By strictlystat
During our program, like most others, you have to take written comprehensive exams (“comps”) at the end of your first year of coursework. For many students it’s a time of stress, which can be mitigated with some long-term planning. I wanted to make some suggestions on how to go about this for our (and other) PhD students.
Start the week after spring break
Again, comps are stressful. You can be tested on anything from the material (ideally) from your first year. Professors can throw in problems that seem from left field that you did not study or prep on. How can you learn or study all the material?
The way to make comps more manageable is to have a long-term studying trajectory. We have 2 weeks after the last exam to study and prep, and that is crunch time. In my opinion, that time should be working on the topics you’re struggling with, annotating books for crucial theorems (if you’re allowed them in the exam), and doing a bunch of problems. Those 2 weeks is not the time to cover everything from day one. That time comes before that 2 weeks.
The week after spring break (the week before this was published) is a good time to start your timeline. That gives you about 10 weeks to study and prep. You can start from the beginning of the year to the current time, or work backward. If nothing else in the first week, make a timeline of what topics or terms you will cover over what time frame. This will reduce stress so that it breaks the test into discrete chunks of time and discrete courses.
Get Past Exams
What’s the best preparation for the comprehensive exam? A comprehensive exam. …read more
Source:: hopstat.wordpress.com