The truth on finals

Finals are the hardest academic experience I have ever been through. I had them nicely spaced out, with at least a two-day interval between each of them, and I was still sweating it. To compare, some of my friends on campus had two finals on one day, and they got an hour of sleep before. I slept like a baby before my finals, getting at least eight hours. It can be tough to physically sleep before a final, with all the stress, but I was at least in bed for eight to nine hours every time. Be sure to get your sleep — I seriously think it paid off when I needed some extra thought power during my tests. Of course you can cram, think you know everything, and get an hour of sleep. Then you will go to your test, the professor will throw something new at you, exactly like my chemistry professor, and you will have no clue how to do it because you can’t use an algorithm to solve it.

That’s exactly my point. No matter how much you read concepts in a book, some tests will hit you with material that you haven’t seen. It’s just not possible to know everything. You just have to know how to do everything. That’s extremely difficult on a test. For example, also during chemistry, I got stuck looking at a combustion reaction that I didn’t know how to solve for over thirty minutes. I kept plowing through and I think I finally got it. It was a good feeling, but I know that if I had been drained, with no sleep, I wouldn’t have known how to do it.

Sleep is not as important as knowing the basic concepts, of course. I didn’t put anything off for my test, so I didn’t have that problem. However, one of my floormates didn’t do any of his statistics for the entire year, and he crammed from 12 PM-12 AM before his final. That would take it out of you.

Just keep up on the work and you’ll do fine. I think I did.