The Tripos Exam Stress Thread 2012

Tripos!!

Octopus!

As for actually getting [GCSE] stuff done, I find it helpful to use a timer to monitor how much time I'm actually spending working. I can easily sit in front of my laptop for 12 hours, but that's not much good if only four of those were spent working!

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I wrote up an essay in Russian the other day which was about 900 words long and it took me something ridiculous like four hours just to copy everything across and make some edits and add an introduction and conclusion. I have NO idea how they can expect you to write 2000-3000 words. It's not like my writing speed is particularly slowed by the script either, as I've been writing cursive Russian for four years now. It's just the thinking takes so much longer!

How's everything going?

Oh, don't worry about that...I asked my language supervisor (SG) if it was really true that you had to do 2000-3000 words, and she said no and that most people write 1000-2000 words (she said that within that range, more was probably better but not to the extent of sacrificing other stuff). And I did a timed essay for it yesterday (3 hours, without dictionary but with notes as I haven't actually memorised anything yet, oopsie) and managed 1800 words pretty comfortably with not too many errors. And I'm sure that for Russian they would take into account that it's harder...I think the most important thing is that it's not a meant to be just a normal supervision essay but more comparative and wide-ranging, so I think that if you manage that ok, it will all be fine (there's no point in pushing yourself to write loads but making more errors in the process).

How are you finding things? Revising for lit is as stressful as ever

I think Russian essays are likely to be shorter as well because it's a much more compact language than Spanish due to the cases and various other grammatical structures. My friend wrote an essay that was probably about 1000 words the other day and was told it was far more than he'd be able to write in the exam, so clearly the expectations are lower. My essay is wide ranging to the point of probably being too vague, so clearly I'll do well

Things are okay actually. Crapping myself about the translation exam even though there's very little I can really do at this point. Other than that I'm much more chilled out than previous years. I feel fairly confident in my scheduled papers because I always write supervision essays in quite an exam style (short, usually focusing on two texts, very question focused) and I'm lucky in that the questions on the scheduled papers I've picked are quite broad so I can argue however I like really. I think I've also realised that this is the last time I'm going to be able to take advantage of the libraries, so I spent my whole day today reading this book on Komar & Melamid (two post-Soviet artists who created a sort of Russian pop art) who I am writing on but probably didn't need to spend all day on as it was more for interest than revision.

Anyway, I'm sure at some point the fear will hit me, but I don't know if I should be faintly alarmed that it hasn't yet. Ah well. Sorry you're finding lit revision stressful At least you presumably have less of it than previous years, considering you did the Sociology paper?

Oh, that's interesting, I didn't realise that Russian was a more concise language...
I know what you mean about the libraries...I just want to read loads of Chilean history books and not revise literature, but unfortunately I don't need more than a passing knowledge of Chilean history even for Essay in Spanish.

I don't know what's wrong with me, I just find it so hard to focus my revision and I always panic about not understanding the question. I kind of don't know how to combine my materials, if that makes sense.

It just combines a lot of meaning into a single word. You don't need anything approximating the word 'of', for example, because that's defined by the case that the word takes. And there are no articles at all which cuts a hell of a lot of words out of an essay!

Perhaps it would be a good idea to go back to basics a bit - don't think about the questions or about combining your materials at all. I was writing a timed essay a couple of weeks ago and got myself in a mess, and ended up crossing out the question and scrawling across the top of my plan 'WHAT DO I WANT TO SAY ABOUT THIS TEXT?'. Then I wrote down what I thought was the fundamental message of each text and a few supporting bits of evidence, completely separately, and then looked at the question again and realised that actually I could answer it just from that. Maybe it would be worth doing something like that for each of your texts without looking at any questions, just to get yourself to focus on the texts themselves?

That's a great idea, will definitely have a go at that I mean, my supervision essays were good, so I shouldn't be finding it this difficult...hmmm.

It's probably a mental block. I have it with language work. All my feedback for my translations this term has been great - I've not dropped below a first in from Russian all year, and my teacher for into Russian has told me I've improved a lot. But I sit down to do a translation and I just. can't. do it. I started one yesterday and felt terrible and gave up, and then went through a different one with my friend and did it perfectly fine. It was just getting my mind to stop panicking for long enough to let me start!

Urrrrgh. I can't seem to get any work done today. I'm just so tired, I can't concentrate, but I'm really starting to panic now because I've only got a week left and there's still so much stuff I have to cover... Every time I look at the clock it just makes things worse when I think about how little I have achieved today.

I feel like I need to cut down on my extra-curricular stuff to give myself more time to work, but I'm on several committees and I can't really just leave them... Urgh. Exam term is rubbish.

To be honest, if you're tired then you need to rest, it's just counter-productive to struggle on. And you're second year MML, right? The language papers are very difficult to actually revise for (apart from learning the vocab you need to describe different cinematic effects for the AV papers), so I wouldn't worry too much about them.

Arrgh - everytime I go to Sainsbury's I want to buy "revision-aiding" sweets. I usually, reluctantly manage to talk myself out of it but by the time I get home I think "I should have really bought those".

Is revision turning anyone else into a snack monster?

Arrgh - everytime I go to Sainsbury's I want to buy "revision-aiding" sweets. I usually, reluctantly manage to talk myself out of it but by the time I get home I think "I should have really bought those".

Is revision turning anyone else into a snack monster?