Hunt as a pack

There is a scene in the BBC's great Planet Earth that captures a rare wild dog hunt. Have a look at it here. The narrator tells us that the secret to the dogs' efficiency is "their...teamwork and tactics". There is truth in this for revision as well.

In previous posts, I have tried to dissuade you from scrimping time in order to cover the material and said that cherry picking is a useful strategy if done cleverly. This post is about the most useful revision strategy of them all: copy the dogs and work together.

There is the most enormous resistance to this idea of collaboration with undergrads. It's because students dont trust each other well enough to coordinate an outcome that's better for everyone. It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma. There is nothing irrational about wanting to go at it alone; the logic is fine. It's just there is a better logic for working together: you get better outcomes and less hassle along the way. Isn't this what any student would want?

What to do?

Form groups of up to around four or five people. Three is perfect in my opinion. Any more and the trust on which the whole operation rests is destroyed.

Then split the workload up between you. That means each of you taking a topic. I strongly advise that you share out a module evenly instead of one person doing the whole of one module and someone else doing the whole of another. That way you get a flavour for each one.

Once you have your crack team assembled, everyone needs to get on and produce very detailed notes on an area extracting the key arguments and references and trying to fit it into a bigger picture.

It is absolutely essential to make these easy enough for others to understand. You shouldn't just copy and paste bits from papers because the stream of logic will be split up. If you take care to build your notes with solid logical links and proper explanation you will remember them better, your revisions buddies will too and this clarity of thought will be evident in your exam essays. So, everyone wins.

For example, in Neuropsychiatry one of your group may take on "Psychosis– Delusions". Here they will need to zoom in and articulate what this is, what the sub-conditions are (Jealousy and Persecutory Delusions, Autoscopic Phenomena and Delusional Misidentification Syndrome), their organic basis (spatial and chemical) and then zoom out and see how this could be slotted into a general essay like "Do patients complaining of psychotic delusions have a real disease?". This example is primarily for 3rd years but it is useful for 2nd years to think in this holistic way as well.

With this strategy - working as a team and tactically splitting the workload - whole swathes of the course will be covered and you can quite quickly arrive at something very exciting indeed: a book (or revision bible as I shall call it from now on). This companion can then form the basis of your revision, thinking and learning (you can even put it on your iPod)

As a guide, the 'revision bible' I produced with my two accomplices in third year (they both got Firsts) is some 300 pages long and 175,000 words. Each module averaged out at roughly 22,000 words.

In second year, I did something similar (by myself, which was horrible, hence why I recruited others in third year). It was 98,000 words long, averaging out at roughly 10,000 words per module.

It's geeky, I know, but that's kind of the point of the degree. It's time to wake up your inner geek now, not languish in a culture against excellence.

We had it all done and printed (here) by week one of the summer term, having started before the beginning of the Easter holidays. We worked six days a week for six weeks and a very manageable nine hours a day (3 in the morning, 3 after lunch, 3 in the evening). Plenty of other time for enjoying life.

So in total: 9 hours x 36 days = 324 hours per person; 324 hours x 3 people = 972 hours. Note how the individual number of hours is way less than the estimate I quoted a few posts back and how the total number of hours is similar to this estimate (it's a bit more actually, but that means its better because there is more detail packed in).

Once you have got to this stage you'll feel great. You have researched a third (or whatever fraction depending on the size of your group) of the whole course and you know the remaining portions are tidily inside your 'revision bible' ready for turning into essay plans, spider diagrams and all sorts of other fun to get it off the page and into your head. Getting to this stage is the end of the beginning.

One final point. This is not cheating. There is nothing to say that you shouldn't be collective in researching and recording information. However, when you have finished the revision bible, the thought that goes into your essay plans and arguments should be your own.

So, the message here: start acting like wild dogs. Hunt as a pack and life will be so, so much easier.