Question Masters

There are questions everywhere; you just need to find them.

Whether you decide to act as a lone wolf or as group (which I strongly recommend) in the research stages here is a skill that will serve you very well.

After you have finished writing about an area in your revision and while it is still alive in your mind simply write down some specific and general questions that could be asked of you.

This will train your thinking process, making you more sensitive to the arguments drifting about in the academic winds.

And it is crisp, crunchy argument that is crucial, way more important than coughing up a wet lump of unstructured facts you have learnt, which no one wants to deal with. Science is not about facts, it's about theories and how facts can be used in service of those theories. It's about understanding the most with the least, not about collecting the most. Exam questions will mostly get you do this - argue and explain - so try to guess what you might have to argue and explain before it is asked of you.

When you are trying to think about the sort of questions that might be asked look back to the previous exams (I cut out all the questions for a course, glued them onto a A4 page, blew them up on the photocopier and then drew links between similar questions).

Ask yourself, is there anything that keeps cropping up (e.g. Neuropsychiatry, how everything comes down to the brain; DDC, how the disorders can speak to the issue of the innateness of language; Human Factors, how taking into account human abilities and limitations is vital for better design and so on)?

Then there will be conspicuousness by absence; once you have mapped out what has been, you'll find yourself thinking about what hasn't. Kit hasn't asked anything on 'qualia' recently, Jan hasn't posed anything big on workload etc (these are examples not actual cases). Write down these missing areas because they may come up.

Another trick is to do theme extraction across a course. This may sound a bit ominous but you can cheat and scour the course notes for those telling titles or comments that wink at the bigger picture. Often lecturers will cram their first and final lecture with this kind of stuff - be sensitive to it.

For the specific questions you will just need familiarity with an area, which will come from writing your notes and discussing it with each other (note, doing both is the best way to get the question tree blossoming).

Think about questions (and their answers) all the time and come the exam you'll not only be able to identify the questions that suit you best but you will have been thinking about answers to them for months instead of those precious few minutes at the start.