Can these shortcuts help? Maybe. 

 Disclaimers: I am presenting the material here mainly as my opinion. If you try to make use of my suggestions and they don't help you write fabulous music, I don't accept any liability. Likewise, it is strictly to your credit and none of mine if you do write fabulous music before or after reading these posts. Plenty of the ideas I will be discussing in this series have been mentioned before, and some theorists may even wish to lay copyright claim or patent claim to some of them. However, I claim that the core ideas have been known to composers and used by them long before anybody published any writings on them, and these ideas are therefore basically in the public domain. But here let me acknowledge the inspiration of the great late Russel Dannenburg, a fine composer and the first person to teach me music theory. 

 On the other hand, I actually sat down and wrote the text of this posting, and it took me a bit of time and thought, so if anybody were to exploit this text as a commodity without consulting me, I might get very mad (standard disclaimer). 

 All that having been said, I am interested in getting some feedback on how interesting or useful you find this article. 

Abstract In this article, I will list a couple hints for (possibly) breezing through theory homework. 

Introduction These hints worked for me, although I no longer conciously think of them or any other methodology when doing that sort of problem. 

Definitions I'm not defining anything this week. If you're in Freshperson Theory, you're probably already bogged down in definitions. 

Three Basic Suggestions Try these on one or two examples. If they help, they help; if not, discard them and stick to the instructions in your theory book. 

 The bass line can either move by step/7th, third/sixth, or 4th/5th. 

1. If the bass moves by step, try moving the other 3 voices as little as possible, in contrary motion to the bass. If it moves by 7th, treat it as if it were moving by step and the second note just got moved to a different octave - then apply this rule. 
2. If the bass moves by 3rd or 6th, try holding on to as many common tones as possible. 
3. If the bass moves by 4th or 5th, try modeling the progression on the tail of a familiar cadence formula. 

Listening Assignment Play and listen to your solutions. Don't just work them out on paper. This is not a chess game: it's a craft that may be useful to you some day. Train your ear to tell you when you've made a mistake. 

Written Assignment You've already got enough written assignments. 

Conclusion I hope some of these ideas are useful to some of you out there. The only way to learn to use them is to play with them constantly until they become an automatic part of your musical personality.