The most stressful time of the year for students is surely the exams weeks. Sometimes you might be lucky and have at least a day or two between the exams to get ready, but you also might have exams back-to-back – a really challenging time period. So, learning a few tips on how you can study for exams easily and effectively might help you a lot. The following tips and tricks will surely come in handy when you need to get ready for your upcoming exams and avoid excessive stress, create an effective study routine, organize your time, and just mentally prepare for challenging tasks. Let’s get started!
Use Different Active Learning Techniques and Study Methods
Have you heard of active learning? It’s basically a method that implies activating and engaging more segments of your brain while studying, which as a result, helps you memorize and understand information better.
It means that only reading or only writing is not enough to memorize complex concepts and theories. What you need is to take notes while reading, write short summaries, take tests, use cards and games, try a mind map, etc. All of these things can be used during the whole time of your semester and during the weeks before your finals. By implementing active learning techniques into your study routine, you can achieve better results and get higher grades.
Writing summaries is very effective. After an hour of writing a lecture, it’s what your brain really needs – to put all the information on the shelves in the right order. If you don’t come back to these lecture notes in the next few days, chances are you will be not able to recollect all the important details.
Summarizing will help you understand the material and make a conclusion in your own words, thus remembering it for longer. When you’re doing a summary, you should strive to reduce the content to only a few phrases or essential points at the most. Because of this, you will have an easier time remembering the fundamental principles and ideas.
Flashcards
Flashcards are another useful technique for learning material. On one side of the card, jot down a question, and on the other side, write down the answer. Flashcards can be used to memorize terminology, formulae, dates, or facts and check the level of your readiness for the exam. So, if you are looking for the answer to how to memorize notes in one night, flashcards can be very helpful.
Make a Timetable for Your Studies
We always stress the importance of creating a study schedule in order to be able to manage your time and organize your day in the most productive way. It works great because a schedule helps you divide the large amount of information you need to learn down into smaller, more digestible chunks. Your study plan has to contain blocks of time that are dedicated to studying, taking breaks, resting, socializing, and other daily tasks.
Be sure that you prioritize your study time. Start working on your schedule by creating a study plan for exams that will need the greatest effort and devote the majority of your study time to it. By doing this, you will guarantee that you have more time on memorizing complex material.
Take Breaks
Working or studying for a long time without taking a break is exhausting. Everyone needs to have at least 10 minutes each hour to change their focus and get a little distraction from the hard mental job. Students need to take constant breaks each 45-60 minutes in order to keep their productivity high.
By having regular and consistent breaks you can actually boost your brain activity – the longer you focus on one task, the harder it gets to stay as focused and motivated as in the beginning, You get tired and lose concentration. That means that having breaks doesn’t mean spending more time on studies, but in fact saving your time and improving your productivity.
Obtain a Good Amount of Rest
Good sleep is what you need every single day. This is the only way to stay healthy and energized, and get your tasks done, and your systems working. If you don’t have enough sleep, you make your body suffer even with the easiest tasks, your mind becomes less sharp, and you might even feel dizzy and memory-fogged. This is the last thing that you need when getting prepared for your exams.
Make it a goal to get between seven and eight hours of sleep every single night. It is important to avoid pulling all-nighters and cramming the night before your exam since doing so might throw off your normal sleep schedule and impede your ability to think clearly.
Practice
Sometimes you might be too nervous about the format of the upcoming exam and all the uncertainty that awaits. That’s why it’s useful to practice on old exam sheets. You can find them online or ask your professor to provide you with such an opportunity. Not every professor is ready to do so though.
You can also practice by setting an alarm and creating very similar conditions to the ones that will be during the upcoming test. It’s important to understand how much time you have on your hands to complete your tasks on time. Usually, there is not much time to waste so you need to be focused and prepared.
If there are exam questions or test samples in the syllabus provided by your professor, be sure to check for them and practice with them too. Some important exam-related information can also be found in your classes and lecture notes.
You Can Study for Exams Effectively
Surely, exams are stressful – it might be a different level of stress for different people, but it is surely not a relaxing time. So, it’s important to get prepared for the exams beforehand to feel more confident about yourself. We hope that the tips that we have gathered in this blog post will help you get an organized and stress-free preparation. Good luck with your exams!