No. 2: The Rule of Importance
In any class, on any topic, in any part of life, some
things are more important than others. That's certainly true in this
class, and it was true in every class I ever took. It took me a while,
but eventually I discovered that if I could identify those important things,
I could do just as well in a course (or even better) AND save a lot of
time.
How do you identify what's most important? In the
classes I teach, I try to set up a rule of importance and follow it. The
rule is simple: the importance of any fact, principle, or problem solving
skill is defined by how much of the subject (or the course) you would
lose if you lost that fact, principle, or skill.
Finally, a warning. What a professor tells you
they want you to know, and what their exams or papers actually require,
never match exactly, in my experience (this includes me). Apparently,
it isn't easy to test in a way that precisely matches the course goals.
Whatever the reason, you need to learn for yourself what's important--both
what's important for you in order to understand the class well, and what's
important for you in order to do well on the exams or other assessments.
(Hopefullly, what's actually important, according to the exams or
papers, actually does match the professor's goals reasonably well.)
OPTIONAL EXAMPLE -- If a third of a course is on Basic
Genetics, and if DNA and Genes are the fundamental units of genetics, then
if you don't understand DNA and genes, then you're going to missunderstand
a third of the course. So, questions that require knowledge of DNA and
genes are virtually certain. On the other hand, a lecture may have also
have spent time upon one type of RNA, 'interference RNA', and discussed
how it can block the expression of a particular gene. If you forget
about interference RNA, you've lost an understanding of one way of blocking
gene function, but you may still understand almost all of genetics.
So, you have easy decisions. First make sure
that you understand DNA and genes. Not only are they more likely
to be on the exam, they are more likely to be a substantial number of points
on the exam. Once you really understand DNA and genes, only then
learn about interference RNA. Interference RNA might matter, but
interference RNA is only one of many secondary aspects of genetics that
might be on the exam. Even if you know that
a professor concentrates most exam questions on these kinds of secondary
topics in a course, you still need to understand DNA and genetics in order
to understand how to answer questions about interference RNA.
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Last updated 9/01/2009
College of William and
Mary, Department of Biology
pdheid@wm.edu
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