I’ve just finished grading forty-some-odd final exams for Dr. Waller’s undergrad stats class. As a public service announcement, here are some test-taking tips courtesy of someone who’s been in school forever and has a few years of grading experience. This applies mainly to math/science/engineering-type exams but there should be something for everyone.
- Put at least something down for every question. Most graders, myself included, are generous with partial credit. I’ve graded exams where people left 30 points out of 100 blank.
- Strategize. Every moment on the test you should be working on the problem that gives you the most “bang for your buck.” For those with economics experience, you should be working on something that maximizes the marginal contribution to your score. This goes along with (1) since, for most problems, the first half of the points are easier to get than the last half. Write down some equations or just some random crap that shows you have the general idea, and you’ll get a fair amount of partial credit with almost no effort. Do this for all the problems right off the bat and you’ll have half the points in about ten minutes. Spend the rest of the time finishing things off. Likewise, don’t beat yourself up trying to work out a few technicalities on one problem (probably worth a few points at most, for a ton of work) when you still have another question you haven’t answered (where you can earn a ton of points just by writing down the relevant formulas in under a minute).
- Work problems easiest to hardest. The worst thing in the world is to spend all the time of the hard problems and run out of time for things you could have done.
- Work problems first that you can’t guess on. If there’s a multiple choice or true/false part, save it for last. If you run out of time you can fill out guesses here and still have a reasonable chance of scoring something.
- Show your work. As a grader, I can’t give you partial credit for what you haven’t written down. If you just write down the answer and it’s wrong, you’re going to get zero points.
- Be very clear in your work. I hate seeing random numbers and equations thrown about. Just because it’s clear in your mind doesn’t mean it’s clear in the mind of whoever is reading it. Just because it’s a math test doesn’t mean you can’t use words. In fact most of my exams consist of actual (gasp) sentences with just a few numbers and equations. More than once I’ve managed to get full (or almost full) credit when I’ve made a couple of mistakes because it was easy to trace my thoughts and find where the errors were. Explain what you’re doing, you’ll always earn more partial credit.
- Don’t hesitate to write messages on the test. If you realize you’ve made a mistake but don’t have time to fix it, let me know. Write “I know this is wrong because of X. I think I made a mistake doing Y, but I don’t have time to correct it.” If someone does this, I give them almost full marks, because they’ve demonstrated they know what they’re doing. Don’t think of the grader/TA/professor as some intimidating scary person who’s going to smite you if you dare to write anything other than formulas and answers.
