Exam Strategy for ISYE 6501: Intro to Analytics Modeling — Georgia Tech’s OMSCS

Improving Exam Grades and Achieving an A in ISYE 6501: Intro to Analytics Modeling — My Strategy

4 min readDec 10, 2022

Strategy for Exam Preparation

Photo by Felix Mittermeier from Unsplash.com

First, I believe it is important to give you an idea of how I personally performed in the exams before sharing my strategy. Because why follow my strategy if I didn’t succeed myself, right?

Midterm 1: 84/100
Midterm 2: 87/100
Final Exam: 93/100
Final Course Project: 100/100

Although I can’t claim I aced them all, I certainly had an improving trajectory. And now that is out of the way, here are my exam strategies:

1. Drop assignments mindfully.

As mentioned in the previous section, this course does allow dropping two of the lowest homework grades. The strategy that I adopted was to only drop the last 2 assignments intentionally. Why? Because you don’t know what life may throw at you throughout the semesters. Hence I kept doing all the homework diligently. Only in the last 2 weeks, I didn’t do mine intentionally because Final exam was cumulative and its grade weightage outweighed that of homework’s. So, it gave me additional 2 weeks to prepare for my finals and final course project.

2. Lectures are the key to success.

All the exams are from lectures with little-to-no reference to the homework. Hence, it is of utmost importance to go through the lectures multiple times and taking mindful notes. I personally would watch the lectures once during weekly homework at 1.5x speed. And then during exams, I would watch them twice at 2x speed.

3. Concise note-taking for cheat-sheet is imminent.

Photo by Owen Michael Grech from Unspalsh.com

While watching every lecture, I would keep a Word Document where I will take screenshots of the important slides and make additional notes of things not mentioned in the slide but present in the lecture. I did that before every exam while re-reviewing the lecture videos. Why? It helped refresh my memory on the lectures, and narrow down things that I deemed as important or I would forget.

Then once I had collected all the lecture notes in a Word Document, I would re-review them again and start removing things from slides that I felt like I had a good grasp of. This helped me be mindful of the page-restriction I am given for my cheat-sheet. And once I was happy with the final draft of my notes, only then I hand-wrote it in my cheat-sheet.

4. Redoing Knowledge Checks are helpful.

Redoing Knowledge-Checks (small un-graded quizzes after weekly lectures) were super helpful in refreshing my memory of important concepts. So, do not skip them just because they are un-graded. In fact, I even went one step further and would re-do the quiz with wrong answers to see why they were wrong.

5. Online Quizlet resources are remarkable.

There are so many dedicated students who have made public Quizlet for this course that are helpful. It helps pool knowledge of the peers and what they deem as important and quiz-worthy.

Here are such Quizlets:

6. Schedule study-time in calendar.

I would maintain a full-blown checklist of things I expect myself to re-review each day building up to the exam. I would not mind getting things done ahead of the schedule. But being behind was not acceptable. I would also schedule-in some buffer-time before my exam (i.e., won’t schedule my study time up-until the last day to take exam on).

Here’s a snippet of such checklist for my Finals.