This repository holds summaries from the computer science course of the University Bonn ("Universität Bonn"). Note that the bachelor is in german, so a big part of the summaries are in german.
The summaries are all hand-written but can still give a comprehensable summary to learn or compare for the exams.
I also provide my learning strategy which enabled me to get perfect results on most of my exams.
- Analysis
- Algorithmen und Programmierung
- Algorithmen und Berechnungskomplexität I
- Algorithmen und Berechnungskomplexität II
- Angewandte Mathematik: Stochastik
- Computational Intelligence
- Datenzentrierte Informatik
- Einführung in die Data Science
- Grundlagen der Robotik
- Intelligente Sehsystem
- Künstliche Intelligenz
- Logik und Diskrete Strukturen
- Lineare Algebra
- Physik für Naturwissenschaftler I
- Physik für Naturwissenschaftler II
- Sensordatenfusion
- Softwaretechnologien
- Systemnahe Informatik
- Systemnahe Programmierung
- Techniken des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens
- Technische Informatik
- Cognitive Robotics
- Computer Vision I
- Computer Vision II
- Humanoid Robotics
- ILAS: Machine Learning
- Image Acquisition and Analysis for neuroscience
- Introduction to Sensor Data Fusion
- Robot Learning
- Technical Neural Networks
Knowing how to effectively learn is the most important skill one obtains during his studies. Of course, there are people that can just memorize the contents of their lecture by looking over the lecture slides for a couple days but I am not one of them. I typically try to keep my learn strategies consistent between lectures with some minor differences between them depending of the style of the exam.
The most important thing to note across all of this: Understanding the lecture's content most often does not guarantee excellent grades (but it definitely helps)
It is more important to understand what lecturers expect in their exams and learn specific towards acing it. This helped me getting perfect results in nearly all of my exams.
1. Phase: Summarize and understand [Starting 2-1 month prior]
In the first phase I start my summaries contained in this repository. I simply go through the lecture slides and try to structure the contents how my brain would group them most logically. Here it is really a personal thing how you want to keep the contents in mind. There are two approaches to structure this:
Content-based: A more free structure if concepts are split across multiple lectures. Typically the best choices if the lecturer's slide are not that good or it does not fit your way of thinking.
Lecture-based: Keeping the lecture structure in the sections of your summary. Typically the better choice when you have somewhat good lecture slides as a lot of lecturers base their exam question on single sections of the lecture, e.g. one question out of each section.
Finally, after this phase you should have a basic understanding of all concepts and a good overview over all topics and potentiall trouble cases
2. Phase: Solve exercises [Starting 2-3 weeks prior]
The most important part of learning is solving exercises (and failing repeatidly). For this take the exercises from potential exercise sheets, books the lecturer recommended or old exams. Just start solving them even if you fail or do not have a clue, write the solution down and try again later that day. You will get an in-depth understanding of concepts and most importantly learn the most important contents by heart. I noticed an exponential learning curve during the first week of the phase, where I am able to solve problems that I had no clue about in the first days.
Also what I discovered later in my studies, try to think like the lecturer. Talk to people that have taken the exams before how they look like what their feeling was about the exam. Finally, just write down exam-like question from the gathered information. I was able to predict a lot of questions or at least come close to it.
A good exercise that can be fitted either in the middle or the end of this phase, is writing cheat sheets. Writing everything important, especially definitions, as small as possible on a sheet of paper, ideally fitting everything on one, which is often not feasible. You should try to write them down out of memory but its completely fine to write it down directly from the summaries.
At the end of this phase, you should have a deep understanding of everything and should be able to solve all problems likely to come in the exam. You should also know your weaknesses and what concepts you have to study more.
3. Phase: Learning by heart [1-2 weeks prior]
The last phase strongly depends on the information you have gathered during the second phase. Especially, what type of exam you expect, whether it is an exam where understanding concepts suffices or you are required to know details by heart.
At the start of the phase, I start making learn decks, e.g. with Anki or GoodNotes, from my summaries and the exercises. What you put on there can range from full-fledged exercises or single definitions, that really depends on the type of exam. Important is that you put everything on there even if you have the feeling you already know it. Typically I have a separate learn deck for each section/lecture. Then use the space-repitition learning functions of these applications, and stupidly learn it by heart. It really helps to also write the answers down at least for the first few times. After I have the feeling, that its only a few hard questions I typically combine the hard ones into a single deck and study them thoroughly.
During this time, continue solving the previous exercises to keep them in the back of your mind. It should take you significantly less time as in the second phase.
- Your brain does not think in words but in pictures! Try to work with color schemes to mark sections, important stuff. This is completely individual but really helps to better keep stuff in mind and more efficiently learn from your summary. Also keep the colors consistant across your studies. There are also a lot of learning strategies connecting visual clues to learned content which might help people.
- Read books and papers! Most lecturers structure their lectures after a book or at least have a lot of references to it. Here it really depends on your learn type and how difficult the lecture is, but my experience is indeed that you can get 2-3 times more in-depth information in half the time when reading the book instead of going to the lecture. Definitely follow the lecture and attend it if it helps you but keep in mind that lecturers are not there to give you in-depth understanding but rather give you a brief introduction. Often reading books or reading up on the presented papers during the semester, really helps building a good understanding making learning in the end easier.
- Buy a tablet! Without my IPad I wouldnt have been able to write these summaries as I constantly restructure as I go through the lecture. Also taking notes during lectures extremely helps when starting to learn the concepts before the exam and looking at the lecture slides. For me it somehow brings back the lecture in mind and I suddenly remember content beyond the notes.
- Keep a positive mindset! I hate the word mindset and talking about it but it is very true. Always keep the mindset that you are able to understand it. During lectures, do not only sit there but go there with the willingness and openess to learn the content, ask questions no matter how stupid if you do not understand it (I bet half the class has the similar question but does not dare to ask) and do not think of concepts being hard. Rather think about "hard" concepts as concepts that you have not studied enough yet. You will understand if you study enough! Sometimes it also helps to take a step back and take what you are taught for granted and do not attempt to make connections and links to what you have already learned (take it as a new independent concept). Later you can go back to it and try to structure it into other concepts you have learned and really understand it.
- Do not take others opinions for granted! You should talk to others that took the exams but really verify if this person knows what he talks about. I experienced a lot of exams with failing ratios near the 80%, where everybody cried out that it is too hard and unsolvable. The ones crying the loudest are the ones that studied the least and did not want to get an in-depth understanding, what you need to transfer concepts to new exercises and solve hard exams. There are no exams that you can only solve if you are smart. Everything can be learned (but it might take time)!
- Von der Hand in den Kopf translates to 'from the hand to the brain'. It's the phrase all my teachers and my mother repeated all the time and it is very much true. Writing down by hand makes you summarize concepts much better than typing it down. You take more time writing it down and thinking about it. It really helps when you want to learn by heart!
- Look at the first exam, take the second! In my studies, I mostly had to exam dates per lecture. In my experience most lectures tend to keep questions similar between exams and only change values or ask the question from a different angle. Vice versa, depending on the lecturer you can eliminate potential exercises for the second exam because they were already asked in the first one. This really helps in acing exams and also get more confidence in the exam.
During my studies I mostly worked full-time and focussed on research, while doing 30 CPs each semester, which led me to become a very durable person that can effectively work up to 90 hours. My learning strategy takes up a lot of time and I tend to spend 60-90 hours a week prior to the exams, especially when multiple exams coming up. It enables me personally to achieve excellent results and have a long-lasting learning effect. Concepts I summarized years ago just pop into my mind when looking at the summaries again.
My strategy is effective but might not be efficient and there are a lot of shortcuts you can take in each phase to shorten it or adjust it to your learning style or the exam style. For example I had exams that were solely based on learning-by-heart. Thus, I did not make a summary (as it trains understanding) but I simply learned all definitions through spaced-repitition learning.
So how you design your learn strategy very much depends on you. Doing similar hours as I do can lead to degrading performance and your brain closes up at some point resulting in learning becoming more and more inefficient. I am confident, that one can achieve similar results with half (or less) the time spend and taking more shortcuts, for example leaving out or significantly shorten the summaries as they take up a lot of time and have the least learning effect towards the exam.
If you have any questions regarding single lectures, about learning or specific exams I took, do not hesitate to contact me. I am always happy to help fellow students!
Luis Denninger l_denninger@uni-bonn.de