How to revise philosophy at university level?

Hi! I'm a second year at university studying computer science and philosophy. I have my first finals exams coming up soon which is scary!!
At A-Level, I studied all mathsy/stem subjects so I already have good study habits and exam techniques in computer science, but when it comes to philosophy I have no clue what I'm doing. I managed to scrape through my first year exams, but now that my exams actually count towards my final grade I want to do it right.
There are two main problems that I face when it comes to philosophy exams. The first is that unlike stem subjects, the topics and ideas that we need to know for the exams aren't well defined or structured at all. For example, the philosophy of language course that I'm taking is divided into 8 general sections, where for each section, my tutor recommended a few books and articles to read and... that's it. There's no syllabus, no structure, just an abstract philosophical landscape of ideas which we could be asked about any part of during the exam. Compared to the way stem subjects are structured it's confusing and scary. I would like to know if anyone has any revision structures/advice for these kinds of courses.
The second problem is in the exams. Conventionally, a philosophy exam is three hours long and you are expected to write three essays. That's one hour to plan and write an entire essay! Which a whole third of your grade for that course will be based on!! Even when I know the philosophy well I really struggle to write an essay well under the time pressure of an hour. In one of my mock exams, the time stress caused me to mess up the names of two philosophers in the same essay which was pretty embarrasing. Does anyone have any exam essay advice?

tl:dr, does anyone studying philosophy at a university level have any advice for structuring revision and writing essays under time pressure?

Reply 1

Joe312

Yeah make your own set of notes covering the various theories in each of the topics you've studied, including the classic criticisms of those theories and then ideally if you want a top grade a bit of your own evaluation of those criticisms, or your own ideas about which criticisms are most significant/critical.

Then expect to use this pre-structured content as jigsaw pieces in your actual essays in the exams.

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