I’ve taught countless exam prep sessions for over a decade and every year, in every university, in every course which allows an aid sheet, I’m asked if I can give them a great aid sheet. I can’t. Of course I can’t! I could only give them my aid sheet, which would be brilliant for me (I’m really good at these courses!), and sort of useful for them, but the only way to make a truly useful aid sheet is to make it yourself.
So start now!
There’s no point copying someone else’s aid sheet. No matter how exquisitely they’ve wedged half a textbook into aligned columns of text. That one sheet could revolutionize human history if it was sent back in time, all by itself, but the fact is it’s their aid sheet. To you it’s just a sheet of symbols put together by someone else. So’s the exam! You’ve already got enough pages of other people’s equations to worry about!
The point of an aid sheet is to help you approach the exam. It’ll help most if it connects to your work, your style, and your experience. Sit down and write a first draft aid sheet. Now use it, and only it, when practicing problems for the next week. Add notes to the sheet when you see something you wish you’d included or find something you think would be useful. Then sit down and copy it all across to a new, reorganized, improved aid sheet.
Then do that again.
Keep iterating the aid sheet as you work. That way you’re making sure it has everything you need, because it’s the only thing you had while doing these problems. More importantly you now know the aid sheet inside and out. It’s not just a list of equations, its got your muscle memory pulling your eyes to what you need. It’s in your writing, almost autocompleting your own thoughts because you’ve used those lines to solve so many similar problems in the past.
Using your own tools will always make you faster, better, and more relaxed. If exams were just lists of equations and methods we could photocopy the textbook and hand that in to be examined instead of ourselves. The point is our ability to apply these methods, and that means not just knowing, it means practicing and improving. And we can improve ourselves by improving our tools as well.
So start now!
You’ve already got enough pages of other people’s equations.
There’s no point copying someone else’s aid sheet. No matter how exquisitely they’ve wedged half a textbook into aligned columns of text. That one sheet could revolutionize human history if it was sent back in time, all by itself, but the fact is it’s their aid sheet. To you it’s just a sheet of symbols put together by someone else. So’s the exam! You’ve already got enough pages of other people’s equations to worry about!
The point of an aid sheet is to help you approach the exam. It’ll help most if it connects to your work, your style, and your experience. Sit down and write a first draft aid sheet. Now use it, and only it, when practicing problems for the next week. Add notes to the sheet when you see something you wish you’d included or find something you think would be useful. Then sit down and copy it all across to a new, reorganized, improved aid sheet.
Then do that again.
Keep iterating the aid sheet as you work. That way you’re making sure it has everything you need, because it’s the only thing you had while doing these problems. More importantly you now know the aid sheet inside and out. It’s not just a list of equations, its got your muscle memory pulling your eyes to what you need. It’s in your writing, almost autocompleting your own thoughts because you’ve used those lines to solve so many similar problems in the past.
Using your own tools will always make you faster, better, and more relaxed. If exams were just lists of equations and methods we could photocopy the textbook and hand that in to be examined instead of ourselves. The point is our ability to apply these methods, and that means not just knowing, it means practicing and improving. And we can improve ourselves by improving our tools as well.
