As a student, you know that effective note-taking and memorization are crucial for success. With the right strategies, you can conquer even the toughest subjects. In this blog, we’ll explore some study hacks to help you ace your exams. Although these are study hacks, you still have actually do it. No human and Ai can study for you sadly.
Organized Note-taking:
One of the keys to effective studying is organized note-taking. There are a couple ways of doing notetaking:
- Note taking whilst your teacher is talking, may affect your ability to actually grasp the teacher’s explanation but does give you a head start in material preparation. This is the ideal way if you’re a person who can’t concentrate and listen in class, note taking will allow you actively to more effectively spend your time and help you do what you can’t do… remember content. This process is fairly tedious and you may have moments where you miss some parts because you’re too busy noting things down. A more effective method is to write a series of questions you hear as the teacher talk, these questions about each topic will encourage you to research more and rewrite content from your own perspectives. Allowing for greater ease of reading.
- The alternative of scribbling down everything your teacher says is to actually listen and focus on key concepts and ideas. To completely avoid writing until the teachers finishes, before mind vomiting everything you’ve just heard into your notes (recommended if you have a decent memory). Ask your teacher as many questions as you can, asking more questions will encourage more developed thinking processes that takes into account both established knowledge and new knowledge to create meaningful questions that many others may not consider. Use bullet points, diagrams, and color coding to highlights certain ideas in your note taking to increase ease of understanding.
Active Engagement:
Passive learning rarely leads to retention and that’s a fact. But that’s not necessary a bad thing depending on the lifestyle you maintain, it very much depends on how much time you have to study.
- If you have a fairly flexible schedule where studying can happen anytime, the recommendation is to 1. write down the relevant parts of the content 2. re-write the content in your own word 3. each time trying to dissect it, shrink it more and more to its core. 4. once you believe you’ve gotten to the core of the theory… the recommendation is to take this core understanding and test yourself on how much of it do you remember. The initial step of learning is to know what content you can utilize, and how to to utilize it is the next step of the learning process.
- By passively writing and rewriting content, you’ll eventually get the flow of how a topic structurally work. But understanding where to expand and adapt the theory is the next important part. Some ways you can expand on this critical thinking and adaptable mindset is through teaching the concepts to a friend or actively testing yourself with contextually unique questions (same concept, contextually different ~ practice exams). These are all some very popular examples in which it forces you to gradually understand the variety of the material, rather than just memorizing the primary example. However, depending on whatever subject it is, memorization may be the only thing you need. So learning to divide your attention based on what you need is also necessary.
Spaced Repetition/active recall:
- Cramming isn’t a bad thing, it’s the lack of preparation leading to a cramming that makes it an ineffective studying technique. The recommended pacing is to study more heavy from the beginning and gradually lightening the load overtime, and cramming a little bit before to refresh the memory again. The idea is similar to a vaccine, you’ll get an initial dose of vaccine to build the initial immunity (to get a decent understanding) and its effect will wear off over time but at least you’ll gain some memory cells (you’ll forget some knowledge gradually as it’ll become stored in the back of your head). Overtime, you’ll get a booster shot which will help you produce more memory cells so you’re even more effective against pathogens (You’ll refresh your memory by cramming closer to the exam dates and be able to perform as well as before)
- Rather than cramming all your studying into one session, spread it out over time aka spaced repetition. Even just regularly looking at your notes passively, with increasing intervals between each review session is enough to be effective as long as you have the initial dose of practice from the beginning. An effective way to see the full extent of your knowledge after a break period is to do a mind map or mind vomit. By creating key points and a visual representation of your notes, with key concepts branching off into related ideas. Mind maps can help you see the bigger picture and make connections between different pieces of information. So when you do read the revised material, there are more boxes ticked off already.
Timed study sessions:
- There is no perfect studying period, some people can study for hours on hours end… Others just can’t study and sit still. So understanding personal flow is the first part to knowing what’s the ideal studying period. A general rule of thumb is to always set a task goal in your study sessions, one thing you need to achieve and additional categories you can try to hit if you feel like it. By working on one primary objective at a time, there’s a better chance you won’t waffle on and be blinded by other need to dos.
Here are some examples of ideal studying periods.
- Short attention span – 15 mins study sessions (crazy I know), but it’s basically a short intense session intending for you to quickly get something done without any distractions. Minimal commitment time, maximum results.
- Mediocre attention span – 30 mins study sessions, a little bit longer to allows a little bit more commitment for slightly larger tasks. Intended to balance both task completion ability and focus maintenance.
- Long attention span – 45-60 mins study sessions, a longer session intended for learning new content or doing homework. Not very effective for learning for a long time as attention drop off can occur quite quickly.
Other factors to include:
- How long you breaks are – There are different ratios, but one that seems to be most loved is the 1:1 ratio. Equal contribution = equal rewards. Study for 1 hour then play for 1 hour, you can only get more if you play more.
- Types of tasks at hand – Are the tasks revolving around research, is it homework, is it understanding a topic? Anything related to research will take longer and requires less active focus, whereas studying or practices requires less time but more attentive focus
These “study” hacks aren’t uncommon, it’s more rare to see everything benefiting from using it. Consistency is the key principle so don’t wait until the last minute to start studying! Because once you start, it only gets easier no harder!
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