Yeah, not so much fun as yesterday. The only reason my Algorithms midterm grade even resembles an A (it's not an A, but it at least came in close) was because the whole class did so bad that the prof curved it a bit. Anyway, the problem in my case wasn't in knowing the material, but not being able to answer quick enough. So, that's what I need to work on. From now on, I'm adding a new category to my "Practice" time: drill.
Basically, drill will be solving problems as quickly as possible, even if the final answer isn't quite right. Obviously, I'll go back over my answers and correct errors after the fact, but drill will focus on getting something decent on paper as quickly as possible. Think of it as interval training for the brain. So, a typical drill session might be 5 section exercises (the section exercises are closer in difficulty to exam questions than the chapter problems), 5 minutes each with 1 minute rest between. I'll start with half-hour sessions like the one just mentioned and try to work that up to around 90 minutes.
I don't think the questions even need to be related to the course material (though, obviously, I'll use those questions first). If I run out of section problems in the Algorithms text, I'll just grab some from any one of my other 20 texts left over from Grad School v1.0.
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