Probability is a mathematical methodology used to understand chance. For example, winning an election, placing a bet, and even foretelling the weather, can be determined using probability.
Probability is also common in your day-to-day conversations, though you might not notice it. As a student, this field of study opens you up to excellent career prospects and opportunities.
If you find yourself in a probability class, you need to increase the probability (pun intended) of making good grades. Here are some tricks towards that end.
1. Treat Class Attendance As Mandatory
Unlike high school and other levels of education where your school attendance was closely monitored, you have minimal supervision in higher levels of learning.
As advantageous as this is, it can be your undoing if you are not disciplined. If you treat your classes as optional activities and miss out on them, your performance will ultimately suffer.
Look at your classes as must-attend events. Not just that, but be on time, avoid distractions, be open to learning as much as possible, and participate in class discussions.
Create a school schedule where you factor in lecture times, downtime, time for extracurricular activities, and so on. Knowing you have time for everything will make you feel better about attending all classes because, after all, it’s all part of your schedule.
2. Hire a Tutor
Tutors have become extremely popular over the years, and it’s not difficult to understand why.
As students move to higher levels of learning, they might find themselves struggling with their schoolwork from time to time. Smart students take action immediately to enable them to get back on track. One source of help is a tutor.
A site like Edutized makes expert tutors available to students 24/7. Here, you can get all the help you need to ensure you remain on top of things, perform well and graduate on time.
3. Master the Fundamentals
Each discipline has certain fundamentals where most of its material is derived from. Therefore, mastering fundamentals is a good way to build your probability knowledge and skills.
Some of the key things to master include:
- The relationship between mutually exclusive and independent events
- Identifying a conditional probability in a word problem
- Joint, marginal and conditional probabilities
- The central limit theorem
- Sampling with and without replacement
- When to apply Poisson and exponential in the same problem
4. See Topics as Recipes
Avoid skipping definitions or moving past them to get to other material without understanding them. Think of your study material as a recipe. If it says to ‘blanch a tomato,’ moving forward without knowing how this is done will only give you problems later on.
The same happens in probability courses. Each piece of information builds on to the next, and so on; this goes by order of complexity. If you go through a few topics or chapters without really understanding the material, you will experience more and more difficulty as you move to other topics.
Again, this is because you will lack the foundational knowledge you are supposed to apply in solving more advanced problems.
5. Review Notes on the Same Day
If you are attentive in class and strive to take good notes, you are well on your way to understanding probability. It does not end there, however.
Make a point of reviewing the notes and the lesson you took on the same day during your study. While you have a good handle on what you learned, reviewing your notes helps cement the information in your memory that much better.
The other it does is flag incomplete notes or ideas early on when the info in your head is still fresh. Once you identify these, fill these in immediately before you forget.
