Boost Your Calculus I Grades: Tips for Bouncing Back After a Low Midterm Score

[preceptor1919]

Hello!We just finished our calculus I midterms and I can say that I did pretty bad considering that this is a foundation course.my score is 60% and class average is 64%.

I did everything I can to prepare for this exam. Did all exercises in books, and I even did well in most of quizzes. Is there anything that I can do more to bounce back from this? I really need to have better grades because I am planning on transfering to a university and it is pretty competitive for transfer students

 

[Imurhuckleberry]

This is a tricky situation because normally I would say that its probably you, that you are over exaggerating your efforts but because the class average is very low it may not be, but in my experiences, especially at a community college, my fellow students would always complain and do bad as a whole and I would always do well. Let me ask you, were most of your problems algebraic or did you just not know what to do on the problems conceptually? Either way you are doing something wrong.

I don't care if you have a bad professor because honestly you can always skip the classes(obviously make the quizzes and tests, but I've never had a professor flunk me because I didn't come to class while simultaneously doing well on exams, they'd have to be very sick if they did that) and study from the book (I prefer this actually because I can learn the material on my own rate instead of furiously trying to copy down all the notes on the board during lecture). My suggestion is read the book before class and then go to class and ask whatever questions you have as the professor approaches them during lecture, many people fail to do the readings and expect to pick the concepts up in one class, which is stupid, also while you may be doing "all the problems" you aren't doing them enough.

 

[preceptor1919]

Well I didn't actually do everything in the book, but the ones that he recommended + some extra

I did not have much problem with concepts(except for the one where you have to infer the graph of f'' by looking at f) and some of the questions I just made some silly mistakes(like making something a negative when it should be a positive which messes up everything) and this is maybe because of the time pressure, but if I am really prepared for the exam, time pressure shouldn't be a problem right?Algebraically, I can say I am pretty decent, I got a 95 in the diagnostic exam required for taking the course.

I do think that his questions was poorly worded that I have to read twice or thrice for some questions.I will probably need to get at least an A in the next midterm if I still want a decent grade. In your experience, do exams get harder after the midterms?

 

[Imurhuckleberry]

if most of you problems were just silly mistakes and anxiety then you just have to relax more, and the best way to do this is to do more of the problems (I don't mean do every problem in the section, but for the ones the instructor assigns as homework, do those multiple times over) that way you come into the test feeling confident, don't worry about finishing the test first or anything either, just take things at a nice slow and steady pace, if you don't see how to solve a problem within a minute or so,skip it and come back later, get what comes to you easily done first, that way if there is a problem that you are really stumped on, you at least have the rest of the exam finished.

Calculus does build on top of itself a bit, but for the most, it doesn't get much harder, once you get maximum/minimum/graphing out of the way, that's the last you'll see of it most likely outside of the final(and multivariable calculus)