggest that you should read every page a professor assigns. Few things are more frustrating than reading a dry textbook and then closing it and realizing you have no idea what you just read. Even worse is when the professor decides to skip the assigned reading after you have already read it.

However, never opening your textbooks is not a good choice. Why pay for something you never use?

Instead, when you return from class, skim through the textbook and search for key terms and concepts discussed during the lecture. After you have determined which passages are relevant, read them. Thus, you will reinforce your understanding of what you heard during class and will already be familiar with the textbook passages so that time spent reading is not time wasted.

An additional useful resolution is to review your class notes regularly. How many times have you waited until the night before the first test to look at them and then realized you had completely forgotten everything you had written? If you read through your notes once or twice every week, your memory will have a harder time losing the material, and night-before cramming will become unnecessary.

Will you resolve to be ready for Finals Week?