Study Strategies & Assessment Shenanigans for Launch School’s RB 119
One of the critical parts of Launch School is that each student initiates assessment on their own terms. There is a lot of discussion about when that point hits for every individual.
Some of the best advice that other, more advanced, Launch School students share is to take advantage of peer study groups, in person spot lead sessions, and TA led study sessions.
These were all critical for my success in passing the RB 109 assessments.
But sometimes, as the commercial goes, “Life comes at ya.” Even if it’s not huge, sometimes weeks go by and your schedule just will not line up with those sessions. So what do you do?
Tactics for Asynchronous Studying
For me, I started getting an itchy feeling where I was confident I knew the material, but I was concerned that continuing to do the “same things” I had been doing — reviewing notes and readings- would start letting me feel overconfident. I was concerned about feeling complacent.
I had done all of the exercises. I had done all of the examples in the S.P.O.T. documents. I had taken notes. I had read discussion boards. I had attended a FEW online sessions, but not as many as I would have liked.
Here is what I did next to strengthen my practice routine. Like high intensity interval training.
Rewrite the Book
Day one: Take the study guide and summarize all the relevant information for each bullet point, without looking at the source material. Just infodump if you have to.
Day two: Make up an example for every bullet point. Or two.
Day three: For every example, annotate what is happening in precise language. Like giving an image a caption.
Because of the science of memory and spaced repetition — the gaps in these steps are important!
Construct a Practice Test
Grab some problems that are “explain this,” and some “this is broken, fix and explain,” and some that are “write something that does X.” Just a variety, even if you’ve already solved them.
Day one: Grab somewhere in the realm of 12–14 of these questions. (Think of it like weight training. If you can do 14 questions in time, you’ll feel a lot better doing the 10ish on a real assessment!) Copy them into a file without looking too closely and then stash it somewhere for a few days.
Day two (after a gap!): set up your timers. Then take the test. Type it all out, in markdown. Practice copy and pasting.
Record Yourself
Record a screen cast with voice as you re-solve some of the medium level problems, while fleshing out all of the steps in the PEDAC process. Time yourself. Some 6–7 kyu level problems from Codewars are great, too.
You don’t even have to rewatch it. You’ll probably feel it if you get mired. When you want to stop the recording. When you start reaching for those convenient docs links. Stop and do it again.
And finally…
Write About It
Like rubber duck debugging. Put on your teacher voice and pretend you’re an expert. Walk through it and write it out in human language, addressing an audience.
This article and its sprouts are my own form of Learning in Public — if you haven’t checked out this article, please do. It has seriously fortified my decision to move past the discomfort of putting my admittedly ugly learning process … out there. On the internet.
And you can, too!
“But no one else out there needs the 100th article on collection methods!” You’ll say to yourself. Bull. YOU need it, because you need to write it.
I’ve chosen to build an example that touches all of the topics given in the assessments. Like a glorious Winchester House that I just keep adding onto.
If you’d like to join me, I’d be delighted to have you:
- Part 1: Building, talking about, and addressing parts of nested collections
- Part 2: Using specific knowledge about desired action, block return value and method return value can prove profitable when mining the Ruby Docs
- Part 3: Managing levels of nested collections to ensure expected outcomes when modifying data and collections
Prepare for external adversity
Of course, all of that preparation can still be destabilized by the assessment gremlins. You know, the forces that inevitably creep in after you click that “Begin assessment” button.
Personally, I had a few doozies this time.
First, I accidentally navigated away from the test page and had to go back hoping I had saved the few answers I’d already worked on. -Make sure you’re clicking that save answer button!
Then, trackpad on my lap top stopped accepting left clicks. I zipped to another desk in my house and plugged in a keyboard & mouse! No luck. I rebooted safely (and knew my answers would be there when I got back) — Turns out bluetooth had grabbed onto a mouse somewhere nearby that I thought had been switched off. But I was glad for all the time spent practicing keyboard shortcut navigation!
Then, my beloved canine frantically alerted me to the presence of the mailman. Who needed a signature. I suppose there’s not always something to be done to prevent this, even if you know about it in advance, but having prepared for time, I was confident that a brief delay wouldn’t send me off course.
Then during the interview portion, I decided to use a setup with monitor, keyboard and mouse. Lots of screen real estate so it’s not just a video of me squinting the entire time. Well. Let’s just say, do the video rehearsals with the keyboard you intend to use. My fingers had NOT registered the new position of the command key on the external keyboard and the first thing I did was delete all the tests. (I got them back! But it was a humbling start!)
But I did love that sharing with the Launch School community got a lot of empathy and more personal anecdotes. Here’s a few precautions others mention!
- Many many of my peers report keeping an emotional support snack & drink at the ready. Some choose something with a little protein and others prioritize a quick shot of sugar.
- Some make sure a partner is on site for animal wrangling specifically. I even saw some pretty aggressively distracting cats mentioned!
- One person takes assessments in the middle of the night to reduce the potential for outside intervention.
- A few people mention having backup devices and even power sources available if necessary.
At the very least, it’s worth thinking about a few “If ____ happens, I will ____” scenarios! Even if the answer is “I will be OK because I have prepared for time.”
And finally, one thing I tried that wasn’t super helpful for me, but may be for others:
Have ChatGPT generate questions from the study guide
Personally, I found it more helpful to seek out my own questions to answer. Or just write long winded articles about each topic. I did try to use AI to generate diagrams of code — it verbally understood what the code was doing, but couldn’t outcompete my fabulous design skills. So if you just can’t parse some code, it’s pretty good for that purpose.
