Actual Exam Written Responses

mtl

Can anyone offer advice on the acceptable level of brevity for exam responses? I'm less concerned about the actual content (the examiner's reports give a good idea of that), but more so, things one might be tempted to do in order to save time, things like:
-do we need complete sentences?
-can we use obvious/common-place abbreviations? (i.e. bc, w/in, SAO, AAA, etc.)
-can our answers be bulleted?

Thanks!

graham

That is an excellent question. These kinds of time management and exam strategy considerations can shift your score by up to 4 or 5 points, which obviously is very significant.

First, to answer your specific questions:

• you do not have to write in complete sentences (bullet points are fine because they grade you on whether you got the correct information, not on grammar or style)
• you have to be careful with abbreviations (I originally used a lot of abbreviations on the wiki and BattleCards, like bc and w/, and people would tell me they didn't know what they meant) but SAO, AA, CAS, AAA, NAIC, SAP, GAAP and others that are in very common use on the syllabus should be fine)

Second, let me address your more general point on saving time while maximizing your score:

• by far the most important thing is to know the material well
• there is a fair amount of repetition from exam to exam and you shouldn't even have to think when you answer the easy questions (if you have to stop and think then you don't know it well enough and it's easy to convince yourself you know the material well...until you get into the exam...)
• being able to instantly recall the easy answers will save time and mental energy when you get to a hard question (usually a long calculation question)
• when you study, you should either memorize the BattleCard answers verbatim, or take the time to compose your own concise and complete answers (you can send me a few of your answers if you'd like feedback)

I cannot emphasize enough how much time you have to spend on memorization and repetition. Whatever you think you have to do, you should at least triple it.

The answers in the examiner's are often too detailed. You can usually get full points with something much shorter. The examiner's reports try to give you every acceptable answer but you don't need to do that yourself. You only have to provide as many reasons (or whatever) as they ask for, and you can usually express them in fewer words than they do.