diff --git a/ersties/exams.md b/ersties/exams.md index 20855e5..3d62e7d 100644 --- a/ersties/exams.md +++ b/ersties/exams.md @@ -3,6 +3,9 @@ Each course at ETH works slightly differently in this regard. Some courses offer while others don't. Others still have parts of the grade determined by project work or similar, while there is one course in particular that has exam-like optional quizzes twice in the semester, which can be 10% of your final grade, each, if they improve your grade. +The most important platform is VIS Community Solutions (typically referred to as ComSol), the online platform for old exams, summaries and Cheat Sheets, +available at https://exams.vis.ethz.ch + ## Bonus During the semester, you hand in assignments, solve quizzes or do coding tasks to get a score. The graded assignments are a subset of the weekly (or bi-weekly) @@ -31,10 +34,27 @@ Using AI during the Lernphase to get different explanations for concepts on the Also see the [page on AI here](/ersties/pretendintelligence). ### Summaries, Cheat Sheets +In the first semester in both subjects in which you can bring a summary, you need to be the author and in Discrete Maths, it even needs to be handwritten. +Thus, I recommend that during the semester you write your Cheat Sheet as you go along. + +I would *not* recommend risking it by using a Cheat Sheet from ComSol, you can however take them as inspiration or adapt one, +if people have shared the LaTeX source files in case of Linear Algebra in the first Semester. +All my summaries that are on ComSol (apart from the one for DDCA) have the source code available [here](https://github.com/janishutz/eth-summaries) ### Old Exams +While studying with summaries is good to get an understanding of the topic, you should also practice using old exams, to familiarize yourself with the mode of exams +and to get a feeling for the difficulty of the exams. +It is also great practice, as you have more topic-agnostic tasks in many cases here. +Also make sure to occasionally solve one with a timer to experience time pressure, as that is also a major factor in many of the exams. +However, first solve at least one older exam without the time pressure, making sure you understand what you are doing, then add the time constraints. +Don't put off solving one for too long, as exams can very much expose weaknesses rather brutally, so be prepared to not do well in your first exam. +It is of utmost importance to consider that normal, don't be put off by it (this happens to a large part of students at ETH), take the learnings, update your Cheat Sheets +or your notes, maybe go back to the exercises from the semester, and solve these exercises again that you struggled with. + +On ComSol, many people put in a lot of effort to properly explain how they got to a given solution, many of which ended up being (or are currently) TAs in the course, +so take their advice and see how that could apply to your understanding. ## Exams