Step one: find out what each exam is actually worth
Before you study anything, open every syllabus and write down three things for each exam: the date, what percent of your grade it is, and what it covers. This takes fifteen minutes and it changes everything after it, because your exams are not equal and your time should not be either.
A midterm worth 25 percent of your grade deserves more of your week than a quiz worth 5, even if the quiz feels scarier. And check that the date is still the date: professors move exams in class all the time, and the change often only ever gets said out loud. Look at recent announcements, and ask a classmate if you missed a lecture.
Then split your hours. Here is what that looks like for one made-up but very normal week:
| Exam | Worth | Days away | How it feels | Hours to give it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Chemistry midterm | 25% | 6 | Behind | 8 |
| Macroeconomics midterm | 20% | 3 | Okay | 4 |
| Statistics quiz | 5% | 2 | Scary | 1.5 |
| Biology lab practical | 10% | 8 | Fine | 2.5 |
The class you are behind in and that is worth the most gets the most time. The scary quiz gets less than your gut wants to give it. That is the whole point of doing this on paper first.
Stop rereading. Test yourself instead.
Rereading your notes and highlighting feel productive because the material starts to look familiar. Familiar is not the same as remembered. In 2013, a group of psychologists led by John Dunlosky reviewed the research on ten common study techniques. Rereading, highlighting and summarizing came out as low-usefulness. Practice testing and spreading your studying out over time came out on top.
The effect is not subtle. In a well-known experiment by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the same time rereading it, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Pulling information out of your head is what makes it stay there.
What testing yourself actually looks like
- 1.Blank page. Close everything and write down all you can remember about one topic. Then open your notes and look at what you missed. That gap is exactly what to study next.
- 2.Redo problems cold. Take homework or practice problems you have already seen and solve them without looking at the answer first. If you get stuck, that is the point where you learn.
- 3.Explain it out loud. Pretend you are teaching it to someone who missed class. Wherever you start saying "and then it just kind of…", you do not know it yet.
- 4.Use the old exams. If your professor posts past exams or practice questions, they are the single best thing you can study from. Do them under a timer.
Spread it out, even if you only have three days
Four one-hour sessions over four days beat one four-hour session the night before. That is the spacing effect, and it is one of the most reliable findings in learning research: a 2006 review that pulled together hundreds of experiments found it again and again. You do not need a perfect schedule. Just touch each exam more than once. Study a topic, sleep, then test yourself on it again the next day before moving on.
With three or four exams this also means mixing it up. Instead of one class all day, do an hour of chemistry, then an hour of economics, and within a class, mix different types of problems instead of doing ten of the same kind in a row. It feels less efficient, but students who mixed up their practice problems did better on the test than students who practiced one type at a time.
If you are behind on lectures
Do not try to rewatch or reread every lecture you missed. There is not time, and you would be back to passive review. Start from what the exam covers, go to the lectures on those topics only, and read the summary and key ideas first. Then go straight to practice problems on that topic, and only dig into the full lecture when a problem shows you what you do not understand.
Pay special attention to anything your professor said about the exam itself: "this will be on the test", "know this derivation", "the exam is cumulative". That is the most valuable information you can have, and it is usually only ever said out loud.
The night before
Sleep. Your brain does a lot of its work of locking in what you studied while you sleep, and an all-nighter trades that away for a few tired hours of rereading. Do one last round of testing yourself in the evening, pack what you need, and go to bed. The morning of, look over the list of things you kept getting wrong, not your whole set of notes.
Where CourseConnect fits
I built CourseConnect for weeks like this one, so take this part with the right amount of salt. It puts every exam from your syllabi on one timeline with what each one is worth, so step one is already done. It records your lectures and writes the notes, including the moments your professor mentions the exam or moves its date. And Live Study quizzes you out loud on your own class material, which is the testing-yourself part. None of it studies for you, it just gets the busywork out of the way so the hours you have go to the part that works.
What this will not fix
If you are really far behind in a class, a good week of studying will not fully close the gap, and that is okay. A midterm is one grade, not the whole course. Go to office hours this week. "I am behind and want to catch up" is a sentence professors respect, and it is much easier to say now than after the grade comes back. Then use what this exam shows you to set up the second half of the semester better than the first.
Sources
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin.
- Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science.
- Diekelmann, S., & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.