The Whiteboard Method
By Janette Siu, Civil Engineering, Class of 2009
I usually study for tests with one or two other people. That way, there are enough of us to bounce ideas off each other, but not so many that we'll get distracted. If your group is too big, it will tend to splinter into subgroups of two or three people, each group having its own conversation; then everyone will lose out on some of the information that gets shared.
After my group finds a study room, we write down on the whiteboard everything we need to know, organized by topic. This means reading through all of our notes and old homework to decide which information might be on the test. Copying information from our notes to the whiteboard helps us to study because we inevitably come up with questions about some of the concepts; then we discuss the material and come to a conclusion, which solidifies our learning of the topic. Once the whiteboard is full, we each copy it all onto our own paper (our “whiteboard sheets”), and then erase the whiteboard and repeat the process until we've covered all of the material. The physical action of writing down the information a couple times helps a lot to get it ingrained in your memory. Sometimes when writing our whiteboard sheets, we’ll find that certain points aren’t as important as they seemed when we first wrote them on the whiteboard, so we won’t copy those down. This strategy helps to distil the information down to what’s actually important.
If it’s a problem-oriented class, we’ll work through some sample problems that cover the key topics. Even if you already can do the problems, practicing them on the board will help make sure you don’t have any conceptual mistakes and will also increase your speed in working through problems on the test.
Then we each take some time to read over our whiteboard sheets and begin to focus on memorizing the information. After we’ve read it once or twice on our own, we take turns quizzing each other. If we don’t remember enough of the material the first time around, we might do a second round of reading and quizzing.
Just before bed, I read it all over (and maybe quiz myself quickly on the most difficult things) so that I’m sleeping on the information, which helps a lot in memorization. Finally, I save the whiteboard sheets along with all of my returned homework and tests, because it makes studying for the final a lot simpler!
Since you’ve already done the hard work of sorting through all the information that’s been thrown at you, you might as well use it twice. You can always distil down the whiteboard sheets even further for the final, since the test you took on that material probably gave you a really good idea of what the professor thinks is important.
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