Learning to learn

PARTY'S OVER: With the academic year now divided into two semesters, with exams at the end of each, the uninterrupted social whirl of old from March to late October is a thing of the past. PHOTO/RICHARD ROBINSON

The heroic view of student life is of a non-stop social schedule, with a little time allowed during the day for attending lectures and tutorials. Classes might be seen as a tedious intrusion into one's sleeping time but, to the dedicated socialiser, they're a useful venue for making arrangements with friends for another busy night out.

Once, this social whirl could continue largely uninterrupted for the duration of the academic year, from March till late October. Unfortunately for today's students, there's a fly in the ointment. The academic year is now divided into two semesters, with exams at the end of each.

As the end of the first semester looms, those students who've been working more on their social lives than their books face the nightmare prospect of being tested on all the work they haven't had time to take in. The temptation might be to rely on pulling an all-nighter or two to get them through the exams. But the advice of experts in exam technique is, don't let it come to that.

"We tell them preparation for exams starts on the first day of the first semester,'' says Dr Emmanuel Manalo, director of the University of Auckland's student learning centre. A fortnight out from exams, students should be revising what they already mostly know, Manalo says.

"There will be the odd thing that maybe they didn't learn that well and they need to catch up on but, by and large, by that stage they will have learnt what they need to learn and will be reinforcing it so they can use it as best they can in their exams.''

Manalo was a student at the university in the early 1980s and recalls the cramming habit as being more prevalent then than now. The cost of fees these days discourages many students from being so casual about university.

Instead, they're flocking in their thousands, this year about 8000, or nearly a quarter of the university roll, to the learning centre for instruction in how to study efficiently. Manolo says the centre encourages them to treat full-time study as a full-time job.

"If you do most of your study during the week, between and before lectures, you can have evenings off. You can go out on Friday night if you want, Saturday night ...

"You might have to do a bit of study and assignments at the weekends, but it doesn't rule out social life and family life.''

Users of the centre pay a $10 fee for a year's access to workshops on a wide range of subjects. The third of users who are postgraduate students, for example, can get instruction in how to design a research project, while high-achieving students often want to know techniques for eking out the last few per cent in their final results.

"A lot of students don't quite appreciate that the semester needs to be used to learn and practice what they will have to do in an exam setting. Writing what you know isn't always that easy. You might have good ideas but communicating them on paper can be harder.''

Manalo says rather than test retention, exams tend to be designed to discover whether students can apply what they've learnt. Courses are organised so that students who have attended lectures and digested the reading materials will be clear about what's expected of them in the exam.

"They might be asked to apply a particular theory to a case they haven't seen before, so it's an assessment of whether they understand. But part of it also is whether they can explain the theory.

"If they have to think about that for the first time in the exam it not only contributes to a slower response to the questions but it also leads to lack of clarity in what they produce.''