Brief Advice for Incoming Students Forum

[BNA]

You may have seen this before, but TYPING SPEED is critical. I'm a non-traditional student who came to school having to look at the keyboard when I typed. After going over my first semester exams with professors and other students, it was clear what held me to a slightly above average gpa - I hit the issues but had no time to elaborate. I typed about half the number of pages that the top students did, and it absolutely killed me.

Students who were able to crush word counts did notably better than others who could not. Practice hard this summer if you think you're deficient.

[sublime]

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[BNA]

Sublime, I discounted it too until a conversation I had today. Met with the professor and my buddy just tagged along. He is something like top 5%, and told me, in front of the professor, that he just typed literally every word that came to mind... ended up with something like 25 pages. I, on the other hand, was forced to be concise and deliberate, and wound up with 14. Same issues spotted, much less analysis. Debate over quantity vs quality followed.

I know it's anticedotal, but this is just one instance among many I've encountered post exam that made me think mashing the keyboard is tcr.

[sublime]

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[tomwatts]

I wrote a lot, relatively speaking, and I was generally around 1000 or so words per half hour. I was probably not typing the whole time, so it probably wasn't the 30-40 wpm that you would calculate from that — it was probably more like 50-60 wpm — but I think the biggest thing was not that I could type quickly but that I could type automatically (i.e., I didn't compose a thought, then type it, compose a thought, then type it, etc., but rather I thought and typed at the same time).

[Goldie]

One of my professors let us see word count and scores for a midterm, and there was certainly a correlation between the two. I think this may have been somewhat professor-specific, but just another anecdote to say that (at least sometimes) there's an advantage to writing more.

http://imgur.com/cLD116Q

[lebongenre]

As a slow/inefficient typist, this worries me. Any suggestions for improving over the summer?

[TLSModBot]

Best advice: Don't go. It's not too late to do something better with your lives.

also lol at you typers. Hand written notes 4 life.

[GreenEggs]

I wouldn't be that worried. I was freaking out about this. I'm a slow typer and a bad speller (so I had to take time to use spell check), and I was convinced that my best class would be the exams with word counts and my worst the ones without. But the reverse ended up being true. A lot of people just write everything, and end up going down a lot of paths that are useless. If you know your law and know how to issue spot, typing is going to be a small concern.

[asdfdfdfadfas]

100+ WPM. I type it and organize it so I can read it. Then I hand write everything that needs to be memorized. Writing by hand will help you retain the information better.