<p>Any good study tips for 1) math, 2) science, 3) history/social sciences?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>for math... do as many problems as you can, not just the assigned stuff.</p>
<p>one thing that I've found extremely helpful is going to your textbook's website. they almost always have practice quizzes and tests, and the history/social sciences ones usually have flashcards. there should be a url on your textbooks, if not google the publishers.</p>
<p>There's a book every college student should read about studying. It's called What Smart Students Know by Adam Robinson, written by one of the founders of the test prep service Princeton Review. I have never seen a better explanation of the steps you need to follow to really <em>learn</em> the material, and if you've learned it well you will have no trouble with grades. You'll probably be kicking yourself that if you'd known this stuff earlier you could have done better in HS!</p>
<p>mikemac: hope your right about that book</p>
<p>mikemac</p>
<p>I got What Smart Students Know last summer and thought it would help. It clearly had some good pointers, and I guess for someone that isn't really independent with their studies, it would be a good book. As for me, it kind of stated the obvious (Be positive, know you don't need a teacher, take notes, etc.) I think someone who followed each of the 12 (I forgot if it was 12) steps, would probably breeze through college. HOWEVER, these steps entail hours of work. For example, the book says right notes about everything, write notes about your notes, notes about those notes and so on until an entire chapter or perhaps even a book fits on one sheet. To do everything the book says, I'm sure you won't have as much free time as other students, but if you're willing to follow everything, I'm sure that academics are much more important to you. Anyways, best of luck. I recommend the book for a quick read, but don't expect much out of it like I did.</p>
<p>would the book help out in engineering? or is it more helpful for majors where you do lots of reading and writing like sociology or something</p>
<p>every student studies differently - as crappy as you're probably going to think this advice is, you need to find what works for you.
I know a lot of people who swear by their flashcards (and it seems like they have millions of the things) - I utterly despise them; they don't help me study at all. I can't study in my room and generally just don't study at all until very shortly before the test (usually the night before) - but it works for me, and I've done well so far.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>I know a lot of people who swear by their flashcards<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>I'm definitely a flashcard fan. I went from being a B- college student to straight As once I started studying with flashcards.</p>
<p>proton--</p>
<p>I'm not sure it would help you much in the engineering field although it does have a separate chapter for math/science and the like. I believe it primarily helps fields that require memorization. It doesn't matter though because you can easily apply some of the techniques to engineering. I'm also sure that you'll be taking other classes that aren't in the engineering field so it'd be great. Buy a used copy. See how it works for you.</p>
<p>well... engineering requires memorization of concepts so maybe it'll help.</p>
<p>does cheating count as a study tip?? j/k heh</p>
<p>
[quote]
would the book help out in engineering? or is it more helpful for majors where you do lots of reading and writing like sociology or something? ... well... engineering requires memorization of concepts so maybe it'll help.
[/quote]
I think it would help in any subject, including engineering. I disagree with the person who said its mainly about memorizing, what its really about is getting you to think about the material until you understand it.</p>
<p>I think this applies to engineering as much as anything else. You wrote engineering requires memorization of concepts so my guess is you're a HS student right now, because you don't really need to memorize much to do well in engineering. What you do need to do, and what makes it hard, is you need to understand the material and be able to apply it in novel situations. </p>
<p>Let me give a quick example from physics. There are some types of problems in which the easiest way to get the answer is thru conservation of momentum. If I was writing a test and wanted to include a few items on this, I could easily think of dozens if not hundreds of different ways to ask the question, and then I could try to disguise the path to the answer by throwing in some extraneous info that would lead you down the wrong path (trying to calculate velocities at every point in time, for instance). There is simply no way you can memorize all possible ways of asking the question, but the concept itself isn't hard to remember. </p>
<p>As for electricity, Maxwell describes all of it with just 4 laws. You don't need "What Smart Students Know" to memorize 4 laws, you need it get a methodical approach for studying the material so you know how to apply the concepts. (well, ok, you also need about 3 years of calculus since the laws are in operator notation -- see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations</a> ).</p>
<p>Even in upper-division courses the tests are often open-book, or you get a page of notes. The profs know that it isn't the formula that's important, and they're not going to ask questions that simply require you to plug-and-chug. They want to see if you grasp the problem and can reason to a solution. If you don't understand the material all the texts in the world aren't going to help you, and memorization simply plays little role.</p>
<p>If you are interested in looking at the book, it is searchable online at amazon so you can see a few pages and decide if its what you want.</p>
<p>^ im not in high school. but in engineering theres a lot of graphs and i found it helpful to memorize how the different graphs look.</p>