Re: Would like to find study group for computer science comprehensive exams.

Casey Hawthorne wrote:
Professors seem to be VERY concerned about how much you can
memorize for a few days - that gets tested along with just about
everything else through closed-book tests. I have no idea why.

Patricia

One of the reasons for the "overwhelming" content/details is to see if
you can organize it while taking the course.

The volume of content and details seemed quite reasonable to me. What
seemed unreasonable was the repeated testing of whether I could memorize
material well enough to remember it for a few days.

For an open book test I would still extract what I considered to be the
key facts etc.

The difference was that for a closed book test I had multiple copies of
my notes scattered around my house for a few days before the test, and
kept repeating things to myself. That was a total waste of time and effort.

It is very hard to get an overall/framework view of the subject matter
while in a course.

Fortunately, I already had an overall framework of computing
internalized from the decades of working in the computer industry before
I started on my Ph.D. It was relatively easy to slot all the new
material into that framework.

Patricia
.