<p>What's your approach that works?</p>
<p>… Knowing the material well since the beginning of the semester? You can’t cram for a calc exam and expect to do well</p>
<p>Break it down topic by topic starting from the basics and then working up to mastering the hardest of the heard problems. </p>
<p>You don’t have the understand everything from the beginning. Give yourself a week with a generous amount of hours each day. </p>
<p>I’m a day into my study schedule. Everything is going well. 4 topics down, 8 more to go!</p>
<p>As mentioned above, you’ve just gotta break it apart. Talk to people who have taken the class before if possible to get an idea of what will be on the final exam. Even if you can’t, you should be able to draw a fairly logical assumption of what will be on it.</p>
<p>Just break it apart by section. Study a few main points from each section every day and just work your way through the material.</p>
<p>A lot of people seem to be posting looking for advice on how to study for math finals. There’s really no secret. You just have to study and make sure you’re prepared for it. If you’re in calc III I’m imagining you’ve had a few previous math finals.</p>
<p>Even if you are not allowed a formula sheet for the exam, make one. It is very beneficial to break down the material and figure out what is important. The act of creating the sheet is very useful to boil down some of the concepts and clear up the differences (i.e., really nailing down normal vs. polar vs. spherical integration). You can then use this as a reference as you work through practice problems (and previous exams, if your professor provides them) without having to waste time flipping through your notes through everything.
Calc 3 is probably the hardest I have ever studied for a final, since my exam grades were 100, 104, and 68. (Class average was <50 on that last midterm…) I didn’t know what the curve would be, so I just invested a ton of hours in going through practice exams, figuring out what I got hung up on, and then going back and reviewing and working more problems on these topics. It paid off.</p>
<p>I’ve forgotten a lot… 
so I feel really overwhelmed that I have to relearn a lot of it.</p>
<p>If you studied well and learned the material along the way, it will come back quickly when you start to go back and practice it again. The biggest hurdle is the first one: just getting started. Once you get into the practice problems, it is much less intimidating.</p>
<p>I took calc 3 about a year and a half ago and never had to deal with the material again until my current co-op. Even though I felt like I had forgotten just about everything, it came back when I needed it and put in a little effort.</p>