h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Pulling An All Nighter - A750836
Author: Flying Betty - U186743

um...I hate comments...um it needs a bit more substance, probably some testimonials, whatever. And never underestimate the power of cheese.

Hi Betty,

This is good!

All-nighters can also refer to the practise of writing an essay / assignment / dissertation the night before it's due in, as well as revising. When I was an undergraduate, one of the lecturers once said there was nothing wrong with doing this as long as you had done all the reading beforehand and had all of the neccesary materials.

I wonder whether it's worth sounding a stronger note of caution - you do advise people not to, but I wonder whether it's worth making the point a bit stronger by saying something about not pulling an all-nighter prior to an exam unless absolutely necessary, as the knowledge gained might not actually compensate for sleep lost!

Also, you need to explain what a "final" is, and perhaps you could come up with a slightly more descriptive title - perhaps something like "Self-Destructive Study Techniques: The All-Nighter". I'm sure someone else will suggest something better!

It's worth putting in some links to other entries, such as
A271784 Exam Revision without Crenellating Brain Cells
A520859 Written Exam technique

This is good, though, and I'd like to see it in the edited guide at some point!

Best wishes

Otto

Good suggestions. I'll definitely keep them in mind when I go to rework this a bit more. Unfortunately, I can't think completely straight at the moment due to *cough cough* personally experiencing said study technique. Only for the purpose of experimentaion, of course.

hey flying betty

well written entry and certainly needed in the guide. well done.

my personal experience has been a bit different to this, so i'll ramble for a bit about it incase i say something useful. feel free to use anything you like.

food for the allnighter.
don't get dehydrated. this makes you more tired. fruit juice, caffine(tea, coffe, coke, red bull) and alcohol will all dehydrate you. it's great to drink some of these for the sugar, but you MUST drink water as well. if you are somewhere where it's possible add ice cubes to some drnks to add variety.
canned fruit is good and can be taken anywhere.
dry cereal in a bowl. not as salty and monosodiumgluetematy as crisps, so a welcome change. does contain vitamins unless it's really crappy kids only stuff. makes you feel like you are eating lots, (helps my thought processes anyway) but your system will tolerate more cereal than crisps and it's cheap. personally i'd go for a mix of cereals, ones with lots of malt in are great, but stick to your teeth. add saltanas etc for extra variety.
raw carrots. good for crunching violently when you are getting cross, and helps get cereal out of your teeth.
rice. if you cook the day before make sure you do extra. no wheat so no bloaty tummy i want to go to sleep feeling.


other tips.
wash your hands lots, with soap.
wash your face as well.
change seats if possible.
do some press ups.
jump up and down for a few minutes.


one of the things that i disagree with from my personal experience is the thing about getting sleep in advance. normally if i am pulling an allnighter it's after a long few weeks of struggle and inadequate sleep. it's through desparation not planning so i think good advice would be, of you have loads of deadlines or lots of exams coming up, stcok up on things well in advance.

if you have a shower before you go out make it quick and cool. i don't know about you but i am quite capable of falling asleep in a hot shower.

take sweets to the exam.

my finals were one a day for five days. all three hour exams. i did really badly and didnt cope very well at all. there is no way to get through something like that in a sane manner. but do remember to eat and drink as healthily as possible. even if you cant sleep then at least your body has something to work with.

dont stop to talk to friends for ages about how much study you have to do. just get on with it. i reakon i would have got another ten hour of work in that week if i hadnt talked so much about how i was going to fail.

if you thing there is a good chance that you are going to suffer the dreaded all the exams at once or all the essays at once syndrome then you absolutley must prepare in advance inorder to gt a decent grade

more later

computers about to crash so i'll post in chunks

for exams ther is no way on earth that you can learn in the weeks before everything you need to know and then be able to remeber it under those conditions however hard you study. i went to my first exam ahving spent the previous three weeks alternating days on my five subjects. the two days before i crammed solidly for the first exam because i had forgotten everything i had learnt when studying for the others. so i came out of that tired, but couldnt rest because i had a different subject the next day so i had to go home and start studying straight away. and of course fouond i'd forgotten everything for that too. byt the end of the week you can imagine the state i was in. a few weeks later people who had also had lots of exams were coming up to me and asking if i was anybetter, thats how screwed i was.

thinknnig about it now, the only answer is to already know most of the stuff before it gets to revision period. nothing you learn in the revision period seems to sink in. i reackon get all the papers at the beginning of the year and then when you do the relevent lectures and seminars make at least brief nots on the exam paper, then you know how to answer all the questions that have ever come up.

before the exams start so all your washing, shopping, etc that you need to do t get you through the exams. i had to go to an exam with no socks on once because they all smelled, and the exam was at the other end of town.

pack the bag you want to take to the exam way in advance, sweets, tissues (lots) bottle of water, pens, jumper, exam timetable and map of exam location if you are not intimately familiar with the place.
there are no prizes for not being able to find a decent pen the morning of the exam, or for choaking to death on a boiled sweet because you forgot to fill a water bottle. tisssues are very useful, there will neve be any loo roll anywhere near an exam room in any of the loos. it's some law or something.
jumpers are very necessary. if you have been up allnight at somepoint you tmeprature is likely to drop rapidly as ll your reserves are used up. even if it is hot n the exam room (unlikely) it will still feel cold. or you can sit on it if the chair is hard (which it will be). at the very least, having packed the bag a few days earlier guarentees you at least one clean jumper.

i'll probably think of more stuff,

good luck with it, very good entry.

FABT

Hi Betty,

Good luck with the exams!


Otto.

does anyone else have weird dreams before exams?

Usually, I end up being stressed and sleep deprived enough that I can't dream at all, but if I do they're weirder than normal.
FABT- your suggestions are good; I'll definitely work a number of them in the next time I work on this entry. The part about getting more sleep before is ideal, but you're right in that it's definitely not possible and if you're resorting to studying all night you can't really plan your sleep schedules too well.

One more thing: is "revising" the British English term for the American "studying" for exams?

Ay, it is...

Studying would be learning things the first time around, revising is going over it again prior to the exam. (this assumes knowing the stuff in the first place - a friend once used to call his exam preparation "vising" on the grounds that he didn't know it before.)

But we'd only use "revising" for exams, not for essays or assignments.


Otto

we also use the word 'cram'. which is actually what most people do when they have frittered away all their revision time down the pub.

One more thing to mention: don't fall asleep in exam.
Also try not to do this if you have more exmas the next day. You'll need some time to recover.
One good thing is that final exams tend to be in the summer, so eating fruit and salads sems like a good idea, instead of chocolate and mashed potato (very nice, but the cream and butter don't exactly put it in the 'healthy' category) which is what I always crave in winter.

Re: weird dreams

I'm right now in the heavy revision period (2 more days to go), and I'm getting dreams in which I'm trying to work something out, or understanding something. It feels very similar to thinking about things as I'm going to sleep, but it always seems just out of reach, things never solidfy properly, and all I'm left with in the morning is a sense of having understood something but being unable to work out what it was... I'm sticking to the story that there isn't any real understanding going on in my dreams and being unable to work things out in the morning is just a sign that there wasn't really anything there.

On the topic...

Nice entry! I can see it moving to Peer Review by now, but you might like to replace the 'you' with 'one' or something equivalent.

'One'? I don't think so.
'You' is generally used nowadays in places where 'one' would have been used before anyway.
It could work, if the tone was right, but it can come off sounding silly.

...just being gramatically correct. Whatever. It gives a sort of professional sound, in most cases. Please don't take it the wrong way.

*winces*

Yes, I do realize that "one" is the official, gramatically correct pronoun for referring to some unspecified preson, but as the subject itself is a bit informal (who ever gives formal suggestions to pull all nighters?) I think I can probably get away with it, but I'll try both out to see.

Are the proper edited guide ruls on exactly how grammatically correct you need to be?
Maybe there should be a spelling and grammar clinic like there's a guideml clinic.