It’s the night before your huge midterm and you’re stressing out about all of the material you don’t know. Should you drink that extra cup of coffee and study an extra few hours, or get a good night’s sleep? It’s too appealing to just push through and study; after all, that’s what all of your classmates are doing, right?
In college, it’s far too common for us to be so busy with schoolwork, athletics, social life, extracurriculars, a part-time job and a plethora of other activities that we don't have time to study for an exam a few days before it arrives. This problem is then compounded by the fact that we also have the capacity to be lazy, apathetic young adults that occasionally make poor decisions, the most common poor decision being procrastination.
While it may seem beneficial to cram before an exam when we don’t have the slightest mastery of the exam material, studies show that cramming often does not result in better grades before an exam. A 2012 UCLA study on a random sample of 535 high school students in Los Angeles, California, found an association between more time studying the night before an exam and trouble understanding in class the following day, which is the result the researchers expected. However, the study also found that the more students studied the night before an exam, the worse they tended to perform on said exam the next day. This finding is somewhat tragic since by cramming, students exacerbate the very problems they seek to avoid.
Cramming, in essence, results in sleep deprivation, which causes a loss of concentration, a dip in energy levels, and sometimes mood disorders. While sleep is universally neglected by teenagers, college students and adults across the world, it is essential to both our mental and physical health. Sleep is critical in memory storage, which is the most important component and goal of studying itself. Cramming also usually consists of sustained studying for long periods of time. In this mode of studying, students are less likely to retain necessary information than if they were to study in “chunks” of time separated by long breaks, thus making it an incredibly inefficient process.
Cramming is not only an inefficient process that often fails to achieve its main goal, but also highly detrimental to college students’ health over the course of a given semester. Cramming mostly results in short term memory, but after a midterm, much of the information is repeated on the final, so that information must be re-learned again before the final. Furthermore, it increases test anxiety in many students, seeing as we grow incredibly anxious about all of the material for the exam we don’t know and our insatiable desire to practice or memorize as much as we can in very little time. Students may also rely heavily on caffeine to get them through their cramming sessions, enabling them to drink as much coffee as they deem necessary to get them through the night and causing an over-reliance on caffeine to the point of addiction as the semester goes on.
So instead of trying to power through the night with cup after cup of coffee, your laptop and your textbook, you’ll have your best performance on an exam (and the least amount of stress to go with it) if you just close everything, brush your teeth and go to bed. Sleeping is not only more effective and efficient, but also significantly more comfortable. Who can deny that?
