Day 19 — Exam prep and a memory drill

In my Day 2 post I mentioned that the first course I took had roughly 700 pages of readings (for 4 sessions in total). Now it’s time to prepare for the exam from the readings. Here’s an overview of my approach.

Step 1 — Take notes from the readings

I’m not great fan of highlighting. Besides, I didn’t actually print out the articles and books, so mostly I read on the screen or listened to speech generated from the texts (I mentioned the tools I use earlier). In any case, that’s how I consumed the content, but recording notes is a whole different story.

I’m not sure if this was the right approach, buy mostly I didn’t take notes while reading, but completed consumption first and took notes only later (this way I knew wheter different messages were importnat in the context of whole article). On the downside, it took quite a lot of time.

Coincidentally, I took notes before two sessions and didn’t take any notes for the two other sessions. Now, when I’m preparing, it is clear that taking good notes from the beginning was a better strategy. Today I spent essentially the whole day catching up with notes (also part of yesterday).

Concerning the level of detail, it depends. Whenever I feel there is something really interesting or insightful or essential I copy that section to my notes. Sometimes, when the document doesn’t allow coping or the idea I have is in not directly in the text I write my own thoughts, but these are fairly short typically. I use a lot of bullet points and lists to give structure to the notes (hierarchy of ideas). Still for some articles I have really long notes.

Step 2 — Revise notes, remember and learn

Repetition is the mother of learning. This means that to really learn the content I need to go through it many times. The only way to do it is to make notes more concise. Another, important aspect of learning is recalling from memory. Like testing myself if I remember things and pushing myself to recreate the content without looking at the support material (after I have already revised).

To speed up revision (I’m hoping to revise the whole content 10 to 20 times and have 4 days left — we have a birthday party for kids, my wife has super busy time at work and needs to work on weekend and I still need to take kids to daycare in the mornings on Monday and Friday, plus I have important and long meeting on Monday, which I need to prepare for) in interest of saving time, I’m summarizing the notes for each article.

Here’s my approach.

I printed one page for each session with titles of articles spread vertically across the page and the page is in horizontal layout. This is the space I have. Now I’ll need to use keywords, mini diagrams and drawings to represent key headings and list items from my notes.

I’m planning to revise the notes in this format. Once I’ve done that several times, I’ll be looking at another set of pages that are prepared like this, but without my mini notes. I’ll try to recall all key elements that should be under each article.

Having all the key items should work as a trigger for me to remember details that fall under that item.

Let’s see how it goes. I still need to take the condensed version of notes first.