Hello everyone!
In this video I will guide you through my tips on how to plan for your exam season to
make sure you tackle all of the reading and note taking in time, so you can have the best
possible grades.
You don’t need a fancy planner or app to make the perfect plan for your exams or finals
week.
A couple of pieces of paper will do the job just fine.
The idea here is to create a schedule slash calendar dedicated to this season and the
sooner you start, the better.
My method is dividing the paper in boxes for all the days that remain until your exam season
ends.
You can do this in a typical monthly layout and then use one page per month.
If you don’t want the trouble of doing all of this drawing on your own, I will leave
a couple of really simple templates in the description box so you can just print everything
right away.
For multiple classes or multiple exams, I advise you to use a color code to distinguish
studying for different purposes.
Mark your exam dates in their specific colors in the corresponding days.
You can use colored pens, highlighters, stickers, post it notes, and so on.
It depends on your preferences.
Next you should start dividing the chapters you need to study each day.
I encourage you to avoid doing unnecessary work by simply referring to the index or table
of contents of your main textbook, or, in case you don’t have one, your syllabi, where
the content or chapters of your class are laid out for you.
Most professors in university hand these out in the beginning of the year and although
they may seem like useless information spreadsheets at the time, they can really come in handy
in this stage.
Taking into account your table of contents or syllabi, your goal is to take each chapter
and find a dedicated slot of time to study that chapter.
Don’t worry about subchapters, titles or subtitles now – your goal is to decide when
you want to study an isolated chapter.
If it’s a big chunk of material, feel free to divide it.
I also suggest that you divide your time inside each box according to the number of daily
sessions you want to have.
For instance, if you usually study in the afternoon and evening, you can use the top
of the box to write down the chapter you want to study in the afternoon and the bottom of
the box to write down the chapter you want to study in the evening.
If for some reason, you are absolutely sure that you are not going to be able to study
in a specific day, for instance during the holidays, make sure to cross out that day
in your calendar so you can organize your studying around those days.
The goal here is to be able to visually anticipate exactly what you should be studying and when;
being honest about your available time is very important to get this information right.
If you are too optimistic when scheduling your time, a gap in your calendar will probably
throw off all of your plans and force you to overlap two study sessions to compensate.
Spreading out your readings in advance will help you have great information retention
in short bursts.
Make sure to leave a buffer day the day before the exam so you can go through all of your
previous notes and summaries and rest for a while.
Of course, that the division of time by chapter you are making will vary according to your
classes.
Some of your exams will probably demand more studying then others so you should have that
in mind while you are doing this exercise.
Once you finish this, you have an official study map to guide you throughout your entire
finals season.
Planning for your exams, however, is not over yet.
Although having a general calendar will be a life saver, going through more detailed
planning ahead will make the whole process a lot easier.
Taking into account the table of contents or syllabi you used previously, you should
be making a separate study guide for each one of your study sessions.
Although this seems like a lot of work, simply dividing your syllabus into different chunks
will do the job or, if you are feeling creative, you can create a separate document for each
study session with detailed bullets including all the topics, subtopics and concepts you
need to study for that day.
If you adopt this last method, I encourage you to keep one study guide per page and then
group all pages with a binder clip.
So now that you have these two separate resources to help you study, you are basically going
to use your major calendar every day to know what major chapter or chapters you need to
study.
Then you grab your dedicated study guides and use them while you study or write down
your notes to mark each subtopic as you read or work on it.
This will allow you to feel a sense of accomplishment and will also allow you to be certain that
you are actually covering all of the material you should and aren’t forgetting even the
smallest detail.