Although I’m a ways away from my exams in a PhD program (have to apply for PhD programs and get started first), I’m interested in the way that students study for them. One of my professors, Vicki Tolar Burton, has suggested time and time again using precis (what is the plural? preces?) for exams, as she did when studying for her exams, so that you can easily remember and return to what you read.
Derek Mueller, a 3rd year PhD student at Syracuse, passed his exams recently (Congratulations!), and I find the way he studied for them pretty fascinating. Collin Brooke, one of his professors, describes the process he used:
If you haven’t visited his Exam Sitting site, you should do so. If you’re faculty, and supervise students preparing for exams, or if you’re someone who’ll be taking exams sometime in the future, you should be thinking about adopting this model. Each entry simply records, categorizes, and tags the reading notes for a particular text–the entries themselves do little more than what our graduate students across the country do on a daily basis as they read for courses or prepare for exams. But the site itself, among other things, provided a measure of his progress, a way for me and other committee members to peek in on his progress, an opportunity to see the larger patterns among his readings, connections among the readings, and finally, a resource that is going to be useful for him for years after the exams are a distant memory.
Brooke goes on to state that “Exam Sitting is the most important webtext to be published in our field last year,” which I think is a pretty powerful, and perhaps even accurate statement. Mueller’s Exam Sitting is an excellent site showing how PhD students are coping and adapting with the rigors of programs in a New Media age. Exam Sitting kind of reminds me of the way this blog started out, with notes to texts I was reading for research (but since it has somewhat grown into more conversational style, perhaps). It’s a pretty important text to remember when I eventually start studying for exams.
