Real Life Answers by morgan

Real Life Answers by morgan - January 2014 Scholarship Essay

All throughout high school, you hear people saying that they got bad grades on the test because they just aren’t good at taking tests or they didn’t even bother studying. At first I thought the same thing. Whenever I would get a bad grade on a test, I blamed it on the fact that I just wasn’t good at taking tests. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school in my World History class that my mind set on test taking changed.

My teacher told us that if we remember anything from his class it would be to remember this: relate the answers to your real life. At first, I didn’t understand what he meant but as he began giving examples it started to click in my head. If you take the answer or definition to a question and relate it to a picture or something that you are familiar with you are more likely to remember it and do better on the test.

Take people who play sports, for example. My teacher related World War 1 to a football game. The two opposing teams were the two enemies in the war and the linemen were like weapons in that they were the main form of protection. More and more kids were beginning to remember things because they were simply looking at them in a way that they were able to understand.

I took my teacher’s advice and began studying like this for my tests. Any date, definition, or idea that I didn’t understand I tried to relate to my own life or something that I knew. When test day came and I was stuck on an answer, I remembered what I related it to when I was studying and I was easily able to answer the question.

Not every study habit or technique is going to work for every person, but this is the one that works best for me. Trying to sit and learn for an hour every day about people that died hundreds of years ago or learning about a book in a language that is hard to understand isn’t always the easiest. When it comes to studying for something difficult, you want to do it in a way that will help you understand and be able to give the right answer when the time comes. What better way to remember information than relating it to your own life. Relating the answers to things in my own life benefited me tremendously when it came to studying and taking the test. I find that I am not stuck on as many answers and I understand the material much better.

This study habit is one that I have used ever since my sophomore year and one that I will continue to use until the day I graduate from med school.