Exam study orientation
Here are several recommendations to help you prepare for the exams. It is useful if you start using them right away, starting in week 1. More information is provided in Course Logistics & Study Recommendations.
Please also make use of the Study Groups Coordination platform to coordinate studying together with others and please ask questions, follow and contribute to the ongoing course discussion on our course Q&A platform. Important questions are being discussed here.
The most general study recommendation is that you have the class lecture slides ready when watching the lectures and take notes. Since we don't have a textbook, this is your natural guide to the material. Use the notes to formulate the content in your own words. Each session has slide pdfs ready for download. Print them out and have them in front of you when you watch the lectures! Take notes on them. Watching lectures is NOT passive, but an active exercise in this course. An annotated example of a slide from Session 1 might look something like this:
Be aware that research shows that manual notes beat computer notes Links to an external site.! Check out the FAQs section at the bottom of the syllabus for more on using notes from others. It is the process of note-taking that makes you learn these concepts. The intermittent questions in the videos (might be annoying, but) allow you to see if you are still fresh enough to pay attention. If you start struggling with them, take a break!
I am told by students who have succeeded in this class that they watched the lectures (at least) two times during the week it is assigned. The first time taking notes. Then reviewing the notes, and watching it again while checking and complementing YOUR notes. When the time comes to study for the exam, and look at your annotated slide-notes, and formulate for yourself what the slide is about. If you cannot formulate it yourself, you found that you do not understand it fully yet. Go back to that video. You can also discuss these concepts in self-organized Study Groups. Many students watch most of the lectures again during that time (that would make it three...).
The questions in the exams will test if you understand these concepts and if you can apply them to new contexts. Experience shows that students who study by memorization and never took the time to think through the content have difficulties to succeed in the exams. The same accounts for the labs. If you do them yourself, you will be able to answer the exam multiple choice questions. Otherwise, you are randomly guessing and will not succeed.
There will be three kinds of questions on the exam, and one kind of questions that will NOT appear.
What kind of questions will NOT appear on the exams:
(1) Which one of the following concepts have you heard being mentioned in this course? Simply put a check-mark on the concept you remember and move on quickly.
A) candy canes & marshmallows
B) asymptotic equipartition property
C) induction & deduction
Of course, this is exaggerated, but you get the idea. In short: we do not test for word recognition. This is simply because these kind of questions do not have any equivalent in the real world.
Exam Question Type 1 (most questions): Application of learned concept Questions:
What you will encounter in a real-world work setting are situations where you will have to apply concepts to new contexts. And for this you need to understand them well. More like this:
(2) A colleague, an avid user of Wikipedia, collected large amount of Wikipedia media data. Thinking about it, he got convinced that it will show something revolutionary. He designed a 8 month plan to test his intuition by analyzing the collected data. What scientific approach is your colleague pursuing?
A) Emergence
B) Deduction
C) Replication
D) Induction
We treated all of those concepts in class. You have to understand each of them them well in order to be able to answer the question correctly. Can you?
Unfortunately, the only way we can test for understanding in a multiple choice setting (which is far from optimal), is to put emphasis on differences in rather small details. This is not to confuse you, but to test for understanding. For example:
(3) A colleague, an avid user of Wikipedia, had an idea about how Wikipedia works. He got inspired by evolutionary theory, and designed a 8 month plan to collect data to test his intuition. What scientific approach is your colleague pursuing?
A) Emergence
B) Deduction
C) Replication
D) Induction
My recommendation is NOT to think strategically about "what the Professor might want to hear", and also NOT to select whatever your first gut reaction suggests. But rather I urge you to think about the question after reading it carefully.
In the exams, there will always only be one correct answer. A good way to do this is to think about counter-examples that discard one option after the other (in science this strategy is called "falsifiability Links to an external site."). This is important because often the answers can appear to be 'tricky'. Now, I do not try to 'trick' you here. Honestly. We all know about the severe limitations of the multiple-choice format. Unfortunately, that's what we have to work with. In order to be able to distinguish between deeper understanding and guessing, I'm forced to formulate questions in a way that seems tricky at first. I'm also do not expect that you know all the myriad of details of a particular concept, but I expect that you understand what the concept is not about. Discarding what you know is wrong is one of the best ways to get to the answer. Try it in the intermittent video questions!
Exam Question Type 2: Note-taking / attention Questions:
(4) In one case study in class we reviewed some insights revealed by the digital footprint of online dating. This empirical evidence gave some food for thought. What the data suggested was the following:
A) Men mostly go to online dating sites to find hook-ups and women to be taken out for an expensive dinner.
B) Tinder has turned out to be more effective than Match.com, PletyOfFish, OkCupid, and eHarmony together.
C) Single men and women looking for marriages often include the search term "sexless" in their searches.
D) Independent from their own age, men always think that women in their early 20s look best.
If you have seen lectures from Session 1, and were halfway awake, you cannot have missed this one. These questions are not difficult (even so they can be more tricky than this example), but the main idea is that if you have not seen the lectures with your full attention, they are pure guesswork.
Exam Question Type 3: Lab / Assignment Questions:
These questions test if you have done the labs and if you have done them for yourself. This assures that there is no free-riding. You can and should get help if you struggle, but eventually, you have to work through the labs yourself.
(5) In the Webscraper we build in Session 2, there were two functions you had to use regularly to save your coding progress. What did the scraper use for this?
A) >Save file< and >Save As<
B) >Save As< and >print<
C) >Save selector< and >Done selecting!<
D) >Save selector< and >Save recommended videos<
E) >print now!< and >upload file to cloud<
By the way, the answer to question (2) is "D" and to question (3) is "B": do you know why?