5 Study Tips to Help Ace Your Final Exam

When you create a routine, you start to program your brain into knowing when it needs to focus. However, building a routine is a habit. This means that it is important to make sure that you are not switching your schedule completely all at once. Instead, take your time and wake up a little earlier – create small increments throughout the day that is set for focusing. By changing the small areas in your life, the new habit will stick and become easier to implement.

The human brain is not built to maintain focus for hours. The longer we study without breaks, the harder it is to maintain the information. The Pomodoro method targets this main concern by setting a 20 minute time of focus and 5 minute breaks in between. During the 20 minutes of focus, you put all your energy into the task you are completing. That means that there is no scrolling on your phone, mindlessly reading, etc. Then on the 5 minute breaks, you want to stop studying. Afterward, you will find that you have gotten a lot of studying done and will have effectively retained more information.

If you’re like me, having my phone near me creates endless distractions. If I see a notification, I feel the need to reply, leading me to go on my phone for longer than I anticipated. I have found that the only way that I can get rid of this distraction is to get rid of my phone completely when I study. At first, it felt odd. I was always worried that I would be missing an important phone call or a message. However, using the Pomodoro method (listed above) gives a 5-minute window to go check my notification. This way, I can be free from distractions while studying while still having the ability to check any important notifications.

Writing your notes by hand again before a test can help to retain the information. Research done by Pam Muller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that taking notes on a laptop leads individuals to process the information more shallowly. This means that electronic notes have a far less chance that people will retain this information. However, they found that handwriting notes will lead individuals to be more selective of the information that they write. This creates a higher chance that people are capturing key ideas when handwriting  notes. It also helps when you are rewriting the notes because you are reviewing the concepts at the same time. This will help to figure out any gaps that may be in your prior notes and areas that you may have forgotten about.

I am guilty of rereading my textbooks to study for an exam. However, this is not an effective way to study. Reading the textbook or your notes can give a false impression that you know the material. A test is much more likely to test recall more than what you can recognize. This shows how important practice problems are. It will help an individual grasp an understanding of the key concepts without having to see the question structured in a certain way.