Exam season is steadily approaching and that means sleepless nights spent studying for a lot of students. I can’t say I’ll save you from that, but I can offer you a few study tips, to minimize your suffering this semester.
- Write it down.
It might seem obvious but it’s a good way to engrave information in your mind. Sit down, look through all your hand-outs and old tests, and write down what you think is most important. This will help you sort through all the smaller details and focus on the main things you learned during the year. You can format your notes however you want, but I like having lots of little illustrations and short bullet-point statements, to make it more memorable. Sometimes it helps me to visualize my notes during a test to remember what I had written there, and it’s easier to remember something colorful.
2. Record yourself.
Although you may get some odd looks from family members, one study tip I recommend is recording yourself. This may not work for everybody and for all kinds of tests but if there is a passage of text you need to know thoroughly this can work, especially if you are more of an auditory learner. Sit down, open up the memos app on your phone and just read the text aloud. Then you can replay it to yourself later, and, if you don’t get the chance, then at least you’ve read it aloud, which is helpful in itself. I would often use this way of studying before history tests, when there were paragraphs of important text I had to know almost by heart.
3. Talk to someone. Or teach them!
Whenever I come across more complicated or confusing pieces of text, it helps to read it aloud. Sometimes when you’re reading to yourself or speed reading, you miss important information or fail to fully understand the concept. Reading it aloud can help slow things down a bit and get a better grasp on the idea.
But why not take this to another level? Talk about it with someone. When you talk about something with someone, it immediately gets your gears turning and actually thinking about the meaning of the words instead of brushing over them. It doesn’t need to be anything serious – just a question or two at the dinner table.
I like to ask my brother if he wants to learn something new, that he will need to know in a higher grade anyway and then I try to teach it to him. By teaching someone something, you solidify it in your own brain.
If you can’t find an actual human being to talk to, you can just read to a pet or stuffed animal.
4. Delve deeper.
It all comes down to making connections. I like to think about the human mind as a web, where each new thought and experience is connected to other thoughts and ideas. At first it’s barely connected to anything and can simply float off into oblivion, but the more you think about it, the more connections you will make and the more threads will hold it in the web of your mind.
So if you want to make sure you don’t forget something important, do extra research! Then you can be sure you won’t forget it.
*Extra tip*
If you’re running short on time and need to spend all your waking moments studying, then this is one thing I suggest you do. If you have any important papers you need to study, you can tape them to the outside of the glass of your shower and read them while you are in there.
I hope one of these tips might help you with your next test!
-kati