Cherry Picking

(from Matt McGee @ Flickr)

Selectively picking areas to study can cut the workload significantly and I consider it sensible for getting to the level of detail you need to with certain areas. But I'll say it now to be clear: this can be a risky game and you must treat this only as advice, not as instruction. It's up to you to make the decision on what you do.

The most reliable way of knowing which topics you can avoid is by the coursework essay questions. They have the least (but not zero) chance of coming up; you can leave the cherry on the tree. However, this is not to say that the themes that coursework question cover (e.g. nature/nurture, module/connectionist, domain-specific/domain-general, functionalism/non-functionalism etc) wont reappear.

Sometimes you will notice a defined lack of a topic in the past questions and then you can hone in on it. Something on autism hasn't been asked in the last three years, stuff on qualia seems a bit sparse and so on (these are examples not actual cases). In order to know this, you need to have a good overview of all the topics.

The other cherries to leave on the tree are the ones that have a bad taste. Anything, you don't particularly fancy or enjoy - and that you can afford to leave out - omit. If you can choose the things you are most interested in your learning will be more effortless.

Second years, you are in a better position to do this. Third years you need to cast your net wider because of the general questions. Nevertheless, you can still on pick a little bit of certain cherries for this. That is, you can revise some topics in great depth and only revise enough on another to be aware of it and perhaps write a paragraph on it.

My advice is to research 70-90% of a course. This means leaving out one, two or three sections (depending on how risky you are - guys will tend to be a riskier than girls in my experience here). Later on when you get down to thinking and learning you may find yourself abandoning material such that you only focus on 50% of the course. This is representative of what I did.

You may ask, why not just learn 50% in depth instead of waste time researching something only to later abandon it. This may be just about ok for second years but for third years you need that breadth. The understanding you get from researching more is not wasted when you ditch those areas because it is important for holistic understanding.

Next, we'll look at a less obvious but perfectly legitimate way of making life easier: working as a group in the research stages.