Examination Excellence Strategies:
1. When should you study and how much should you study?
The first question to answer is when should you study? And how much should you study? The obvious answer to this question is that the more you study, the better your exams will be. If you spend hundreds of hours preparing for the exam, you will get a much better result than if you spend ten hours or less, which is very clear.
However, what's less obvious to everyone is how you should allocate your limited study time. This brings us to our first cognitive science principle, the Spacing Effect.
A large body of research on the impact of spacing shows that study time is more efficient if it is spread over multiple sessions than if it is compressed into a single session. Receiving information at separate times saves it better than if it is received together at once. Therefore, your study program should take all the time you have available and try to distribute it as equally as possible throughout the semester. It is normal to study a little just before the exam, but you should do so much less than usual.
The next question is: How often should each piece of information be studied individually? Jakub Jilek, who has a master's degree in cognitive sciences, and I advise you to cover every piece of information that you study through questions or exercises, at least five times, but must have equal periods of time between them, from the first moment you learn it until the time of the final test, and this approach helps you save the information with minimal effort.
Tip: Leave sufficient and equal intervals between study periods while leaving easy information before the exam day (if any), and try to practice each piece of information five times from the moment you learn it until the exam day.
2. What should you study and how to do it?
After setting your schedule, it's time to consider what you are actually doing while studying. There are significant differences between what most students think is effective and what is really the best.
For example, the experiment carried out by psychologists Jeffrey Karpicke and Janelle Blunt on this. They had students divided into four groups: a one-time information review group, a frequent information review group, a free memory group, which is any attempt to remember as much information as possible without looking at it, and a group to create a concept map also called a mind map.
Which group do you think is the best?
Before I answer this question, let me tell you what the same people thought. Those who did a concept map and a frequent review thought they would do the best on the exam, while those doing free recall expected the worst.
But in fact, quite the opposite happened, as the group that adopted the free remembrance process was much better than the other groups despite the fact that the students themselves expected the lowest scores in the exam.
This result is only one of many extensive research related to the testing effect, and this effect indicates that self-testing, which is retrieving important information from memory, works better than rereading notes or creating graphs during the reference to your textbook.
Tip: Having studied the materials for the first time, the majority of the subsequent study should be the practice of retrieving the information you have studied; That is, trying to reproduce the information, solving a problem, or explaining an idea without looking at the source of the information.
3. What types of exercises should be done?
There is a specific hierarchy of the types of subjects that will be most useful to you during preparation for the final exam:
- Mock Tests: Examinations that are intended to be identical in style and format to the test you are actually taking.
- Next come questions given on homework, textbook questions, or short quizzes given specifically to students.
- The questions you create on your own based on the material.
The sets of questions (Problems sets) often vary from class to class in terms of field and expectations, so I would not recommend using them if your goal is to study for a particular exam.
The reason for this hierarchy is known as transfer-appropriate processing, which means that the more you practice like a real exam, the more your efforts in practice turn into actual results.
If you cannot access high quality question sets, creating a motivation to write is a good solution. So, choose a big concept, topic, or idea, try to explain it briefly and accurately without opening the book, and then re-read it to see if you've got it right.
Tip: Always prioritize high-quality question groups and preferably mock tests, followed by questions asked in the classroom and then write down writing motivations from the big ideas or concepts discussed.
4. Make sure you understand:
Most academic subjects are conceptual. This means that success or failure inevitably depends on your understanding of important ideas. Therefore, memorization is very important, but it is often a means of understanding and not an end in itself, which means that a thorough understanding of the basic concepts behind any exam for which you are taught must be a high priority.
The sets of questions you are practicing help with this, since solving any problem usually requires understanding; however, superficial concepts that appear to be deep concepts are very common. Even psychologists have given a name to this, which is the explanatory depth, and the reason for this is that despite the ease of self-verification of factual knowledge - either you know it or you do not know it - understanding is done in degrees, so it is easy to convince yourself that you know something you do not know deeply.
As a result, I recommend using the Feynman Technique as a tool to deepen your understanding of the basic concepts that are addressed in the classroom and are primarily interested in learning the material by teaching it, as you will have a better understanding of the information when you can teach it.
Tip: Identify key concepts and make sure you can explain them without looking at the materials. If you don't benefit, move between the explanation in the textbook and your own understanding until you come to a conclusion.
5. Overcoming anxiety by simulating the exam first:
Large exams are generally accompanied by great concern, and anxiety is the biggest reason why you can't study. Anxiety can make you have difficulty concentrating, and stress can make you have difficulty remembering information.
The solution is to make at least some of the study sessions a full simulation of the exam if you have some mock exams. So, you should keep them to do a full simulation of the test; That is, do the same things that are usually in exams whether in terms of time, sitting, or anything else.
There are three benefits to conducting full simulations:
- Your temporary anxiety increases during the study, making it easier for you to remember information due to the effects of state-dependent memory.
- By experimenting with the exam, you will be less worried when the time comes for the final exam.
- You will know how you will perform on the test.
Tip: Simulate your exam by conducting mock exams, as if you were taking an actual exam, in terms of time and conditions.
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