Brief Study Suggestions

If when attempting these problems you have a question, there are many people you can ask. Your friends. TA's at the math help room. Or me, either by e-mail or commenting below.

So I looked at the practice midterm and I would do the following.
Make sure I know all the basic differentiation rule. Including but not limited to product rule, chain rule, quotient rule. Knowing when to use which rule. Knowing some of the methods that will make a problem easier. So, how should this be done. Well I'd start with page 261 Concept Check. It asks to state various rules and derivative for basic functions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any homework involving Concept Check 2o-2t so you can skip the derivative of hyperbolic trig functions and their inverses. But the concept questions are basic to the course. Your answers to 3-5 don't have to be on the dot, at least a close idea of the concept is sufficient. The true-false section on that page is optional if you have the time. Otherwise, go on to page 262 and do all the problems 1 through 50, skipping any that deal with hyperbolic trig functions. If you can do these all correctly, then you will likely get the first 30 points of the exam. If you can't do all of them correctly, keep practicing. Practice makes perfect.

Next, do all 5-64 on page 305. As the instructions indicate, try to avoid l'Hospital's Rule for a more elementary method if possible, and try to make sure you're allowed to use the rule when you apply it.
When possible, try to spot when a problem uses the squeeze theorem or $\lim_{\theta \to 0} \frac{\sin \theta}{\theta}=1$ such as problem #39. Doing this practice is another 20 points.

Optimization problems are slightly harder to practice. Doing many of them takes more time, and it's hard to generalize. This type of problem will often require a little extra thought in multiple ways. But strengthening the basics will allow you to try and think through these slightly more involved problems.
Remember:
1) Try drawing a picture
2) Try simplifying the problem by saying, what if I had a similar problem that asked this instead. What would I do in that case...
3) Try writing out some relationship between the information given.

The last 30 points hopefully will be fairly easy. Read through the first derivative test and the second derivative test, and all the other important boxes in section 4.1 and 4.2 and 4.3, such as the definition of a critical number, or even the definition of an absolute maximum for example can be handy to know. There are a lot of problems in those two sections to do for practice.

For any graphs, label and be detailed. Besides the typical labeling of axes, if you have time, add a few words justifying what you drew.

If you have time, read my homework 7 and homework 8 solutions, or at least glance for any tips that might prove useful.

General test taking tips:
Read through each problem. Writing down some ideas. This way the problems are in your mind throughout the test period and your mind will unconsciously think about them. This is another way of saying don't spend too much time on one problem.
Don't erase work that is correct. When in doubt, something is better than nothing.
Do show work.
Along the lines of the last two, if you get an answer, that is somewhat out of the blue compared to the work you did, you should explain how you got it. Otherwise, you're likely just to receive a zero for the correct answer which is unqualified by your work.
Don't look at other people's papers. Besides the fact that this is cheating and wrong, what if their answers are wrong?