Number crunching

(from lonebluelady @ Flickr)

In preparing for your exams you will be faced with what will seem like an insurmountable amount of material to get through. Making decisions about how to approach it can be difficult. So, let's think about some numbers because they help clear strategies rise up out of the unknown.

Consider the amount of research you had to do for one essay. Let's say this is 10 hours. For a whole module multiply this by the number of topics in a module. This is roughly 10:

10 hours x 10 topics = 100 hours

Now multiply that by the number of modules on a course. Let's use third year as an example:

8 courses x 100 hours = 800 hours.

If we work out how much this equates to in other terms:

800 hours ÷ 10 hours/day = 80 days = 2.6 months.
Plus weekends free ≈ 3 months

These rough numbers reveal a daunting task ahead. One that will consume your life for three months. They imply working ferociously hard every day, all day, starting now...

...I didn't like the look of this either so I thought about alternative strategies. The numbers reveal three:

1. Effort scrimping. This means simply investing less time in each topic.
2. Cherry picking. This means simply looking at fewer topics.
   
3. Hunting as a pack. This means spreading the workload out.
   

In the next posts, I will look at each of these individually, arguing that you should be looking at a smart combination of (2) and (3) and definitely not opting for (1).