Jon88;3435181 said:
Wait until you get to college. The tests there require a lot of thinking. I thought I was going to breeze through college like I did in highschool. It wasn't the case. My GPA dropped from a 3.5 in highschool to a 3.0.
No kidding. My US History, 1877-Present final exam at Texas Tech was a killer. The professor was from Colorado State, on a one semester contract, doing research at Tech. 50 questions, multiple guess plus a single essay question.
"Describe any social, political, socio-economic, or events of interest from 1887 to present time that shaped the modern United States."
Translated: Write the book in the time remaining.
I took that test in the spring of 1993. I still remember that question being written on the board and the groans of people as they read it and recognized what it meant.
I write fast. Really fast. 27 pages in a blue book. It dropped me from an A to a C. Everyone I knew failed the class. I ran into one of the TA's the next semester and he remembered that I passed. Out of class of hundreds. Folks that have attended Texas Tech, it was in one of those cavernous lecture rooms in Holden Hall.
That's my final exam horror story.
Romo2Austin, you'll need to do what you can about taking better notes by hand. Eventually you'll run into a prof that expects you to be able to keep up in taking notes with how fast they speak, and the text book won't help worth a damn.
A professor I had at SWT would diagram biochemical pathways, turn, explain them, then erase them to start the next point. Almost impossible to keep up with, and even in the nightly study sessions we couldn't put the diagrams completely back together from the notes we had. You ended up in the library on the weekends trying to find the right reference material to put together coherent notes to start to study for the test.
