Chunks. Not spread.

toronto_lex @ Flickr

If last year is anything to go by, right now is an anxious time. You are far enough into your revision and close enough to exams to doubt whether you have enough covered and in proper detail. This puts space between where you are and where you want to be causing stress (and maybe even some out-of-body library experiences.)

The first thing to say is that you can't know everything in a course. For those of you fretting over this, stop. Trying to know everything means you'll end up floundering because unless you started back in January you will spread your butter too thinly. It's best for everyone - both people who have left it too late and the diligent - to have several nice big chunks of butter. Concentrate on areas you've cherry picked to come up and craft arguments you can deploy in exams.

For those who have left it too late, your best bet is to be ruthless in this cherry picking. You need to redress your poor planning with riskier strategies. Hone down on, maybe, four areas that have the best chance of coming up. This happened to me in second year on the Individual Differences course after I spent far too much time doing Klaus impersonations and pretending the course didn't exist.

For third years, concerned about that general question, know that you can answer a general question with information from your specific topics; you just need to be solid on the course themes (blueprints). You do not need to have a understanding of every single topic to answer general questions.

For those of you who have had more foresight, you will likely have your cherries picked. Don't be distracted by trying to go beyond that. If you made a decision a while a go to do, say 6 topics for a module, stick with it. Take the topics you have covered and learn them until you wake up mumbling references.

It is better to be solid in lots areas than OK in all of them. Now is the time for fashioning arguments and learning them and their supporting evidence. It is not a time to embark on new stuff.

The online hub

bfionline @ Flickr

You will have spent a long time on your essays, familiarising yourself with an area to exam-level detail. Fortunately, you only have to do an essay per course for coursework. Unfortunately, for exams you need to know lots more. One shortcut to familiarising yourself with all this other material is to read each others essays.

Last year many of the Level 3 psychologists compiled their essays on an online hub. Essays were uploaded along with the mark they got, any important comments made by the marker and without any identifying information.

The beauty of this is that you can quickly use the legwork done by others to get to a good level of understanding. In addition, you should be able to improve your own communication skills by noting in others what is effortless to read and what is horrible.

It's a great little resource and last year's was very successful but its power rests on you lot uploading your essays. To do this, first, remove your name from the doc, add your mark in a nice fat font size at the top (plus any marker comments you deem necessary), make sure the document is saved with the essay question in the file name and then head here to MediaMax and enter these details :

username: brain_milk
password: i/l/i/k/e/s/h/a/r/i/n/g
[remove all the "/" - this is to avoid bots]

After this navigate your way to right folder, or create your own if I have left one out, and upload.

Do make an effort to upload guys and gals, we all found it was a great thing to have last year...

Concentrate there, not here

Hard way leads to a bright end. Easy way leads to dark end. Make a choice.
Thanks to darkroom11 @ Flickr for this and the quotation

I am the most guilty of this. I stay on an area I love for ages and forget about stuff I don't like so much. The problem is exams are blind to your affections and dislikes.

It's tempting to stay on an area you are sound on or did your coursework essay on because there is no anxiety about the content.

So be careful not to get sucked in to the areas that give you comfort. Rather, give the ones that you are less confident on but carry equal weight your attention.

Your mind may not like it now, but it will when that exam question on your favorite area fails to show up.

Get excited!

It's an annoying fact of evolutionary carpentry that human memory is so resistant to academic learning and yet so happy to soak up other things, like the plot of a film. We feel this difference intimately. Extracting a paper's details is hard. Absorbing a film's plot is easy.

Yet, when stripped down to their essentials, the amount of naked, quivering data in a paper and in a film are comparable. Both have antecedents, names, dates, a logical sequence and conclusions. Nevertheless, we pick up the film's details collaterally, whilst the paper takes a bit of cognitive mastication. Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn papers like we acquire the minutiae of a movie?

I think you can get close. Whilst a film undoubtedly unfurls more easily into the channels of memory than a paper - exploiting all those things our minds are very good at (face recognition, mapping social relationships, organising narratives of events etc) - there is another ingredient: excitement. When you watch a film you are stimulated and interested; a paper may seem like an ordeal. The latter has to change.

Getting interested

I am fully cognizant that excitement and interest can't just be turned on and off when you feel like it. However, the renaissance of research into that curious emotion, interest, has told that things are interesting when they are:

1. high in "novelty–complexity...which refers to evaluating an event as new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, or obscure" (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)
2. accessible enough that "[P]eople feel able to comprehend them and master the challenges that they [the novelty-complexity] pose (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)." (Silvia's 2008 CDIPS paper, p.58)

New papers and the ideas they house are likely to be new to you in the research stages of your revision and some are undoubtedly going to be complex. The first ingredient of interest is there.

This second point means that experts can be interested in things that cause novices to turn off because they have the knowledge to comprehend them.

This is important because the major reason I think people give up and get bored with experimental psychology is because they haven't put the groundwork in. If you enter new, complex stuff without the ability to understand it you will get bored.

The way to understand and get interested in this stuff is to understand the story leading up to it. This can only be done by voracious reading to acquire the 'big picture', which ironically may be rather dull.

However, once you master understanding you arrive at a lovely self-fulfilling cycle: the more you are interested by new, complex material, the more you learn about it, the more you are interested by new, complex material.

Bottom line: for interest to grow you need to feed it with a bit of boredom. In the vast majority of cases it will arise after hard, unexciting work when all confusion peals away and the elegant beauty of an area is revealed and it becomes interesting.

Extinguishing dislike

On the other hand, negativity towards your subject can be quashed and should be whenever you feel it creeping in. Remind yourself of what a fascinating subject yours is, both per se and relative to most other degrees. You are lucky to be studying it. If ever you forget this, peer over the partition in the library and see what your neighbour is working on.

Modern psychology or cognitive neuroscience is providing answers to all sorts of questions that have had philosophers scratching and pacing for millennia. Star Trek was wrong: space isn't the final frontier, we are. Our fantastically complex brains and behaviour are the most interesting bit of the unknown.

In an article in TIME, Pinker said "Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings." He was talking about evolution, but the point still stands. The mind has a lot of naïve impressions about itself. Overcoming them to find out how we humans tick is one of the most important and interesting pursuits of modern intellectual inquiry.

As you enter this revision and examination period you'll need to shrug off the 'Erg work. Isn't it shit' attitude and take on the spirit of the badges at the top of this blog. Get really excited about this subject, all the gems its has to offer and the possibility to be really knowledgeable in it. If you don't it's just going to be academic self-laceration over the next few months.

At worst, with all that knowledge you'll have interesting things to say and the cool blade of science with which to cut down others' naïve ideas about the human mind. At best, your interest will pay dividends in extra marks because you'll spend longer learning, studying and reading (and doing so more deeply) and lay down better memories (see Silvia, 2006). Either way, you improve something.

What I can be certain of though is that if you are intrigued by your degree, you'll start to feel that the effort required for all that learning ahead of you is magically lifted away. Suddenly references will start appearing in your mind without having to sit down and write them out twenty times, methodologies will etch themselves into you memory, and arguments will unfold themselves effortlessly.

This is both experience and fact talking. There is a thick wadge of evidence that shows if you are emotionally invested in material you'll learn it more easily and it will stick for longer (e.g. LeDoux, 2002; or for a fairly recent review see Labar and Cabeza, 2006). And, if you are positive about learning you'll out-perform those just huffing along (Dweck, 2006).

Instead of mediocrity, seek excellence in psychology. Instead of feeling duty-bound, be excited to be learning about the newest stuff in the sexiest science. It will make everything a lot easier.

The Timetable

(offshore @ Flickr)

Revision in its literal translation is inaccurate for the first part of the task that lies ahead. This is because revision means re-visiting the stuff you have already looked at. Much of the stuff you will be looking at will be for the first time because you were absent/dozing/comatose during that lecture or you simply need to flesh out the skeleton it provided.

Thus, the first stage of your revision is research. This should not just be the blind copying out of material. It should be active, involving lots of thinking about the material at hand. I think I'll do a post on note taking soon.

In the meantime, you'll need to get yourself sorted with a good timetable. This is absolutely vital. It should block off time for researching, then thinking, then learning. For example, you might say that by the end of the first week of the summer term you will have all the research completed. This then leaves you lots of time to organise your thoughts, write essay plans and start learning the material. That's what I did.

I had a look around for my old timetables but it wasn't to be: I must have binned them after exams. Instead, here are my Tables of Contents from Level 2 and Level 3. (I'll show you how to make a Table of Contents in the next few days). It might help you organise your time more effectively. Each subsection (e.g. L3: Psychosis –Auditory and Visual Hallucinations; L2: Philosophy of Science) probably took anything from half a day to two days to complete. Remember, before you freak out, this was a combined effort.

Make sure you leave some padding for overflow and that you give yourself plenty of time to relax and do other stuff. Pencil in your exam dates too, if they have been published yet. This will help you get a sense of how to allocate your time later on. It should also show you how there isn't a luxurious amount of time ahead that visions of May/June conjure up ('oh, it's in the summer - that's way off' kind of attitude).

For those of you who like to do it the digital way, Google Calendar works a treat and is out there in the 'cloud', so you can access it wherever you are and there's internet. Handy if you're roaming about.

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.

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.

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.

Effort scrimping

(from pesterussa @ Flickr)

In the previous post, I roughly calculated the amount of work you might like to put in to your revision. It was a lot. Too much. I made three strategies for ways in which you could cut this.

The first of these was simply to invest less time than the 10 hours I suggested in each topic. If you only give yourself, for example, five hours for each topic, you have cut your workload by 50%. Those three slaving months divide in half - something altogether more manageable.

I would say that this is a very poor strategy. For good marks you need understanding, you need detail and you need to have learnt the material. To obtain these things, you need time. Thus, time is the one thing you should not scrimp on.

That said, I don't want this ten hour thing to be set in stone. You do the work you need to do to understand the area. With me, it was probably around ten hours per topic to get to the level of understanding and detail I was happy with. For others, it may be more or it may be less. My point is simply don't sacrifice on time.

As the next posts will argue, it is better to sacrifice on topics or spread the workload.

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).