For two essays by your instructor concerning effective learning (and teaching) strategies, see:

• "How Students Learn -- And How We Can Help Them"
• "Teaching and Technology"

• Preview (or Survey): Survey the chapter to determine the general topics being discussed.  identify the sections to be read as units.  Apply the next four steps to each section.
• Read the section headings and summary statements to get a general sense of where the chapter is going and how much material will be devoted to each topic.  Try to understand each summary statement and ask yourself whether this is something you knew or believed before you read the text.
• Query (or Questions): Make up questions about the section.  Often, simply transforming section headings results in adequate questions.
• Make up a study question.  From the section heading make up a related question that you will try to answer while reading the text....  This will give you an active goal to pursue while you read the section.
• Read: Read the section carefully, trying to answer the questions you have made up about it.
• Read the section to understand it and answer your question.  
• Reflect: Reflect on the text as you are reading it, trying to understand it, to think of examples, and to relate the material to prior knowledge.
• Try to relate what you are reading to situations in your own life.
• Recite: After finishing a section, try to recall the information contained in it.  Try answering the questions you made up for the section.  If you cannot recall enough, reread the portions you had trouble remembering.
• At the end of each section, read the summary and ask yourself if that is the main point you got out of the section and why it is the main point.  Sometimes you may be required to go back and reread some parts of the section.
• Review: After you have finished the chapter, go through it mentally, recalling its main points.  Again try answering the questions you made up.
• Go through the text, mentally reviewing the main points.  Try answering the questions you made up [Query] plus any other questions that occur to you.  Often, when preparing for an exam, it is a good idea to ask yourself what kind of exam questions you would make up for the chapter.

And, for that matter, Repeat.

• Elaboration: memory is better when we relate the to-be-remembered material to things we already know.  Relating what you read to the questions you develop creates a more elaborate memory.  
• Schematic Processing: memory is better for material that is related to our expectations.  Surveying the text before reading it seriously helps you develop the appropriate expectations.

• Preview: Before the lecture starts, look over the slides.
• Query: After looking them over, try to make up a question about each slide.  
• "Read": Attend the lecture with the printout in hand, taking notes in the space provided, trying to answer whatever question you had formulated earlier.
• Reflect: As soon after class as possible, within 24 hours, go over the slides and your notes.  Rewrite your notes, filling in any gaps and making connections between individual slides, and between material from the lectures and what you're reading in the textbook.  (See "Six Learning Strategies", immediately below, for more on this point.)
• Recite: Go back to the slides, and try to reconstruct, from memory, the points that were made in lecture.
• Review: Finally, review the main points, especially the basic concepts and principles discussed in the lecture.

And, again, Repeat.

1. Take your own notes, by hand, even if notes (or slides) are provided by the lecturer.  That same evening, rewrite your notes, condensing, extending, and paraphrasing them "so that you make the meaning your own".  When you take your own notes you are actively engaged with the material, and the act of rewriting will enhance your encoding of the material into long-term memory.  Rewriting is essential to effective learning, even if you think you got it the first time. 
2. If you must miss a class, get notes from a fellow student.  The ASUC lecture notes can help in this regard, as do the lecture supplements that I provide on the course website.  But getting a fellow student's notes helps you develop relationships with other people who are learning the same material you are, at the same time -- people whom you can ask for help when there's something you don't understand.
3. If there are sample problems in the text, work out the answer for yourself before looking at the answer provided in the text.  Then, in addition to comparing your answers, compare your approach to the problem with the one provided in the text.
4. Form a study group, and alternate individual and group study sessions.  The Student Learning Center sponsors such a study group, and you might be able to form your own from the members of your discussion section.  Keep it relatively small and manageable, no fewer than three, no more than six people.  Make up practice quizzes and tests for each other.
5. Teach the material to someone else -- like a fellow study group member.  Or do some informal tutoring.  There is no better way to learn material than to try to teach it.
6. Set attainable goals and move slowly toward them, beginning with simple material and progressing to more complicated things.

What Works:

1. Self-Testing: Quiz yourself with practice tests, flashcards, and the like.
2. Distributed Practice: Spread your study over time; don't "cram" before an exam.
3. Elaborative Interrogation: Ask yourself how what you're learning relates to what you already know .
4. Self-Explanation: "Channel your inner four-year-old" by asking "Why?" the material you're learning is true.
5. Interleaved Practice: Alternate your study time between one topic and anothe.

What Doesn't Work:

1. Highlighting: Underlining is pretty much useless, if you don't do the other things outlined above.
   
2. Rereading: Rote repetition doesn't promote long-term retention.
   

For details, see "Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology" by John Dunlosky, Katherine A Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham (Psycholoogical Science in the Public Interest, 2013); this review is summarized in "What Works, What Doesn't" by the same authors in Scientific American Mind, September/October 2013). 

Exam Scope

• You know the correct answer.
• You reason to the correct answer from some concept or principle that you know.

Pre-Exam Reviews

• The Midterm Exam includes all the material from the first day of the course up until the class before the exam.
• The Final Exam includes material covered after the midterm, as a noncumulative portion, through the last day of class, plus a cumulative portion that covers the entire semester.

• In devising the test, I try to have at least one question explicitly drawn from each of the lectures.  So, for example, on one exam or another:
• you can expect at least one question on the Asch impression-formation experiment (covered in a lecture on Social Perception);
• at least one question on stereotyping (covered in a lecture on Social Categorization); and 
• at least one question on attribution theory (covered in a lectures on Social Judgment).  There may be more drawn explicitly from the lecture, but there will be at least three.
• I also try to have one question drawn from each major section of each chapter in the assigned reading.  So, for example, with respect to Fiske and Taylor's 3rd edition, you can expect at least one question on each of the following topics:
• the distinction between automatic and controlled processing (Chapter 2);
• face perception (Chapter 3); and
• associative network models of person memory (Chapter 4);

The first thing is to score the exam straight, assuming that all the items are good, and calculate the mean score (and standard deviation).  In an upper-division course, experience tells me to look for an average score of about 80%.  An average much lower than that indicates that there might be something wrong with the exam.  Of course, it might also be that students just didn't study effectively!  I can't do anything about that, but I can do something to correct any problems internal to the exam itself. 

Then we look at the psychometric properties of the exam as a whole, particularly its reliability (coefficient alpha), which should be in the .70s or .80s.

In order to identify potentially bad questions, I use a dual criterion of (1) extremely low scores and (2) extremely low item-to-total correlations. 

Individual items may be worth differing points. In order to put all the items on the same scale, their scores are converted to percentage scores.  For example, a 3-point question with a mean score of 1.99 would be converted to a percentage score of .66.  I then calculate the mean percentage score and standard deviation for each item.  A reasonable candidate for a question that is too difficult is to identify items whose percentage score is >2 SD below the mean, or < .35.  If there are no such items, I look for items that are at least 1 SD below the mean; or items whose percentage score is < 50%.  These items are candidates for rescoring. 

In addition, I examine the item-to-total correlations between each item and the total test score (corrected by dropping the item in question).  With a large class, even low item-to-total correlations can be statistically significant (for N = 100, r = .20 yields a p-value of .046).  So I employ a cutoff of .20 to identify items with low item-to-total rs.  Any such items are also candidates for rescoring. 

Any such items are rescored by giving all students full credit. 

Sometimes items will be graded so that students receive "half-point" scores like 1.5 or 2.5.  When these are summed to determine a final revised exam score, the total exam score is rounded up, as necessary -- e.g., from 39.5 to 40 or 45.5 to 46.

As a result of the rescoring, and rounding up, scores on the exam should now be at least in the 80% range.  If they don't, at this point, it's not because of any problem with the exam!

Requests for Regrading

In addition, I try to conform my grade distributions to that of the campus as a whole. Psychology is both a social science and a biological science; so I average the figures together for those two divisions of the College of Letters and Sciences.  According to the most recent data available to me, from the 2014-2015 academic year (Fall and Spring semesters combined):

What do I mean "depending on how you count"? It turns out that UC Berkeley records letter grade distributions in two ways, as percentages and as counts. When it calculates percentages, it does so based on the number of letter grades. But not all students take a course for a letter grade. So, for example, of students taking upper-division courses for letter grades in 2014-2015, 49% got "some kind of A". But only about 2/3 of these courses (69%) were taken for a letter grade; most the rest were taken on a Pass/No Pass or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory basis (and a very few grades were Incomplete, In Progress, or Unknown). P/NP and S/U are excellent options, as they make it easier for students to take intellectual risks. At the same time, experience indicates that most students who opt for P/NP are going to get grades in the B or C range -- perhaps because they've gotten in over their heads, or because the P/NP option gives them license to blow the course off. The result is that, while 49% of all letter grades in upper-division courses were "some kind of A", As comprised only 31% of all grades. Put another way, the P/NP option probably inflates the percentage of As and Bs. If you assume that students who received a grade of P or S would have received a C+ if the course had been taken for a letter grade, the percentage of As and Bs combined would drop to about 56% from 86%.