Attention Studentphil! how to do well in a philosophy exam.

rubuhoeikanaika

Phil,

You just !!!!ed me off so much. Don't feel too special though, I wrote it for a friend of mine in college. It worked, he got his 2.i, much to everyone's surprise.
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The following is some points about revising for philosophy exams. It may be overly ambitious in the short time SP has left, but even a truncated version should get him something done. I'm not saying it's perfect but it got me onto my PhD programme.

If your exams are less than a month away, work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. I mean 10 real hours, but including short breaks.

How to do this:

• 8am: get up and get ready
• 9am - 12pm: first in the library. (3 hours)
• 12pm - 1pm: Lunch
• 1pm - 6pm: Work. (5 hours. Total: 8 hours)
• 6pm - 8pm: Dinner and relax, watch some TV, post here, whatever.
• 8pm - 10pm: Work. (2 hours. Total: 10 hours)
• 10pm - Midnight: unwind however you want, watch TV, catch last orders at the bar or whatever. No more than half a pint, preferably no alcohol at all.

Then bed and do it all over again.

About breaks - you may in each hour work 40 min and relax for 20min. So long as:

• that 40 min 'work'is solid work, at your desk. not including trips to the bookshelves etc - do that during your break.
• you return to work *immediately* when that 20min is up. All packing, walking, daydreaming etc counts as breaktime. As the 'buzzer' goes off you are back at your desk, pen in hand, ready to work. (This was how it was with breaks at the factory I worked at - I hope you don't think you're too good for that?)

Then you may count 40min work+20min break as an hour's work for the purposes of totting up your 10 hours, above. So you do a 10 hour day, but fully 1/3 of that is breaks.

This is a punishing schedule and ideally you'd want to work up to it, but this is game time.

Passing philosophy exams is about answering the question as asked. For this you need two things - recall (of facts and arguments) and analysis (if you're aiming high).


It is probably too late for you to develop your analytical skills much before your exams, but recall is easy.

Undergraduate exams are quite repetitive, often you can count on there being 'the skepticism question' etc etc.

I assume you are doing a 3 essays in 3 hours type exam.

What you need to do is make sure it's virtually certain that you will be able to produce 3 passable (that is, 2.1+) answers. To do this:

1. You need to be confident of being able to answer (at least) 3 questions in every exam.
2. So identify which topics 4 or 5 come up every year. Do this by looking at past papers. Look path the actual wording of the question to the topic. For a metaphysics+epistemology paper, this might be: possible worlds, endurance vs. perdurance, causality, brains in vats, and internalism vs. externalism
3. Each of these topics is really a debate, with standard (if basic) arguments on either side. So! Summarise the 3 arguments for and 3 against on some bullet-point notes (no more, we're too late for detail now) and *rote memorise* them. No more than 1 mostly empty side of A4 per topic.
4. This way, you are guaranteed (almost) to know *something* and be able to write *something* for 3 questions, even if it's not particularly good. If you capture the main points of each debate in an accurate way, you should get a 2.i

Spend your 8pm-10pm session revising past questions.

Every night, do at least one past question 'blind' - no notes, exam style. Do the best you can in 1 hour. Then either do another question, or spend the next hour looking at what you could/should have written. Use this to check whether your rote memorisation has worked. Look at examiners reports if you can - they can be a goldmine.

Rote memorisation is hard. Review, review, review.

I think the best method is at 1 day, 3 day, 5 day etc leading up to the night before your exam.

DO NOT just go through the A4 sheet thinking "yep, I know that" - turn the sheet over and see if you can reproduce it from scratch. If not, look at it again, write it out where you went wrong, and try again. It will come.

How to use your 3 basic facts to answer questions.

We assume each question has 1 hour.
Spend up to 10min *but no more* planning.
You have facts you need to get on paper, and that takes time.

Most every undergrad question can be rephrased as "is this particular philosophical position correct", perhaps by means of a specific example.

eg "could I be a brain in a vat?" = "could skepticism be correct?"

Now you have in this case learned (at least) 3 arguments for and 3 against skepticism. So!

• INTRODUCTION. say what you are going to do. take a position. "I will argue that though there are fairly strong reasons to believe we may be envatted brains, they do not bear close inspection blah blah". MAKE SURE YOU PHRASE THIS IN TERMS OF THE QUESTION ASKED.
• Give the arguments for skepticism, in terms of the question asked.
• Give the arguments against skepticism, in terms of the question asked.
• CONCLUSION. "I have shown blah" *in terms of the actual question*

Now either follow my plan or another. BUT ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING.

Good luck,
rubuhoeikanaika

crazy_guy

Top stuff rubuhoeikanaika - this is sound advice! I have been working like this for the last 3 weeks but since Friday my motivation has dropped a good amount but this advice has propped me up and I will personally follow this plan until my exams are over!

Again thanks for the useful information, hopefully it will inspire another well known student round here!

Catseyez

Thanks for taking the time to post this, it's very useful indeed. I shall be saving it and using it when I reach that stage.