The following serves only as a guide. Each student must determine his or her own most effective study habits.

Study tips

• Read all assigned material well before the examination. If time allows, preview material by skimming to determine important themes. Then, reread actively. This means having a pen, pencil, or highlighter in hand to mark important material and jot notes. Most students cannot succeed by reading academic material passively; they must read actively. Pay special attention to material deemed important by the author (as noted by chapter titles, subheads, bold print, or italics) and the instructor (concepts or facts mentioned in lectures or assignments). If the book does not have a detailed table of contents, it may be helpful to make an outline of each chapter’s contents. Many students are surprised to learn the reading skills that worked well in high school do not yield similar results in college. Like athletic or musical skills, reading skills benefit from practice and will improve over time.
  
• Take good notes. This is more difficult than it sounds for many students. Each lecture contains a theme or thesis—often explicitly stated and sometimes implicit in the material presented. Try to identify the thesis and note how factual evidence is used to support it. Ideally, you should review your notes immediately following the lecture to insure you included all the important points. Reviewing once a week may be more realistic, but beware waiting until the week of the exam.
  
• Integrate lectures and reading material. Some portions of lectures may repeat themes and facts from reading assignments, while other portions may introduce new material. Repetition tends to indicate an item’s significance. As for new material, look for how it fits into reading assignments.
  
• Review actively. When the exam draws near, don’t rely on simply rereading the texts and your notes. Rather, take an active role in organizing the material. Making outlines is one good method for active reviewing. Drawing upon reading assignments and notes, divide the historical period being considered into blocs or look for themes. Constructing an outline helps you see events in perspective and relate one event to another.
  
• Pace yourself. Don’t wait until the week of the exam to study. Many instructors recommend spending two hours studying for every hour spent in class. For a three-hour course, expect to spend six hours per week studying.

Top of Page

Essay writing tips

Each essay question requires a slightly different approach. Your instructor will likely ask interpretive questions, which will force you to draw upon both readings and lectures and to apply this material to a problem. The following suggestions should apply to most essay questions.

• Answer the question. Amazingly, many students make the mistake of regurgitating facts without actually answering the question posed by the exam. Another common mistake is reading the question carelessly and missing one or more key elements. Read the question carefully, then reread it. Underline key words and phrases. Draft a brief outline and make sure it addresses the question. Then answer the question.
  
• Start with a thesis. State your interpretation clearly in the opening paragraph. Be sure subsequent paragraphs and details adhere to your thesis.
  
• Hit the highlights. Put another way, do not omit important information. For example, an essay discussing the immediate causes of the Civil War should not ignore Abraham Lincoln’s election.
  
• Sweat the details. Be sure to support your thesis and mid-essay generalizations with relevant factual evidence.
  
• Organize, organize, organize. Be sure the details you include make sense and adhere to your thesis. A “shotgun” approach, randomly tossing details into an essay, reflects poor preparation and understanding. Drafting a brief outline before starting to write should go far in eliminating this problem.
  
• Follow the rules of grammar. Even the best writers will make mistakes during an in-class essay. Everyone should, however, attempt to write a literate essay. Excessive errors detract from the essay’s effectiveness and may result in point deductions.

Top of Page

Magic bullets

• There are no magic bullets, but the following tips may help.
  
• Don’t fear the exam. If you have done your homework, the exam is a chance for you to show off your skills and hard work. Look at an exam the way a musician looks at a performance or the way an athlete looks at game day.
  
• Get some sleep. Staying up late to cram will probably impair your critical faculties on exam day.
  
• Eat well. Taking an exam on an empty stomach can be disastrous.
  
• Quit while you’re ahead, or about an hour before the exam. Don’t study right up to the moment of the exam. Give yourself an hour or so to do something relaxing right before the test.
  
• Don’t get to class too early. Get there in plenty of time for the exam, obviously, but you don’t want to sit around worrying or listening to that nervous, obsessive student behind you fret about the exam.
  
• Pace yourself. If one question is worth 50% of the exam grade, be sure to allot at least 50% of the exam time to answering it. If you get stuck on a question, move along and come back to it later. (See below.)
  
• Follow your hunch. On multiple choice and true/false questions, usually your first hunch is correct. If you are clueless, try using the process of elimination.
  
• Live off the land. Sometimes information on one part of the exam may provide clues for or jog your memory about material on another part of the exam.

Top of Page

History Links

TCU British Studies: London and the Great World
This class mprovides a cross-disciplinary, site-enhanced introduction to British and Post-colonial studies, this team-taught course will allow students to explore, interrogate, and understand the historical and literary dimensions of the British Empire from the perspective of the metropolitan center, London. Click Above to find out more!

• H-Net, or Humanities and Social Sciences Online, "is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web."
  
• The American Historical Association: "Inside you'll find membership information, selected articles from our newsletter Perspectives, information on how the AHA relates to K–12 teaching, a catalog of our publications, and many other items."

Ancient History

• The Internet Classics Archive at MIT provides English translations along
  with the Greek and Latin texts of 450 Greek and Roman works--everything from Aeschylus to Xenophon--with web links and reader's commentaries.
  
• The Association of Ancient Historians web site at the University of
  Washington has an Electronic Resources section that provides links to many sites for the study of Greek and Roman history, archaeology, and literature.

• The European Enlightenment.is a site dedicated to just that.
• Yale University European History page with links to Internet resources in the field.

Pre-Colonial/Native American

• TimePage contains links to federal resources, university projects, American historical document collections, and pre-colonial and Native American information.

Presidents of the United States

• Thomas Jefferson--a selection of various writings
• Reminiscences of James Madison by a colored man. By Paul Jennings

World War II

• War Movies & War Propaganda Media Resources Center Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley
• Special Collections in the Library of Congress Office of War Information Collection
• World War II in Europe, Timeline with Photos and Text

Civil War

• 8th Georgia Infantry Webpage is an excellent Civil War website.
• The Papers of Jefferson Davis Homepage contains not only information on Davis, but other good Civil War Links as well.
• Vicksburg National Military Park
• Gettysburg National Military Park
• Hargrett Library Rare Map Collection is the University of Georgia's collection of Civil War maps made available on-line.
• Selected Civil War Photos in the Library of Congress.
• The Illinois Civil War Project contains more good Civil War information.

Top of Page