Hack Your Grades: Effective Exam Study Guide

You haven’t studied a word and it’s 10 PM already. You realize that the exam’s tomorrow afternoon so you have an ample amount of time. You go back to browsing Facebook, or playing Fifa, or whatever other mindless task you were doing. It’s midnight. You open your book and you realize that the syllabus actually isn’t as small as you had previously thought. Panic sets in. You frantically try to grasp and dump whatever you can on your brain. The clock ticks away and so does your retention. The sun rises but you decide to push on because you’re accustomed to pulling all-nighters. You show up at the exam hall and memory goes blank. You recognize the terms on the question paper but you can’t recall what on earth they really mean. Congratulations! You just earned yourself a D+!

I will cut to the chase here and tell you that this article is not a shortcut to earning good grades. It’s actually based on meticulous planning and hard work. Let’s be honest here. The “cool people” who say they haven’t studied a word but still ace the exam are liars! No matter how smart you are, if you don’t know what’s written inside the book, there is no way you can score an A. Epiphany won’t strike you and neither will angels come down to help. There is no shortcut to success. You can’t rush it. Good grades require tremendous amount of hard work and discipline. Don’t leave yourself excuses after 4 years of college because guess what! CGPA matters! Minimum CGPA requirement of 3.30 or 3.50 or even 3.60 can disqualify you from even applying to certain organizations.

If you have ever googled “study tips”, you must have come this YouTube video by Professor Marty Lobdell titled Study Less, Study Smart. Although the video is an hour long, you will find that everything Professor Lobdell discusses is pretty much the cornerstone of any good student’s study regimen. I was amazed to see how his thoughts were perfectly aligned with mine. In this article, I cover most of what he says plus my own hacks.

So here it is, a proven system to hack your grades. Since it’s a very long piece of writing, you can read the summary points at the end of the article.

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Know the syllabus

It may seem like a dumb start but a lot of students have no idea what’s included in the syllabus and what’s not. Knowing the syllabus will allow you to know how much time you’ll need to invest. So the next time when the date for an exam is announced, ask a friend or classmate who keeps tabs on the classwork about the syllabus.

Divide and conquer

After knowing which chapters and sections of those chapters you have to study, count the number of pages you need to read. For instance, “chapter 13 – 26 pages,” “chapter 14 – 34 pages” and so on. After that tally the total number of pages. If you have, let’s say, 100 pages to read and 2 days in your hand, it may tempt you to divide the task equally, but it would behoove you to leave at least the morning of the exam day free. I will tell you why, later.

Use the low-hanging fruit principle

If you have spread the number of pages equally over the number of days you have, you may want to start off with the chapters that are smaller in size. The reason is that you need to trick your mind into accepting the difficult task ahead. By starting with the easy, smaller bits, you are positively reinforcing your brain by making it feel accomplished. Plus it makes sense to mitigate the risk of not finishing on time by covering multiple chapters than just one. Once you have finished the easy parts, you’ll find that your commitment bias has kicked in. Subconsciously, you realize that you are now in the middle of the task. There’s no turning back! How can you quit?

Set a target

Now that you know what you have to study and how much time you’ll need to devote, it’s time you set your expectations. Everybody wants an A, but nobody is willing to put in the necessary effort behind it. Be realistic. If you are swamped with extra-curricular activities, you may want to lower your expectations to a B+ or B.

Use the 80/20 principle

I have a close friend who used to study 1/5th of the time I used to study and he usually scored only a grade below mine. That’s how I learned the 80/20 principle. The principal says that 80% of the effects can be attributed to 20% of the causes. Using the principle, you can score 80% marks just by studying 20% of the syllabus. To score anything above 80% would take a lot more effort which may not be worth the expectations you have set for yourself. The challenge here is knowing what constitutes the magical 20%. Just knowing the key terms and obvious concepts that the teacher repeats over and over again in the classroom should get you very close to the 20%. Hence, here as well, knowing the details of the syllabus from a fellow classmate will help you.

Create a dedicated study area

Our environment or context that we’re in, largely determines our behavior. For instance, when a teacher asks a question in class, we instinctively raise our hand. This behavior is automatic. Nobody asks us to raise our hands. We simply do. We are conditioned to it. Your study area is a similar concept. If you study in a place where you are conditioned to do other things, like sleep, or play video games, it’s going to be very hard to get into studying. So you have to find an area that is specifically used for studying, so that the context of the situation makes it easy for you to get into your studies. I always study at my table no matter how comfy and appealing the bed appears to be. So remember to declutter your desk before you get down to business.

Break your studying into sessions

An average student can only pay attention for about 25 to 30 minutes. This is true for lectures, reading, studying etc. After about 20-30 minutes your efficiency starts to dip, hence the advice to study more is just not effective at all. So break your study sessions into 25 to 30-minute sessions after which take a break for 5 minutes to do something fun or relaxing. Alternatively, take a walk indoors. It will help stretch the rigid muscles. Be sure to give yourself a tangible reward after you’re done for the day. Reinforcement of positive things builds good study habits and trains you to study longer on each sessions.

Get in the zone

Having a desk alone doesn’t always cut it. You need to go the extra mile. Have a bottle of water, a mug of coffee, some chocolates, and a bottle of cola next to you. It’s usually dehydration and low sugar levels that makes us tired. So having these goodies next to you is a great way to not only avoid fatigue but also to reward yourself during short breaks. Turn off your phone’s Wi-Fi and resist the temptation to mindlessly scroll through social media on your laptop. Listening to background music on YouTube helps spur your creativity and makes boring task a bit more enjoyable. Be sure to listen to only instrumental versions by searching for “background music” or “study music” on YouTube. Music with lyrics or music with dramatic highs and lows usually draws your attention away from the task at hand.

Use a stopwatch

This would perhaps be the most effective study hack I can offer you. Having a stopwatch running on your phone is a constant reminder that you must push yourself harder. It usually takes me 3 to 4 minutes to read an entire page. I allocate 5 minutes per page to account for distractions. When I power through the pages and build a surplus of saved time, I feel a sense of accomplishment which further encourages me to study. The time I save also adds up to the short breaks making them longer and more enjoyable.

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Skim

There are two types of learners – ones who understand individual components then see the bigger picture and the ones who see the bigger picture first then connect the individual components to it. Whichever category you fall into, you should skim through an entire chapter by glancing over the learning outcomes, headings, sub-headings, illustrations, key terms, review questions etc. Skimming helps you see the bigger picture and can really prime your brain for picking out the most important information when you actually do the reading.

Study actively

Studying actively means being completely aware and understanding what you read. The more active you’re in your learning, the more effective you’ll be. The best way to do this, rather than going through rote memorization, or reading and rereading chapters from your book, is to first ask yourself, before studying, “What is is that I’m learning?” The answer is always 1 of 2 categories – facts or concepts. A concept is something that needs to be understood, like how inflation and exchange rates are related. Whereas, a fact is something you remember, like what is the inflation rate in US. Concepts are always more important than facts, because once you learn a concept and truly understand its inner workings, you’re going to remember it forever. Facts, on the other hand, you’ll forget. You should always learn concepts first. The best way to learn concepts and to be sure that you know them is to put them in your own words. So test yourself and learn actively. When learning actively, be sure to highlight important terms. But when you go back to those highlighted terms after your first reading, you probably will mistake recognizing for recalling. The human brain is very good at recognizing. We can recognize a face very easily but we can’t recall that person’s name with the same ease. The problem with tests is that recognition requires a cue or trigger. But unfortunately during most tests there is not trigger. You have to actually retrieve from your memory. So when you test yourself, make sure that you’re actually recalling something, instead of just recognizing it.

Use mnemonics when studying facts

Facts, as opposed to concepts, are a lot harder to tie actual meaning to, and as a result, a lot of students often turn to repetition or rote memorization to remember them. A better alternative is mnemonics. A mnemonic is any system that facilitates recalling. Mnemonics can be: (i) acronyms, like Roy G. Biv for remembering the color spectrum; (ii) coined sayings for things like, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue; and (iii) the third and best one, image associations. Think of Image association as interacting images that create a ridiculous picture or story in your head. The more emotionally evocative or weird it is, the more easily you’re going to be able to recall that piece of information. If you want to know more, there is an awesome YouTube video on image association. Even if you have to memorize a long, random list of, let’s say, the causes of Renaissance you can still use mnemonics to remember it. Here’s how:

Causes of Renaissance:
Influence of Byzantine and Saracenic cultures
Flourishing commerce
Growth of cities
Revival of interest in classical learning
Growth of critical and questioning attitudes
Study of Roman law
Expansion of intellectual interest by universities
Growth of naturalism
Patronage
Crusades

If you consider the above list as an acrostic poem, you’ll get acronyms that don’t really make any sense. But you can reorder them and make it into 4G IF ERPS C meaning 4G technology will start IF Enterprise Resource Planning Software (ERPS) is Completed. Because this acronym is so silly and weird you are more likely to remember it.

Use YouTube. We google pretty much everything these days. But we miss out one very important resource – YouTube. The website has all sorts of educational content so be sure to search YouTube alongside Google. Because the videos come in audio-visual format, they tend to be very engaging which helps you retain more. For starters, you can browse Crash Course and Khan Academy.

No all-nighters

I used to be a fan of pulling an all-nighter because it seemed to be the most efficient use of my worthless time. But you and I both know that, more often than not, an all-nighter never works. Even if it miraculously did, you’ll spend the entire day feeling groggy and the following day adjusting your sleep cycle. So even though on a surface level all-nighters seem to be a very efficient form of studying, they may just be the most inefficient form. You need at least 3 to 4 hours of sleep the night before the exam day. The sleep helps you commit whatever you’ve learned to your long-term memory.

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Draw an overview tree

On the morning of the exam day, or the night before, try to revise what you’ve learned. Ask questions to check if you’re just recognizing terms and concepts or actually recalling them. While you’re revising, draw an overview tree. It looks something like this:

Exam study guide Overview notes can help you see the bigger picture — Click to see a larger image

Pardon my alien handwriting and the coffee mug stain. But you get the idea! The overview tree doesn’t have to be perfect. You can just write down the headings and subheadings from the book’s chapters. You can scribble additional notes with a pencil. You can even highlight terms you feel are important or you might forget. What an overview tree does is that it gives you a bird’s-eye view of the entire syllabus. It helps you see how individual components of a topic is related to the umbrella topic.

Teach what you learn

The best way to learn something is to teach it. The reason for this two fold. Number 1, it’s a great form of active studying, because you’re forcing your brain to recall all the information so you can basically summarize it for somebody. Number 2, you’re really making sure that you fully understand the subject. If you’re explaining it somebody who has absolutely no idea about the topic, then you’re going to have an easy time pinpointing gaps in your own understanding. So on the exam day, be a teacher to a friend. It will benefit you more than it will benefit him or her. If you can’t do that, as you revise, pretend that you’re teaching someone.

Seek help

There is no shame in asking others who have taken the course before you for notes or what the previous year’s questions were. If that’s too far fetched for you, at least ask for help from a friend. He or she can help explain to you a certain concept or give access to notes or, if it’s too late, tutor you on the morning of the exam day. I’m sure he or she will gladly do so.

The worst feeling in the world is perhaps that sinking feeling we get during an exam when we know we’re doomed but we still try to do some damage control. I know that procrastination gets the better of us most of the times, but once you learn how to discipline yourself, you’ll discover that there is an immense satisfaction in powering though the problems and work. Now that you know my tried and tested exam study guide, hopefully, you’ll be better prepared. So to recap again: