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Study Skills

Are You Ready?

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Common High School Experience

Homework•Taken up, sometimes graded•Significant portion of grade based on homework

Tests•Multiple choice, fill-in-blanks, matching, true/false•Study guide almost an exact replicate of test

Grades•Bonus points given for showing up/simple assignments•Added points (incorrectly called curve) given to skew average

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Traditional College ExperienceHomework•Assigned, but rarely taken up or graded•Little to no part of the grade relies directly on it, but if you do not do it, you will have trouble on tests

Tests•Multiple choice and true/false in large classes, essay in small•Study guide tells you content that is covered, but does not have any test questions or such

Grades•Bonus points rare, usually requires major project•If grades are curved, it is a true curve and the average is a C

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Curve

•Scores forced to fit a Gaussian curve•Grade assigned based on number of standard deviations away from the mean

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Current College Experience

• Mixture between these two scenarios

• Sciences tend to lean more toward the traditional college experience

• Which would you prefer?

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Skills Set Needed to Succeed

• A great deal of advice out there on how to study for college

• Most comprehensive list of study skills have a common set of messages

• A few seek to take the easy route, while most do not

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Websites

• http://www.studygs.net/

• http://howtostudy.org/

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Science Skills

• Science requires many skills that are not mentioned on these lists

• Science is very quantitative, which means that math skills are very important

• Science includes experimentation, which requires a completely different skill base from other disciplines

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Fermi Problems

• Named after Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th Century

• Seemingly unsolvable problems due to a lack of information

• Require one to estimate information and rely on errors canceling to give good approximation

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Examples• How many piano tuners are in the Chicago

area?• How much time is spent aimlessly browsing

on the Internet in a year by people in the U.S.?

• How much money is required to actually educate an undergraduate?

• How many pounds of chicken wings are consumed each day in the world?

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Use in Science

• Great way to check answers to see if correct

• Without an operating theory, allows one to investigate which parameters are important to situation