1) Stay healthy! Get your beauty sleep, take in plenty of Vitamin C, make sure you eat all three meals, and don’t overdose on caffeine. Your body, brain, and grades will thank you because even though taking midterms suck, taking midterms half-awake with the sniffles sucks even more.
2) Start early… like a week, or even two weeks early. As college students sometimes it feels like we have nothing to do, and other times it feels like everything is crashing down on us at once – so make use of that free time! After every week of lecture, casually make a study sheet so that come midterms week, you’ll have something organized to study from. It’s a better use of time than daytime napping on top of the 10 hours of sleep you already got… and it’s like a present from yourself to yourself in the future! Plus, when you’re cramming last-minute and you have questions, it’s less likely that you’ll be able to get help – if you go to your teacher or TA’s office hours the week of your midterm, there is probably going to be a long line of students (procrastinators unite!) and you don’t want to waste your time waiting for your specific question to be answered when you’re on a tight schedule.
3) Reward and treat yourself in little bits, with a grand finale at the end. For example, after every subject you finish studying, do something fun and quick like a phone call to family or friends (they’re bound to have words of encouragement for you) or go on a Starbucks run and get your favorite specialty drink. For the grand finale, set a date to celebrate once all your midterms are over so you have something exciting or relaxing to look forward to (even if the date is with yourself, Ben and Jerry’s, and Hulu).
4) No distractions – Don’t study in your bed! Fact: It will make you sleepy; it’s best to just get out of your room, especially if you have roommates. It’s way too hard to find the motivation to keep on studying when you see your roomies watching TV or sleeping in relaxed, dreamy bliss. Go to the library (if you’re looking to study in a quiet place) or a cute café (if you’re not) where other people are also doing work so you can feed off of each other’s productive energy! As a side note – two hours of facebooking, texting, tumblring, and twitter-stalking in the library is still 2 hours of unproductivity. And let’s be real about music – it’s physically impossible to read and listen to lyrics at the same time…
5) Make studying fun (if at all possible) – bring out your inner artist and use pretty pens in all sorts of colors to make aesthetically pleasing study guides (try Le Pen – so smooth and easy to write with!). Make up a song to help you memorize or make up little stories to illustrate your thought process. You should, in the first place, be taking classes that you actually enjoy because if the material is interesting to you, it’ll be easier and more fun for you to internalize.
6) Know what to study – Definitely prioritize and differentiate between what you know and what you don’t know. The key thing is understanding, not memorizing. If you understand concepts, you can easily apply them. See if you actually understand the concepts by becoming a pseudo-kindergarten teacher and explaining them to a ten year old version of yourself – or to anyone who is willing to listen (because who doesn’t want to learn about delta-epsilon proofs?!).
7) Visualize success! Athletes do this all the time: envision yourself before, during, and after acing the midterm. It’ll motivate you and eliminate just a bit of test-taking anxiety.
But then again, if it’s 12 in the morning, you haven’t started studying, and your midterm is in a few hours, don’t freak out! Read over your lecture notes, write down key points, look at the sample test key to get a feel for the type of questions your prof will ask, and then say sweet dreams. There’s nothing you can do at that point to improve your situation, and it’s just not a good idea to pull all-nighters, especially if you’re a rookie to the whole hardcore studying scene. Instead, go to bed and go into the test rested and clear-headed so you can at least remember what you do know and be able to use your common sense or sheer wit to knock down (and/or b.s.) some answers. Acknowledge that this is only a certain amount of your grade and learn from your mistake; know that come next midterm, you’ll be a pro at this!