I'm sure that most of you are at least as disappointed as I am by the scores on Examination 1. As a class, your mean score was, I think, the lowest I've seen for this test. By comparison, my last two BIO202 classes' means for Examination 1 were 70.2% and 78.3%. I'm not mentioning this to add to your misery. I just want to arm you with as much information as possible so you can make the adjustments that will be NECESSARY if you want to improve your test scores. By monitoring the website traffic, I noticed that much of the BIO202 traffic occurred within the last few days. This means that many of you are waiting until the last few days before studying for the test. This is exactly what I told students NOT to do. If you continue to put off studying, you can expect your scores to remain the same as this one. You should expect to have to put in a couple hours of study each day to do well. (By the way, I mean a couple of hours of undistracted, concentrated study. That does not mean spending a couple hours with the book open somewhere near you while you answer several cell phone calls.) Another thing I noticed by monitoring the website traffic is that not too many students even looked at (let alone read) the page of tips for how to succeed. Read that page as soon as you're done reading this message, then be honest with yourself when you consider how many of those things you did NOT do. There's really only one reason I wrote those tips, and that's because they work. So if you ask how you can improve, I'm just going to refer you to that page. Those are my best ideas. It's all about time management. If there is no way for you to put in the necessary hours outside of class, then there will almost certainly be no improvement in your scores. I don't want to see that happen. I want all of you to succeed in this course. But you're simply going to have to cut something out of your life, bite the bullet, and put the time in for this course. While you're doing all of that, however, remember that this first test is just one of six, and that it represents only 100 of 1065 points for the semester. There definitely is still time to recover from this, so PLEASE don't be discouraged.

http://www.pc.maricopa.edu/Biology/thoffman/CommonGlobal/Study.html