OnlineProfessor

It’s never too early to prepare for final exams

Too often, students panic at the end of the term because most — or all — of their classes have a final exam or final project requirement. Students can save themselves a lot of anguish if they took an incremental approach to studying.

Final exam study tips:

• Take final exam notes every week. After every lesson or class, take notes of key terms and study topics in a final exam folder or on index cards. Build on this collection each week, and by the end of the term, you’ll have a neat set of study guides for the final exam.
• Schedule a weekly review of materials. At the end of each school week, go back and review the major elements you’ve learned. This summary helps you retain information and etch it into longer term memory.
• Collect all your old quizzes. Regular quizzes during the term give students a clear guide about the types of questions your instructor is likely to include on a longer exam. Reviewing older quizzes and tests provide you with good practice for what lies ahead.
• Play the guessing game. Before every test, as you study and prepare, try to see if you can predict the types of topics and questions likely to appear on the exam. Make educated guesses based on the instructor’s style, focus and lecture points. If you practice this enough, you’ll find that you will likely get better and better at identifying key study points because you’ll learn to “think like the professor.”
• Come prepared to final exam reviews. Quite often, professors will have final exam study sessions. It’s amazing how many students come to these sessions and just sit there when an instructor asks if there are any questions about topics covered in the class. Come prepared to such study sessions with specific questions about things you did not understand. An instructor will rarely tell you what’s on an exam, but the more intelligent and genuinely interested students seem, the more inclined an instructor will be to slip in a few hints. If students seem uninterested and passive, instructors often pull back on the hints as well.

Are Online Students Ruder Than Other Students?

Many of my online instructor colleagues have mentioned instances where their online students sent them an e-mail message that was surprisingly unprofessional or downright rude. Like many online professors, I also have experience working in the traditional, on-campus classroom, and the perception is that students who know you personally are less likely to be so callous. But is that really true?

False sense of anonymity?
This opens up a series of questions:

• Does the online learning environment create a false sense of anonymity that fosters a bolder or more aggressive communication approach?
• Or are online students just less skilled than expected in professional written communication?

What do you think? Are online students ruder than the average student?

[Of course, remember to keep it professional. Avoid using names or identifying references in your comments. Instead, let’s help one another better understand online interactions and exchange tips on how to handle some tough situations. Of course, the number of polite and professional students far outweighs the bad apples, but it’s nice to know how to better handle the rudeness if it comes along.]