Lazy way of asking for exam tips

Juniors now a day have never failed to amuse me with their ‘creativity’ side. At one moment, they can be scrambling for tips for almost every paper that they going to sit for exam, to the extend of spamming everyone in their YM list, yet the next thing I realized, they are busy updating Facebook, playing those Facebook games.

This is the problem. They put so much effort to hunt down last minute tips:

1. Meet every single lecturers, 1 day or 1 week before the xam or during the last lecture. Ask for tips and what questions will come out.
2. Tell their friends to ask their lecturers (if it is a different lecturer) the same thing.
3. Posting in online forums, asking for last minute tips and claiming that they are doing it because the lecturers are not helping them, they are not as smart as ’somebody’ so they have to ask for tips or other nonsense.
4. Spamming their contact list in their instant messenger asking for tips for almost every subjects they are taking.

Instead of doing those, why don’t you:

1. Compel yourself to successfully ‘understand’ the subject and pass the exam.
2. Do all your tutorials. Nothing from the tutorials that will not come out in your exam. It may not be similar, but it will be related.
3. You should have spent your time in lectures wisely. No, this does not mean paying  100% attention to your lecturers or achieving 100% attendance. These are nonsense and bullshit. You should have planned how you want to absorb the lecture given. The truth is, human can’t absorb anything 100% and our average attention life-span is 45 minutes. Make full use of that 45 minutes while you are still not yet sleepy. Pay attention to the lecture not the lecturer (I know some lecturers are cute, handsome, hot or they are just eye candy but by staring at them will not make you any smarter).
4. Do past year papers, not for the sake of doing exercise and memorizing on what going to come out but to build confidence and recognize the question patterns. In this way, you know where you can build your confidence. It is useful if you are the type that have low self confidence.

There are other things that you can do:

• Group study. Nothing in this world is free. Help your friends the same way you would expect them to help you.
• Look for tutors, lecturers and seniors who can help. Asking them for help once a while is perfectly fine but bugging them constantly is not. They are not paid for you to bug them constantly. Tutors and lecturers are paid to help you understand the subjects. Help yourself. Show some ‘appreciation’ if they are annoyed by your constant bugging. Once again, nothing in this world is free, so make sure you reward them accordingly.
• Be friends with those lone ranger seniors whom always sit behind because you and your buddies alienated them. By your definition, they may not be smart. Even if they are repeating that subject, they are indeed experienced (only applicable to those whom previously did not fail because they were once like you). Make full use of their experience. You do not want to be one of them if it so happen the next time you have to repeat your subjects.

This is a very popular practice in many universities, but not in MMU. There are external tutors that you can hire to give you tuition. They may be your own tutors, academicians from other universities or your seniors. They work the same way like your tuition teachers back during the school days. You pay them and they will try their best to help provided you are helping yourself. You might ask yourself, I have already paid so much to MMU for my fees, why do I need to fork out more money. My answer is, there is nothing as free lunch and do you want to pay a small amount of money to increase your likeliness of passing the subjects or you want to pay a hefty price(the term here implies the consequences of failing a subject) for repeating a failed subject and having your CGPA affected and Fs written on your transcripts?

Some of you who knows me may say of course I can say all these because I am ’smart’ or I am ‘different’. I can assure you I am different and smarter than you because I have only 15 minutes attention life-span, I definitely know how to differentiate what kind of approach that I need to take for my subjects and I am smart enough to know how to make good use of the time I spent in lectures. At the same time, I am no different or smarter than you. I am still a student and I still need to study.