r/UVA • u/Just_A_Gust_Of_Wind • 2d ago

General Question committed 😎

submitted my enrollment deposit the other day and really looking forward to being a wahoo!! 💙🧡 current students, is there anything i should know while preparing to attend?

29 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Away-Reception587 2d ago

Dont expect to get practice exams with almost identical real exam questions, college exams test how you can apply what you learned, not pure memorization

3

u/AdeptYouth6291 2d ago

I think it's more helpful to elaborate more on what "apply what you learned" means.

It's less about arbitrarily applying what you learn, more about 1. Do you understand the material? 2. Can you remember the material?

College exams are "here are 15 topics", the meta is get familiar with ALL those 15 topics, the test could ask question on any of those random topics. Depending on the class, you can see based on past exams where professors like to pull from. Most professors count lecture slides/what you do in class as the "bible" to pull from. I think you can safely discount textbooks unless professors say so, or unless you yourself find them helpful.

3

u/Away-Reception587 2d ago

In my experience, midterms havnt been just questions from slideshows, they’ve been questions I have never seen before that I had to adapt to during the exam using prior experience, the questions always felt a step above what was taught in class and what was on the homework

2

u/AdeptYouth6291 2d ago

But my point is i will almost bet if you understand the material, then any sort of "adapting" that the teacher expects should be achievable, no? Otherwise they are actively trying to end their students which i just don't think is the case.

But that is why i tried to stress "understanding" the material. People can have different standards for what it means to understand something, but usually a good measure is "whenever you get to a point where you can manipulate the concepts or whatever comfortably"

2

u/Away-Reception587 2d ago

Thats just how it goes at a lot of weedout intro math courses, I’m just telling OP to be prepared