Steve Tippins Ph.D. walks through take-home comp exam prep: outline the questions, block time for each one, and aim to finish in 18 days instead of the full 21 to leave room for review and revision.
How do you prepare for this? Well, if you've got a take-home version, the preparation is, oh, here are the questions. I now have to answer them. And you have to be able to say, I've got a limited time period. Let me set up an outline and then go through and fill in that outline within given time periods. You may have 3 questions in 3 weeks. Well, that means, gosh, I'll try to allocate a week to each question. One of the things I tell people when they have a limit like this is, let's say you have 3 weeks. Really, you want to finish in about 18 days. Not 21. Because if you finish in 18 days, you have a few days to go back through and say, you know, after you've done this and you've come back to it, say, does this make any sense? Did I really answer the question? And if you can do it with even more time, a week left, you really have time to digest and then make corrections to anything that seems to be going in a different direction. So budget your time.
