Step 1: Identify Your Problem Areas

What's a Problem Area?

If you're taking a class and studying for an exam, chances are, you've already seen throughout the course that some topics are particularly challenging for you; these are your "problem areas." When you have a limited amount of time to study and prepare, you need to make sure you make these difficult topics a priority for your attention. If you are running out of study time, and you need to cut back on your schedule, you need to make sure these problem areas stay on your plan, while you cut out other areas.

Identifying the Problem Areas

Here's some questions you should ask yourself when finding your problem areas:

• In your previous exams and assignments, where did you lose the most points?
• Which problem types and topics make you feel the most anxious or uncomfortable?
• Which areas would give you the biggest boost in points if you could master them?

Two Types of Problem Areas

There are two major types of problem areas you should think about:

• Topic areas: What specific topics, subjects and content sections in computer science and programming did you have trouble mastering?
• Question/assignment types: What question types or formats gave you the most trouble?

To identify your problem topic areas, figure out what concepts or tasks were the most difficult for you. For example, did you have the most trouble with strings and text output, different types of variables, how to create and use methods or classes, and so on. You can also look at the most difficult chapters and sections in your textbook and notes to remind yourself of what topics you need to brush up on.

As for question and assignment types, here's some formats you should look at, and determine how difficult each of them are for you:

• Coding problems: Possible problems might include writing and reading short programs and code fragments, tracing output and execution, and making changes to given code or finding bugs. Your best bet for preparing for these types of problems is doing lots of practice problems and reviewing code examples.
• True or false questions: These fact-based questions ask you to determine whether a statement is true or false. Sometimes you might have the option to say that not enough information is available to determine the statement's truth. They are often based on major concepts and specific details that you need to understand and remember. Do your reading, pay attention to lectures, answer review problems in your textbook, and use flashcards to study the material for these questions.
• Fill-in-the-blanks: These questions ask you to complete sentences with missing words, in order to express facts or concepts. Your study approach for these fact-based questions should be similar to the approach for true/false questions.
• Essay/short answer questions: These questions ask you to write a few sentences or more about a particular topic. The questions are usually more open-ended then some of the other fact-based questions. Some possible questions might include asking you to explain computer science or technology concepts in detail, or justifying a design decision made in a program, as well as explaining some possible alternative approaches. For these questions, you'll want to build on the fact-based studying you've done for the other types of questions, and really make sure you understand the big picture of the concepts you've learned. Be able to see how the concepts apply to the code you've seen and written in class, and it helps if you can apply them to real-world examples, too.

Rank Your Problem Areas

Once you've decided on the questions and topic types you need to go over, you should rank them in terms of both the topic importance and your level of comfort with them.

Look back at past exams and projects that you've done, and pay attention to how much emphasis each topic gets (the number of questions/problems, how often a concept is used, etc). You will want to prioritize the topics you've had trouble with that seem to get the most coverage. Ask the teacher/professor to clarify if you're having trouble determining topic importance.

Once you have an idea on how important each topic is, think about how comfortable you are with each topic. If you have some questions or topics that you were only slightly unsure about, but for the most part, feel pretty confident about, you might consider these a lower priority. You can then focus your time on the more difficult pieces, and then revisit these other parts once you've got the tough spots covered.