dragonbook

45 PART II—ESSAY EXAMS In general, high school teachers don’t give essay exams, and, as a result, incoming freshmen frequently do badly the first time they take an essay exam—not because they don’t know the material, but because they don’t know how to demonstrate what they know. Over and over again, I get freshman students who study and study—but still fail the first exam they take from me. The good news is that most of them eventually learn how to go about writing in-class essays, and, by sophomore year, most students actually prefer essays to multiple-choice exams. So what do you need to know in order to do well on an essay exam? First of all, you need to know what a good essay is. I tell students over and over again that a good essay consists of a series of good generalizations related to the exam question backed up with specific support from the lectures and the readings. The basic steps in preparing such an essay include the following: 1. Read and understand the question. If the professor provides a study guide, you can do this in advance. Otherwise, take the first minute or two of the exam time to be sure you understand the question. 2. Pick out the key words/ideas in the exam question. Refer to these words/ideas frequently and explicitly in your essay. 3. Write an outline of the main points you intend to cover in your essay. If you have a study guide, prepare outlines in advance and be sure to learn the outlines. If you don’t have a study guide, you can often guess what the essay questions will be anyway, and you can still prepare something of an outline in advance. 4. Write good topic sentences (main sentences) for every paragraph of your essay. The topic sentences especially should refer back to the key words/ideas of the exam question. For instance, if the professor asks you to discuss the causes of the French Revolution, one of your topic sentences might begin, “One cause of the French Revolution…” If your professor asks what the Epic of Gilgamesh shows about the values and interests of the Mesopotamians, a topic sentence might begin, “The Epic of Gilgamesh shows that the people of Mesopotamia cared a great deal about….”