Top Study Tips for Final Exams
Despite working incredibly hard throughout the semester when final exam time rolls around, students’ stress levels increase. According to Mental Health America, the most stressful time of the entire semester is final exam time. Students pull all nighters to study for tests and use Quizlet as if their lives depended on it. What are some of the best ways to prepare for upcoming final exams?
- Study Your Notes-and it Doesn’t Matter How You Took Them
Whether it is by hand or on a laptop, having good notes will be helpful in terms of being able to go back and review key points from class. Dr. Katherine Rawson, psychology professor who specializes in cognitive psychology says there is nothing certain on if taking notes by hand versus on a laptop is more effective.
“It depends in part on a student’s preference,” Rawson said. “Students who prefer laptops do better on laptops and students who prefer by hand do better by hand. It also depends on the nature of the content. For example, in math classes where you are having to write down formulas, that’s a lot harder to do with laptops.”
Rawson spoke about taking notes while listening to lectures versus not taking notes. Taking notes during lecture has an encoding benefit which means you are much better off taking notes then not taking them at all.
“Generally, the bigger benefit of having notes is the storage component, which is you have now stored the information that you can go back and later re-study,” Rawson said.
2. Self-test Yourself
Self-testing has more of an effect on long-term memory than restudying information alone does.
“If you spend the same amount of time self-testing instead of simply restudying you will get way better gains in your long term memory for that information than if you just restudied it,” Rawson said.
Simply restudying information has some modest benefit, but not as much as self-testing has. Some ways to self-test include saying the definition of a word out loud before flipping your notecard over or using different tools like Quizlet.
3. Don’t Go Overboard with Colors
“The research suggests that highlighting information doesn’t help your learning at all,” Rawson said.
The act of highlighting information in something like a textbook has almost no benefit to learning because when students go back to look at what they have learned they struggle to point out the main ideas.
“They miss a lot of the main ideas and end up highlighting a lot of stuff,” Rawson said. “That’s not actually the target of learning, so highlighting in itself isn’t really going to improve learning.”
However, highlighting to the point of simply marking the most important information is somewhat beneficial when you go back to study the most important information.
“In that way, highlighting might have an indirect benefit, but you still have to come back to the target information and use an effective strategy for restudying,” Rawson said.
4. Don’t Cram Study
Cram studying the night before the exam is way less effective than splitting up your studying time over multiple days. It is much more effective to study across multiple days in small doses.
“If you have four hours to spend studying for an exam, if you spend all four hours the night before the exam, that will be less effective than if you spend one hour a day studying for four days,” Rawson said.
The idea of splitting your study time up is called distributed practice. The term is fairly self explanatory as it means to distribute your study or practice across time.
“There’s what you should do and when you should do it,” Rawson said. “For example, self-testing is what you should do and when you should do it is repeatedly but spread out over time.”
5. Use Multiple Study Tools
There is no single method of studying that will fit every situation. It will depend on the type of content you are trying to learn, learning goals and what you will be expected to do on the exam.
“Two examples of learning goals are memory and comprehension,” Rawson said. “You want to be able to remember information, but sometimes in addition to being able to remember it you want to understand it because exams expect you to comprehend or understand the content. So, some strategies that are good for memory may be a different set of strategies than are good for comprehension.”
Rawson used the analogy of a carpenter and his toolbox to further clarify and explain this concept. Essentially, we all have a toolbox full of study strategies and each strategy is a different tool in the toolbox. Some strategies like self-testing and distributed practice may work for multiple kinds of study situations just as hammers and screwdrivers might work for a multitude of projects for a carpenter. For certain projects the carpenter might need speciality tools. In terms of studying, the specialty tools are going to be activities like comparing and contrasting terms that are similar. The specific learning goals or exam expectations will determine the kinds of specialty tools you will use to study.
Some helpful tips from Mental Health America include creating a study plan, getting enough sleep, taking breaks and limiting time on social media.
Junior athletic training major Cady Newman uses the distributed practice method to prepare for her exams.
“I study really far in advance, usually one to two weeks before the exam is when I start studying,” Newman said. “I start studying about one to two hours a day and as the exam gets closer I increase that to three to four hours a day.”
Newman finds tools like Quizlet to be more useful than handwritten notecards.
“I like using Quizlet because it helps with my memorization and you can have it on your computer and phone,” Newman said. “Also, it’ll remember the ones you missed, so you can star them and come back to those specific ones and it’s more organized.”
In terms of advice for other students during exam time, Newman recommends studying in advance, writing out your notes instead of typing them and going through your notes daily.
Junior integrated social studies major Rachel Buck uses a planner and desk calendar to keep herself organized for upcoming exams.
Buck also uses the distributed practice method with breaks in between to prepare for exams.
“I study about one to two weeks before the exam and study around five to six hours a day,” Buck said. “I tend to take a lot of breaks. So, it’s five to six hours total with a few 20 minute breaks in between each hour.”
Buck’s two biggest pieces of advice for students are to give yourself breaks when you need them to prevent burnout and to take studying one day at a time.
“I find that studying for a bit then taking a break by watching a YouTube video or giving yourself some other kind of reward helped with pacing and doesn’t make studying as overwhelming for me,” Buck said. “But, the biggest piece of advice I have is to take studying one day at a time because it’s going to be impossible to study everything for every exam all at once.”
