Hello! This is the post where I review each of the courses I took this semester as a part of my Science degree at McMaster University (Pre-specialization). This will include what I did to do well in each respective course. If you don’t care about that in particular, see the general study tips that I include at the end. Let’s go.
Summary
Out of the five courses I took, four were taken in order to fulfill requirements for my specific Science gateway. One was an elective. I scored a cumulative average of 12.0 in the McMaster grading scale. (4.0 GPA in the Ontario standard grading scale).
Biology 1M03: Evolution
I took this course with Professor Dushoff & Kolasa. If you want to do well in this course, then you must adapt to the teaching styles of both professors. (Provided you’re taking the course with them). This course’s material is extremely stale and mostly builds on content from high school biology so be prepared for high amounts of information.
For Dushoff: GO TO THE LECTURES. Dushoff does a good job of providing notes but he often expounds on the examples presented in class. Often, this information makes its way into the test question he writes. (My lowest grade was the first term test written by him). He is a decently entertaining lecturer and teaches in a application-based way that forces thinking.
For Kolasa: His lectures are optional, as most of it is just content from the textbook. For him, it is best to focus your studying on the textbook and the online platform Peerwise. He pulls most of his test answers from peerwise, so doing a ton of those questions proved to be useful (sort by difficulty and quality of questions).
Another highly weighted section of this course is the PBL tutorial assignment. This is the research heavy project that you will be given in the mandatory tutorials. For this, hope for a good TA, do the work early, and choose reliable group members. You don’t want to end up with a group that relies on 2-3 people to do all the work as I did. I spent an estimated total of eight hours on this assignment throughout the semester, which really isn’t that bad for a project worth 11% of the course. Cite your sources, you’ll be fine!
Chemistry 1A03
When studying, look at the “Learning Objectives” document provided for each unit as a guide. This is important as the tests will not deviate from this material, and some of the required knowledge is not throughly covered in lecture. This course is half-memorization and half-conceptual: you can remember all the terms and definition, but if you do not truly understand all the concepts you will end up falling short of expectations, and vice versa. You must do both. For each entry of the learning objectives, ask:
Can I define every term in here? and Do I understand all the concepts required? For example, one entry reads as follows. “Identify Brønsted-Lowry conjugate acid/base pairs.”. Naturally the questions that follow are: What is an Brønsted-Lowry acid/base? How is a conjugate acid different from a normal acid? Does identification of the acid/base pair change if one flips the reaction? These are all questions that arise forth from such concepts and such considerations could (and have) shown up on the tests. Many fall into the trap of pure rote-memorization and spamming practice questions, which is not always the smartest answer.
The lab portion is basically a guaranteed perfect score if you show up and put in any kind of effort. The grading is automated with AI and as a result they give you a lot of attempts even if you mess up. So in any case, your main effort should be on the tests.
Korean 1Z03
I can’t really give any useful tips for this course because I already had a lot of pre-requisite knowledge of Korean. My best advice would be to (again) do the work early. If you fall behind it’ll take a large amount of will to pull yourself back. Even though this is a bird-type course, it does take a lot of work. If you put in effort, the quiz and workbook sections are guaranteed free marks. The quizzes are a mandatory component that occur during lecture, making lecture attendence semi-mandatory. As with other courses, your main challenge will be the tests.
행운을 빌어요.
Math 1LS3
The Childsmath Quizzes are great guides for studying. Do NOT ChatGPT through these quizzes or labs, you are cheating yourself out of free practice! The Math Department also provides great material to study, such as the coursepack and previous tests. A good repository of previous Math tests can be found here. The coursepack can be found for free here.
Calculus is an extremely conceptual subject. If you do not really understand the concepts, then you cannot hope to apply them. For this reason, I actually do not recommend trying to brute-force such understanding through practice questions. For example, you could be a master at using the power rule, but completely fail at relating how the derivative of a function relates to the original function (Eg. Matching a function graph with derivative graph). At that point, can you really say you understand derivatives?
Self-learning skills, attending lecture, and asking questions is extremely valueable in this case. Once you have an idea of how concepts work in your mind, you can then test these hypotheses through doing practice questions or through recall methods such as mindmaps or teaching.
Physics 1A03
The repository of previous tests is posted in the math section.
Go to lectures. There is a participation-based mark that makes these lectures semi-mandatory. If you find the material redundant, take the time to complete the assignment that accompany the lecture while you’re there. They’re free practice and marks. The labs are easy enough to be done in 1-2 hours at home. To ensure high marks, make sure to read the long-answer questions throughly and that you have answered every single part of the question.
I can’t write much more for this subject at a risk of repeating myself, as I find studying for Physics extremely similar to Calculus. Concepts, concepts, concepts.
Studying Tips
AI is not good for studying (Don’t take shortcuts).
Using AI is famously unhelpful when it comes to understanding new concepts because it undermines the very mechanism that results in learning. When one inputs a practice question into a chatbox, they rob themselves of actually finding the path to solving a problem. Ask yourself this: have you ever read the solution of a problem and decided that you could probably solve it, only to be defeated when confronted with a similar question on the test? That is because a birds-eye view of a maze is far easier to solve than on the ground. There are divergent paths, efficiency considerations, decision fog, and others that cannot be felt when one doesn’t actually try to solve the problem proper.
Note that this isn’t a hardline AI, or problem solution stance. However, one must take special precaution to actually use these tools correctly. That is, to only look to confirm an answer, find a problem solving direction, or to compare thought processes. (Full solutions can provide alternative, perhaps faster thought paths). What one will find if they overuse shortcuts is that they will either stumble on the more conceptual questions on tests or they will have to spend more time relearning everything, eating the price of their own sunk work. In the case of AI, it is important to remember that despite its name, it is not actaully intelligent, at least in the way 99% of people think about intelligence. It can’t derive new information out of previously known axioms like a mathematician can. Even though it is able to spit out the correct answer for certain questions, it cannot do so without having a human-created solution somewhere in its dataset. Because of this, I’d advise you to use the technology as little as possible when studying, and find human-made solutions if you are able to.
Remember, understanding is the final goal of studying. Understanding takes a high mental load, it is tiring, and it is not always fast. Don’t be embarassed to work through a problem for a long amount of time. As long as your brain is engaged, then you are getting better even if the results cannot be immediately be felt. Of course, if you really cannot figure a problem out, look at a solution for ideas.
Do everything early.
This is self-explanatory, but I would like to expand on why this is so neccessary. Quizzes, assignments and projects are there to develop conceptual understanding of subjects. For example, the Childmath Quizzes and Labs in Math 1LS3 are there as free grades while also serving as practice for tests. (The questions are similar to the ones found on tests). Doing these projects early (that is, almost immediately after they’re assigned) sets up a guaranteed spaced repetition that will guarantee a lead come exam season. It also creates the conditions for which a consistent study schedule can be made.
Due dates and test dates usually coincide. Once exam season comes you don’t want to be caught and overwhelmed by the workload. “Should I do my project, or study for my exam?” is a question easily avoided by just doing the work. “The work will find me, no matter where I hide” is the mindset that has helped me the most.
Test early.
When approaching a new subject, it is best to get an extremely basic understanding of the subject and go into practice tests immediately. It is not actually wise to spam practice of specific subjects individually at first. The purpose of this is to identify weak spots that you can ‘mend’. This approach will feel very hard and will inevitably lead to failure, but practice is the time to fail. Avoiding the hard parts of learning will make you complacent.
Zoom out, identify all your cracks, seal them up and zoom back out again. Do until satisfaction.
Thank you for reading! If you’re taking these courses in the future, I hope you 12 in each one of them. Good night.
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