Written by Molly Weisner
Nothing like being shut inside with a textbook to herald impending exams. The flurry of flashcards and barraging begs for extra credit is the stuff of nightmares as students prepare for exams. Although studying may be madness, there is method in it.
Your Page-Staring Needs Repairing
Let this be abundantly clear: if your study method includes staring at a page, your method needs to be revamped. No amount of time spent looking into the soul of the word “antimetabole” will help you differentiate it from “anthimeria” on a test. In order to effectively encode information into your memory, you need to interact with the material. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this both electronically and by hand. Draw a chart, create flashcards with pictures, make acronyms, compose a song, hear the information spoken to you or pretend you are giving a speech about the information and recite as much as you can from memory. It doesn’t really matter how you absorb the information as long as you are effortfully processing it.
Ma’s Good Old-Fashioned Recitation
As much as you don’t want to hear this next bit of advice, it really is a lifesaver. For subjects ranging from foreign languages to math to orchestra, repeated practice or rehearsal of information is a great way to nail down difficult or abstract topics. Cognitive psychologists have found that it is much easier to retain information repeated over a long period of time than information that is “brain dumped” in a short period of time (a.k.a. cramming). So, while rote memorization is often frowned upon as shallow learning, it is a good method to practice when trying to secure technicalities like spellings, vocabulary meanings and even musical numbers. Be selective about the types of information you leave to be purely memorized and try to break down larger topics into manageable pieces. Additionally, if you can, give yourself plenty of time to slowly commit individual pieces to memory.
S.O.S.-Friendly Resources for the Eleventh (or Even Twelfth) Hour
Oh high school student, why do you continue to assume that you can teach yourself the entire PreCalculus curriculum in one evening? As much as the real world would retract their sympathy in a hot, a2 + b2 = c2 minute, we masters of the late night know what it’s like to feel wholly unprepared the night before an exam. That’s why we’ve put together a quick last-resort list of resources that can help you absorb a lot of information in a very, very short amount of time. The first, and perhaps best, is Quizlet. By eliminating the need for pens and note cards and cutting work time in half, Quizlet’s online flashcard system is not only very simple to operate, but allows you to auto-define terms and upload pictures. Whether you generate your own flashcard set or search a bank of pre-existing ones, you can then choose to study the information in different modes like speller, matching or fill-in-the-blank. The site even generates a test for you out of the information you’ve inputted.
Writing a conclusion here would only be wasting your precious study time, so I’ll be concise: good luck!
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