[M]y own experience is that preparing for an economics exam has more to do with preparing for a musical performance than with preparing for an exam in the humanities. You cannot expect to play a piece of music perfectly the first time you sight-read your way through it. Rather, you will have to do a number of very rough sight-readings of it before you can identify weaknesses in your playing. When you have identified those weaknesses, you will isolate those measures that are the most difficult and work on them until you can play them seamlessly at the right tempo. Once that’s done, you will play the whole piece so as to make sure you can integrate those difficult measures into the easier material to make the whole piece of music flow evenly.
It’s that time of the semester once again, when students are preparing for their first wave of midterm exams. In my own APEC3001 — Consumers, Producers, and Markets course, my students have their first of two midterm next week, on Thursday.
As such, I just sent them the handout I had written a while back about how to do well in econ your econ courses. I thought I would share it again with the world at large; you can find here (link opens a .pdf document).