12 Study Skills for Exam Success

The best way to get high grades on an exam is to consider the entire length of your course as a pre-exam, preparation period. Because courses can last a few months to a whole year, you may find it difficult to make the connection between your daily homework, periodic assignments, and your final exam. To get high marks, start by recognizing that all academic work done through the semester.

The strategies below can help you keep pace throughout the year. They will ensure exam success as well as mastery of the subject.

Set your goal:

Read the course overview to understand what the course will cover and how it will be scored.

Identify your goal in concrete terms and put it in writing to strengthen your resolve.

Manage your time:

Time management skills can help you take control of your study workload, achieve more, and

Stress out less. There are many ways to make time work with you, instead of against you. Purchase an academic diary or study planner. Buy one which provides a week-at-a-glance or a month-at-a-glance view, so you can get a holistic view of the time you have available. Find out assignment due dates and exam dates and mark them in your study planner in advance. This way you’ll be able to avoid social commitments during pre-exam periods. Minimize distractions and keep your priorities straight. Focus on your goal of getting the highest marks possible. Schedule social activities around your study schedule and not vice-versa. Remember this is not only an academic challenge, it’s your job in life right now. Make it a successful and enjoyable year.

Identify your learning style:

Take a learning style assessment test and find out if you are a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. This self-knowledge can help you make more effective use of your time. Remember, your learning style may be quite different from that of family members and friends. Adapting your study method to suit your own natural style will enable you to produce powerful results in less time.

Develop a study plan:

For each course, figure out how much time you will need to spend outside of class, in order to keep up and in order to do well. Plan a study schedule that allows you to stay in control of the academic workload.

Keep up with reading:

Particularly in college or university, staying up-to-date in terms of your reading is critical to your success. When you attend a lecture without having completed the required reading, you lose a valuable opportunity to add to your understanding.

 Develop effective note-taking techniques:

A variety of note-taking styles can help you record key information and see the bigger picture in terms of subject matter. Good note-taking strategies can help you make the most of the time spent reading from textbooks and attending classes.

Attend classes regularly:

Be an active learner. Attend lectures regularly and participate whenever possible. The interaction will help you to remember more than if you sit passively in class, dreaming of other things.

Create mind maps:

Mind maps are graphic organizers, developed by Tony Buzan, which can help you summarize vital information from lectures and textbooks. Each topic can be condensed onto a page, each chapter can be encapsulated onto a larger map. Eventually, you can develop a mind map to review the key sections of each course and get a broad view of how each topic relates to the others. Then, to review before an exam, see if you can reconstruct the map. In this way, you can test yourself to see if you can recall key terms, factors, reasons and examples.

Surround yourself with learning:

Create a 24-hour learning environment by putting up review charts and points where you can see them daily – on mirrors, doors, fridge, bathroom, television, or bedside table. If possible, purchase a white board and dry erase markers, so you can test your recall by reproducing the mind maps. Use bright-colored markers, include images to trigger your memory and most of all, have fun.

Work with concentration:

It’s in your interest that one hour of concentrated study is worth several hours of distracted study. If you learn how to work with concentration, you will achieve more than 95% of the population. This critical skill enables you to do more in less time and is one of the distinguishing features of super achievers around the world.

Apply memory techniques:

Take the time to learn different memory techniques and practice applying them in a variety of academic and professional contexts. Understand the basic memory principles upon which your brain works and learn some tips for improving your memory. The more you exercise your memory muscle, the stronger it will be and the more confidence you will have in your ability to recall information when you need it most.

Use all your intelligences:

Are you aware of the concept of multiple intelligences? Do you know it doesn’t matter how smart you are but rather how you are smart? This concept was introduced by Howard Gardiner of Harvard University. It explains the number of different ways in which a human can have intelligence and how this self-knowledge can help us live, work, and study more efficiently.

N.Premkumar

Associate Professor/Mech

The Best Teacher

DIVYA G AP/CSE

150 Teaching Methods

Divya G AP/CSE

The 4 wives !!!

This article is posted by Dr. S. Duraiswamy, VP (Admin). Thanks for the nice article Sir !

Creation of Universe

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. At its beginning it looked nothing like it does today. Yet, everything in today’s universe did exist in some form back then. It all started with the BIG BANG, a kind of explosion that would not only go on to produce all the matter in the universe but also marked the start of time.

                The term BIG BANG was coined by FRED HOYLE in 1950 to illustrate to his radio listeners the difference between it and his own theory, steady state where the universe has no beginning. At the start, the universe was a hot and dense ball of radiation energy. In one- thousandth of a second, tiny radiation particles produced tiny particles of matter. These combined to form the first ever chemical elements hydrogen and helium. Some regions of the young universe contained slightly more hydrogen and helium than others. These shrank to form the first stars. Nuclear reactions inside the stars produced many other chemical elements including carbon and oxygen. The elements in the universe today were produced in the BIG BANG.

Everything in the universe produces energy. You produce energy when you exercise, and light energy is produced by nuclear reactions inside the stars.

 

The sun formed from hydrogen and helium and small amount other elements.

The top ten chemical elements that make up sun are

Hydrogen               : 71%

Helium                   : 27.1%

Oxygen                  : 0.97%

Carbon                  : 0.4%

Nitrogen                : 0.096%

Silicon                   : 0.099%

Magnesium            : 0.076%

Neon                     : 0.058%

Iron                       : 0.14%

Sulphur                  : 0.04%

4.5 billion years ago some of the material not used up in the sun joined together to form earth.

About 3.7 billion years ago carbon- containing molecules in young earth’s oceans evolved into bacteria- like cells, the first forms of primitive life.

1 million years ago the first humans walked on earth. All the elements on earth, including all the elements in your body, were produced in stars.

Galaxy comes from the GREEK name for the galaxy. We live in the Milky Way galaxy and have its origins in the Greek word for milk. Galaxies are huge stars systems, made of stars and large amounts of gas and dust. They come in a range of sizes and shapes consisting of millions, billions, or even trillions of stars. Some known as active galaxies, have unexpected amounts of energy that come from star material falling into a black hole. Other galaxies are transformed by galactic collisions.

A black hole is a region of incredibly powerful gravity that drags matter towards it and squeezes it into a tiny space or point, which is called a singularity. They are called “black” because the light that is sucked in cannot get out. You get black holes when massive stars explode. These explosions are called supernovas. You can also get black holes at the center of the active galaxies, where their mass is equivalent to millions of suns.

Written by A.Devasena. ECE Dept.

The Humanoid Robot

Peeper, the humanoid robot that can read emotions unveiled by Softbank corp


World’s first humanoid robot named Peeper that can communicate and read emotions was unveiled in Japan on 5 June 2014 by a mobile phone company Softbank Corp. The humanoid robot equipped with an emotion engine and can recognise emotions by reading facial expression, body language and tone of voice was engineered by Softbank after teaming up with French robot maker Aldebaran Robotics SAS.

About Pepper, the humanoid robot
• It is 120 cm tall and weighs 28 kilograms
• Pepper is also loaded with sensors that include touch sensors in its hand
• Uses sensors to monitor the happenings around before making an independent decision
• It can learn things by interactions with humans and the experiences will be uploaded on internet and shared with other peepers through cloud database


By Gayathri M
AP / IT

Learning Techniques

1) Elaborative interrogation

            Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true

2) Self-explanation

            Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps   

            taken

3) Summarization

            Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts

4) Highlighting/underlining

            Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading

6) Keyword mnemonic

            Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials

7) Imagery for text

            Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening

8) Rereading

            Restudying text material again after an initial reading

9) Practice testing

            Self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material

10) Distributed practice

            Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time

11) Interleaved practice

            Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule  

            of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session

N.Premkumar

Associate Professor