Shmoop Literature Courses Overview

[Notgodot]

Thank you so much for your reviews of this material. I decided to go ahead and sign up for the month subscription. I completed the Bible in Literature course in my one day trial and thought it would be a cake walk on the other courses.

1. I'm curious how long each course took you to complete?

2. What methods did you use to study for the unit tests?

I'm currently slogging my way through British Literature, Modern European History and I'm going to start Women in Literature. I feel likes it is a ton of reading / links - like hours and hours. I think I spend a couple hours on each unit, maybe more - I haven't officially timed it. And I find I do really, really well on all the activities and quizzes but when it comes to the actual unit tests I pass but not with super high marks (I'm averaging 70% and 83% in two of the courses). I swear I know the material inside and out - I've even read most of the books in the British Literature class. But the questions are about obscure, little bits in the text - or not anywhere I can find - not general themes. I'm almost tempted just to skim the texts and take my chances on the unit tests as I don't think it really matters. But I'm afraid I'll just bomb out that way. Even though its a lot of reading it helps me recognize about half the questions. I'm just wondering if there are any pointers on methods. Ideally I would like to complete 4-5 of these courses in one month as it will fill up all my elective and maybe a couple of my lower level AOS classes (just depends on how TESU reviews these).

I'm currently averaging 2 units/day. I have 21 more units to complete all three classes. So approx. 10 more days to finish. Is that a good pace? Is there a faster method? It looks like you were finishing these in a day or two?

Hi, sorry it's taken me a while to reply -- things have gotten really crazy in my work life.

Basically my approach to each unit test was to keep every tab open for the entire unit, and read the Shmoop unit lessons and text summaries. Each course is slightly different; some you'll find yourself going to the course summaries quite often, and others you'll be checking out their notes on symbolism, allegory etc. Still other times, you'll have to track down some obscure fact from an external site they linked to in the unit.

My mental approach was simple: get everything done in a month. I only cared about passing, since that's all that will show on the transcript. At one point I was berating myself for getting 60/60 on a unit test, because it meant I'd spent too much time on the material

In the thread you'll find my specific notes for each course. Don't take Contemporary Lit; you almost certainly won't pass it. Western Lit and British Lit take foreeeeeeever. The rest are not too horrible and not too long.

Hope that helps!