Today I realized that the method I used for studying all my life was completely wrong and because of this, I failed Aerodynamics and Compressible flow. What I did was review the concepts in the lecture notes, and then after knowing I had a grasp of them, redo the problems in my lecture notes, text book examples, and HW problems. It sounded like a decent plan, right?
Except one thing: engineering and upper-level math exams rely on students solving problems they likely never seen before. They rely on testing the “on-the-fly” problem solving skills of students. That’s why professors make tests completely different from HW and lectures.
What I was doing was reviewing what I already knew. In other words, I wasn’t actually learning anything new or teaching myself how to tackle new problems: all I was doing was pointlessly redoing all the problems.
All that did was give me a false sense of confidence without actually learning anything new. In other words, this method only made me overconfident.
A different method would be something like this (under read more)
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