I love autumn, and I love Halloween, but October kind of sucks. Football games are every weekend and if you’re in the band like I am, attendance is mandatory. Leaves are falling and all you want to do is plan your Halloween costume and take aesthetically pleasing Instagram pictures on The Lawn. Carter Mountain is filled with apples to pick and dogs to pet. This seems great, but school hits you hard. Classes are not only in full swing, but professors have the audacity to test you on the first half of the semester. Every awesome thing about fall just gives you another excuse to tell yourself why you don’t need to worry about that exam. You have a week, think about it later! You have three days, you can study tomorrow night! You have twelve hours…and everything is horrible and you’re dying. You must cram.
To clarify, I do not support regularly cramming for tests, but ya girl is trying to get into med school and a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
Take the Practice Exam
Right away, find out what you don’t know. If your class offers a practice exam, it’ll give you a pretty good idea of what you thought you knew and what you actually didn’t. If your class doesn’t offer one, find one online! Even if your teacher doesn’t want to help you do well in the course, a ton of other teachers have entire websites of practice exams. After you take the test, make sure to go through your answers, mark the ones you got wrong, and why. This will help you identify what you need to study versus what test-taking skills you need to improve (i.e. not knowing the answer vs. not reading the question).
Ditch the Study Group
I know we all love our friends, but the night before the exam is not the time to pretend to study with them. Study groups can be great, but can also suck up much needed time when you’re scrambling to understand five chapters in one night. Instead, buckle down at your desk and make friends with your school supplies. Create a study zone you can’t escape and lock yourself into the world of molecular bonds. Of course, make sure to take periodic breaks so that your brain doesn’t melt into a puddle like the sidekick friend from Sky High, but keep them short and stay focused.
Read the Chapter Summaries
Now that you’re in the zone and know what you need to review, break out the textbook. I don’t care if you haven’t cracked the spine this semester. This is the time to get the most out of that $180 brick. Tons of textbooks have a summary and review section at the end of the chapter that covers the most important topics. Unless you have enough time to read the entire chapter, these summaries are going to keep you afloat. Skip the hours of highlighting and make note of the important equations and vocabulary listed at the end so that you might have an idea of what’s happening once you open that testing packet.
Take the Practice Exam….Again.
I said earlier that we were going to come back to the practice exam. It’s time to test what you learned. If you have a good memory and think you’ll just remember all of the answers from before, find one of the million tests online. When you take the practice exam again, try to create a testing environment. Put a timer on your phone for the amount of time you’ll have in class, and only allow yourself to use the materials you’ll be allowed in the exam. Test-taking skills are a huge part of your ability to do well, so read thoroughly and answer the questions you know before trying the harder ones. When you finish, go over your answers again. If you have time, repeat the entire process of finding what you missed and reviewing it. There’s going to be a point where you can’t shove any more information into your brain, so don’t burn yourself out.
This is what burnt out looks like.
GO TO BED
In my opinion, this is the most important part of studying, for anything, ever. This is the most important part of living. It doesn’t matter if you think you can function on four hours of sleep because the human brain is physically not made for doing that. Our bodies wouldn’t sleep if we didn’t need it to live. Like I said, there’s always a point where you can’t study any more than you already have, and staying up past that point is taking away valuable sleeping time. I know it sounds impossible, but I consistently sleep eight hours every night. If I don’t, I feel like I’m dying and my brain moves -2 miles per hour. I’ve done better on tests when I’ve slept and studied less than when I’ve slept less and studied more. The National Sleep Foundation says 17 to 25 year-olds need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. Missing out on sleep might not make you noticeably tired during the day, but it does impair problem-solving and motor skills, as well as your ability to fight off infections. The only thing worse than taking an exam while exhausted is taking an exam with the flu.
I know the October midterm blues are the worst, but you can make it through if you try hard enough. The best way to try hard enough is to prepare for your exams in the weeks before they happen, but we all know that seasonal Bold Rock isn’t gonna drink itself.