Philosophy Revision
Advice for 1st Year Philosophy Exams
First off, don’t worry. Statistically speaking, no one EVER fails, so there’s no need to worry about that. However, I am not recommending that you don’t bother revising. It’s still possible to get a 2:2 or even a 3rd.
The main form of revision that Paul will recommend to you is writing practice essays under timed, exam-style conditions. This is a very effective way to revise, particularly when you look at past exam papers and see what sort of questions are asked on a regular basis. When you’ve written a load of essays, hand them to your supervisor on that topic and ask for supervision where you go through them. These are really good sessions where you get pretty accurate feedback on how to make your answers that little bit better. This can range from simple things like making sure one paragraph flows smoothly into another, to things like a total restructure of the essay. Make sure that you push them to give you a rough grade for each essay, so then you can tailor your revision around the essays that weren’t as good.
As you will have studied four areas in each paper, it makes sense to prepare four different areas that you can answer questions on. This is the recommended thing to do as occasionally you’ll get a weird question on one topic. With regard to the Logic paper; if you feel confident with formal logic and just want to keep on top of your skills there, pace your progress through the past papers. I used to do those questions as a nice break from essays, but still feel as though I was working. Most of the things you have to translate are about ninjas, pirates and other random stuff, so they’re almost enjoyable. If you feel that you can do the probability, sets or relations stuff, its well worth staying on top of that, it’s a really straightforward way of banking 1/3 of a paper. Last year some people only spent 20 minutes on the relations questions, which gave them more time to write an essay and check their formal stuff. However, if you’re like me and don’t really get probability and don’t feel too confident with sets and relations, do not worry about it. The essays that come up in logic papers are really predictable and so can be revised for easily.
The other big tip that I would give is Essay plans. You should be able to knock out an essay plan in less than ten minutes if you know the topic well. If you don’t, make a detailed essay plan, and then a more approximate one from that. I found this to be an excellent way of making sure I understood how the different parts of a debate fitted together. This pays dividends in the exams as you can save a lot of time by scribbling out a really rough plan that refreshes your memory of the more detailed ones that you did before and help you get a solid essay out in the exams. Making plans is also a really efficient way of covering a lot of stuff at once, so you could attempt to make three essay plans in an hour based on one tripos paper.
All of this makes it seem as though you should be working really hard all the time. Unless you’re going for a first, you shouldn’t be. Make sure that you take time to spend a few relaxing, blissful hours on the bowling green with some friends on a regular basis. Cambridge in the summer is a brilliant place to be and it’s a real shame that it’s the one time of the year that everyone is inside working.
Your exams should finish first of everyone, so try and plan things to do after your finished. You are going to have two or three weeks when everyone else is still revising and you can just play croquet, go punting and have fun all day, every day. If you look forward to that, it should make revising better.
If you are struggling with anything at all, ask Bernie or I, or any of the third years. We’ve all been through it too so we should be able to help.