I think I might have made a wrong impression on my previous post, studying is not really such a nightmare to me, I do enjoy it, it's just that sometimes it can get very exhausting and frustrating.
One of the aspects of studying that leave me emotion-mixed are exams.
On one hand, the exams' period is usually the period during the semester when I have the most free time - no lessons, (usually) no assignments and as my studying method is a quick revision of the lecture notes and solving previous tests I don't spend much time studying for an exam. Why not? Well, at least in my Masters I usually have a maximum of two previous exams to refer to and this doesn't leave me with much studying to do.
On the other hand, exams are annoying. One of the things that annoy me is that you would expect an exam to be designed to test your knowledge, but this is not always the case. That's why my studying method is as described above. You are not studying the course's material, you are studying for the exam.
For instance, I had three tests this last semester, each one of a different kind:
1. "A Literature exam", or at least this is the Hebrew term, meaning the exam isn't really designed to test your knowledge or understanding but how much you can write on a trivial subject and how accurately you can guess what negligible facts the lecturer expects you to mention.
2. An easy test but there was a catch... time shortage, and the lecturer won't add any time. So OK, it's a ranking system, the better students will probably solve the questions more quickly and will have a chance of answering all the questions, but I still think exams are supposed to test knowledge and not writing agility.
3. This one was an exam that really tested knowledge but we had only a small set of sample questions (without solutions) to study by.
Well, after telling everything I hate about studying I can now rest and don't think about it for the rest of the summer.
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