How I Cram For Finals
This is how I cram when I have to (spoiler, very often). Disclaimer, it’s not healthy, it’s desperation taking over and I would not recommend it unless you really need to do it.
Plan of action
Take five minutes to make a plan. This is how mine usually goes:
Make a lisf of all your topics/units (with little boxes)
Whatever you’ve already studied gets crossed off.
Whatever you remember from class gets ticked.
Topics your prof went over quickly and kind of implied weren’t that important, put a cross in their box
Essential topics get an exclamation mark in the box.
Count the hours until your exam
Substract 2-4 hours for sleeping per day (adjust this to whatever amount of sleep you know you can function on). You don’t need to use these, but it’s good to set some time aside in case you crash.
Substract 15-30 minutes for each meal until your exam (yes, you’re gonna have to put a timer on when you have them)
-10 minutes for showering if you have to
- 30 minutes for getting ready in the morning + however long it takes you to get to where you’ll be taking your exam
Divide the hours you’ve calculated between the non crossed/ticked topics. You’ll have to set a timer while you’re studying these too.
Start with the ones that have an exclamation mark
If after you’re done with those, you have some time left, start with the topics with ticked boxes, continue with the ones with crosses and lastly go over the crossed out ones.
Tips
Ditch color coding - actually if you can, ditch highlighting altogether. Otherwise, keep it to one color.
Use mnemonics as a super fast way to memorize lists - identify the most important word of each item in it, make a word out of of all these letters and then make up a sentence with the topic of the list (so for ‘characteristics of the peptidic bond, you’d just pick ‘peptidic bond’) and the word you’ve just made
As you go along, write down details, figures and stuff that seems like key info on a sticky note and stick those on a page one after another. This is just like making a cheat sheet but you can make the info stand out more without any need for prettyfying. Warning - you’ll be using a shitload of sticky notes. You can see an example here. This way you can review all the crucial facts right before your exam.
Doing a one minute workout each hour at night will keep you alert if you’re not sleeping enough
Ok so now that you’ve read this (probably on your phone), turn it off and put it in a drawer in the room furthest away from you. This is critical for success. Any other distractions? Laptop, food, TV? Sell it, tell your roommate to take it for a walk, lock it in the bathroom, I do not care, get rid of it. Godspeed my fellow procrastinators
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