Preconceived ideas?

[muscles]

It has been well documented that during a Literature exam students should not come in with preconceived ideas, and no matter what the passage try to fit those ideas into their essay.

I have seen many essays where it is obvious they already knew the basis of their discussion and that they had a few sentence structures ‘ready to go,’  all they had to do is make a few adjustments according to what passages they receive.

My question is; to be a top Lit student do you come into the exam with ideas and sentence structures ‘ready to go’ or do you attempt to write everything from the top of your head? (By 'top of your head' I mean without a plan, not coming into the exam with no idea at all)

[Water]

Interesting..I"m also curious...

When its a SAC or an Exam for English / Lit, my innovative* brain just shuts down, and I"m in the SAC period feeling helpless and pressured.

[Eriny]

I definitely went in with ideas. Part of the exam is relating the passages to the text as a whole, and you can have ideas about the text as a whold before the exam, in fact I would recommend it.

[muscles]

I definitely went in with ideas. Part of the exam is relating the passages to the text as a whole, and you can have ideas about the text as a whold before the exam, in fact I would recommend it.

Indeed but the problem here is we must relate SPECIFIC passages to the text as a whole, hopefully this skill will come with practice.

[EvangelionZeta]

Specific passages will nevertheless generally fall under specific branches/themes, which means you can very well prepare for virtually ever single passage within the text by simply working out a response for every branch/theme.  Indeed, I would argue that writing out an interpretation for every major branch/theme is essential to succeeding.

In terms of your original question, it depends.  I know some students who earned perfect scores by memorising entire chunks of texts, which they would then adapt to the passage using a more specific variant of the technique I discussed earlier.  This is rather painful though, and really, I wouldn't recommend it unless you were crazy about your study score.

Personally, I wrote about 3000 words of notes for both texts I wrote on (Emma and Hamlet), making sure that I had an interpretation on virtually every single aspect of the texts which might possibly come up.  However, the stuff that I DID write was generally relatively broad, and adaptable - my modus operandi was to have a flexible idea of specific interpretations which I didn't necessarily need to know word-for-word, but which I could nevertheless churn out instantly in fresh and original ways off the top of my head.  This basically resulted in me adapting pre-existing ideas to the slightly unexpected passages in the exams, with my last paragraph for Emma in particular being something that I had never ever written on before.