It’s officially “dead week” here at IU, which means finals are just a week away. While it’s too late to go back and undue any mistakes you’ve made thus far in this semester, the following guidelines provide advice that can help ensure a stress-free and successful finals week.
Understanding What Needs to Be Done
Albert Einstein was once quoted saying something along the lines of, “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” Applying this idea in the context of finals week, you should be sure to spend sufficient time creating a plan for how you’re going to study for finals. Here are several key steps that you should consider:
- Map out your schedule for finals week, knowing exactly which exams occur when
- Determine which exams need the most attention based on your current grades/desired end grade in each course
- Skim through each course syllabus to identify topics which need the most reinforcement
As intuitive as these steps sound, you’d be surprised – and maybe even know from personal experience – how failing to properly plan is just as bad as planning to fail. Time is a finite resource which you can’t afford to waste by mistakenly waiting until Sunday to study for a Monday exam, spending too much time studying for exams which aren’t as important as others, or arriving at an exam only to realize you have forgotten to study the one topic you’ve struggled on all semester.
Once you’ve determined a course of action for the week, begin considering how to best execute your strategy in order to ensure that you get the most out of the time you spend studying.
Studying More Effectively
One of the biggest downfalls of failing to properly plan is that it often puts you in situations where your most effective means of studying is memorization. Memorization is useful in some situations, but generally shouldn’t be used as a primary means of studying for the following reasons:
- There’s too much information covered on exams to memorizes it all
- It can be difficult to recall information in stressful moments such as during exams
- Exams (especially in upper-level) courses require you to synthesize on what you know, not just regurgitate what you’ve learned
Instead, you should focus on study tactics that improve long-term retention and subsequently promote better recall of material such as:
- Linking new information to things you already know
- Actively participating in your own learning by creating summaries, study guides, etc.
- Studying in an environment that is similar to the testing environment
- Quickly reviewing materials before going to bed each night
These strategies not only help to solidify your memory and recollection of the material, but also are more likely to put you in a situation where you can reason your way through topics that you can’t actively recall during the test.
Chunking – The Right Way to Cram
If you have to resort to memorization and cramming for an exam, chunking is perhaps one of the most useful strategies you can utilize. Essentially, chunking works to reduce the cognitive load of learning by breaking content down into smaller, more manageable blocks of information. It’s the same process that makes phone numbers easier to remember when presented in the format (XXX) XXX-XXXX instead of XXXXXXXXXX.
When pressed with time, focus your efforts on chunking the content of the course into the 5 to 9 most important concepts/topics that will be on the exam. Once you’ve done this, you can further utilize chunking by taking each of the core concepts you’ve identified and chunking together 5 to 9 of the most relevant terms, facts, examples, etc. for each one. Finally, allocate whatever time you have left to study according to which concepts present the biggest challenge for you.
By utilizing this strategy, you effectively eliminate non-essential topics, allowing you to focus your efforts on the areas which need the most attention and increasing the likelihood you’ll actually remember what you studied. Again, this isn’t the most ideal way to study, but it’s more effective than trying cram an entire textbook overnight.
Crushing Your Exams
Now that you’ve read this, you’ll hopefully have a better idea of how to plan for finals week, study more effectively, and – if all else fails – cram for your exams in a way that ensures you’ll get the most out of your efforts. And, of course, keep in mind cliche advice like getting 6-8 hours of sleep the night before and eating breakfast the morning of every exam. Moreover, don’t forget to cut yourself some slack and avoid stressing out too much over finals. If you've been in the library all day, take a break, go on a walk, eat a snack, or talk with friends - these little moments can help keep you sane when the burden of finals starts to pile on.
Best of luck on your finals!
