Study smarter, not harder

By Elaine Zhang

In a little over a month, finals shall descend upon the school.  In order to survive with your grade intact, incorporate the following tips into your studying regime.

Start reviewing at least two weeks before finals week.  Start studying early enough to ensure that you can cover everything in all your subjects.  This also will prevent you from staying up until 4am the day of the final frantically cramming.

When you are studying, turn off and put away all electronic devices.  If you wish to study with music in the background, find music without words.  Study in 25 minute sections, taking a five minute break between each study session.  After three sessions, take a longer 15 minute break.  Set up a reward system for your studying.  For example, you can give yourself a small snack every time you finish a page.  This studying style is known as the pomodoro method and there are various apps that can be used to enforce it.

See if you can find out what type of test your final will be.  Studying for an essay will be different than studying for a multiple choice test.  This can also ensure that you will not be surprised on the day of the test.

Take the notes you took during the semester and condense each chapter to half a page long. This helps ensure you understand the main ideas, while letting you review all your notes.  Study from the condensed notes.

If a teacher offers a study guide, be sure to study the questions carefully; the teacher would know what’s going to be on the test.  Understand all the topics mentioned in the study guide.

Find the old tests and quizzes you took throughout the semester, if your teacher returned them.  Teachers often use similar questions and cover similar topics on their finals, so they are great review guides.  Make sure you review the questions you got wrong and understand why you missed them.

When the day before the test comes around, make sure you get a good night sleep, at least eight hours.  If you started studying earlier, this will be doable.  Otherwise, you might end up falling asleep during a test, or blanking out

The day of your finals, eat a good breakfast.  As the old saying goes, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Eating breakfast can help your thinking ability and jumpstart your day.  Also, it can help prevent you from starving during a test and distracting yourself.  Make sure the foods you consume is healthy.

Finally, and most importantly, read the question.  You will never get points if you don’t answer the question.