I’m currently taking a beginning Java class at my college and I’m having a difficult time with it. I’m hoping I can get some pointers from some people with more advanced knowledge.
I’m in a small class and with 30 other students and while on the homework assignments I do very well (I have the highest grade in the class with a 98%) I’m having a very difficult time with my exams. My last two exams I scored a 55% and the class average was 70%.
For me, memorizing things is difficult. It’s easier for me to remember where to find information than memorize it. When I’m programming on the computer, if I have a syntax error it shows me and I can go, “oops, I forgot the semi-colon”, but when it comes to the test I can’t look anything up and I don’t have an IDE telling me I have a syntax error. On the test I’m given a sheet of paper and a pencil. What do you do to practice for these types of exams?
For example, one of my test questions was this: “Assume that your Triangle class is a subclass of another (unseen) class named Shape. It also uses the interface named Comparable. Finish the first line of the class definition here:”
At the time I didn’t have the foggiest clue what to write, I knew I needed an Extends and Comparable, but I was missing another keyword, I wrote down:
Public class Triangle Extends Comparable
I lost two out of four points for that because it’s actually:
Public class Triangle Extends Shape implements Comparable
On another question, worth 6 points, I’m asked to write a comparteTo() method and I do a pretty good job at that, the professor even wrote “very nice”. I still lost two points because when I declared two of my variables I didn’t put “double” in front of them (I completely forgot to do that).
On a different question I was asked, “Which method do we override if we want to have specialized graphics in a GUI component? Give the entire signature”
I wrote down,
protected void Graphics(Graphics e)
The correct answer is
protected void paintComponent(Graphics g)
I had another question like, “Write a static generic method that empties the Stack passed into it, and returns the bottom value in the Stack. While the logic is important, the problem is just as much about working with generics and Stacks.
On this question I couldn’t remember the syntax at all, so I wrote as close to declaring a generic method as I could remember and wrote in a little pseudo code and I was able to get half the points.
What do the rest of you do when it comes to exams like these? Do you write all of your programs with pencil and paper in hopes to better retain information? I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but there has to be better study methods that I can utilize for these types of exams.