the curious feeling that you are beginning really to know the subject, and if only you had other three months instead of three weeks you could truly master it. The cause of this feeling is that towards the end of your long preparation you are revising a good deal of the work you have previously done. Accordingly, you are dealing with much larger slices of the subject at a time than you have been accustomed to during your ordinary preparation. The result is that you have perforce to take wider views, you see things more in their relation to the whole, you begin to have a glimpse of the meaning underlying that whole. As you thus begin to appreciate the general principles underlying the detailed knowledge you have acquired, you inevitably tend to organize your knowledge and thus to experience a feeling of mastery that mere details cannot give.
Preparing to work an examination paper to be set by another person is itself a sort of examination of ourselves conducted by ourselves. The advantage of having a paper set by some one else is that we have to take into account the possibilities of questions being set quite other than those we have been setting to ourselves. We are all apt to get into a groove: we deal with aspects of our studies in which we are specially interested. But when we know that our work has to stand the test of questions set by a person who may not share our view about the interesting points, we have to take a wider sweep, and try to get a true estimate of the relative importance
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