Hey what's up everybody, it's Thomas Frank and it's almost finals week.
This being a channel where I teach you how to study better I figured I should probably
make a video on finals.
I want to make it short, I want to make to the point and I want to help you both study
more efficiently for finals and also reduce some of the stress that comes along with finals
week.
To that end I have five tips that can help you do both of those things.
The first one is to no the difference between your planning mode and your doing mode, or
as I like to call it, the robot mode.
The word robot is actually an adaptation of the Czech word robotnik which translates to
worker or slave.
The thing about workers and slaves is they do things, they don't plan things.
As a student you got to do both of them but you should do them at different times and
you should plan before you do.
When it comes to finals you want to figure out how many days you have until your first
exam and your last exam, how much time you actually have to study and what all you need
to study during that time.
Then you can make a detailed plan for what you're going to study in order based on priorities,
based on context and mental intensity that you can put toward your studying and anything
else that's pertinent.
You also want to break individual study projects into actionable steps.
Something like "study calculus" isn't really actionable, it doesn't really tell you what
to do next so break that down to something more actionable, something like get out all
of your material, review the chapter on L'H�pital's Rule or something like that, go through a
practice problem set.
Just make sure your list of tasks includes things that you can sit down and definitively
achieve.
Once you actually have that plan set in stone for studying, it's time to go from planning
mode and switch over to robot mode.
Actually on the College Info Geek blog I've written an article this week all about robot
mode and planning mode and gave specific examples of things you can do to make this a more efficient
process.
At the end of this video I'll put up a link to that blog post where you can go read it
but first we have a few more tips to go over.
Tip number two is to know the format of your exams and them tailor those study efforts
to match those assessments.
For example if one of your finals is going to be a multiple choice test then you want
to make sure you have a solid understanding of the facts in that class and a good way
to do that would to maybe build a deck of cards in Anki and do space repetition studying
or create your own study guide that asks specific questions and then you have to answer them
later.
If the final's going to be based around essays then you want to know the main ideas of what
you're studying and then force yourself to write those down in your own words.
Get practice beforehand so when you actually go into the test it's easier to do.
My third tip is to base your studying efforts around active recall.
This means actually digging into your brain and forcing yourself to bring forth information
that you've learned before.
The opposite of this is passive review, simply reading a book and looking over your notes
and exposing yourself to information and it doesn't work as well as active recall.
In 1885 a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus came up with a theory he called
the forgetting curve.
It was his attempt to explain how memories degrade exponentially over time.
Ebbinghaus's theory is that the strength of your memories is subject to a lot of different
factors and the frequency of active recall is one of them.
If you just listen to me tell you about this guy, you're probably not going to remember
him very much later on but if you actually try to answer this question for yourself,
what did Ebbinghaus do this research, and you pause the video and you actually do it,
you're probably going to remember it later on.
My fourth tip is to review old material while you're studying.
There's a site called koofers.com where you can actually look up old tests and exam questions
for your classes and you may actually be able to find something very similar to what's going
to be on your final exams.
If you can't find it on koofers, you can also look at fraternity test banks, professional
organizations and other student organizations on campus.
My fifth and final tip has to do with your stress and it's this: anticipate your failures
in advance.
What I mean by this is that you probably are going to procrastinate, you're probably going
to lose willpower at some point during your studying and the most successful students
recognize this and plan ahead for it.
The way you can take advantage of this and plan ahead is to set breaks in the future
that you're going to take.
Maybe after 50 minutes of studying, you're going to let yourself go on Facebook or you're
going to let yourself play a video game for a while.
But the key here is that you plan for this in advance.
You plan for dealing with the pain point before it actually happened.
When you do this, you're more likely to be able to move past that pain point and get
back to studying.
That's it for this video but I do have a couple other resources you can check out if you're
still looking for some more tips.
The first one is my Mutant Guide to Studying for Finals, which I wrote over on the College
Info Geek blog a couple of years ago and you can find that by clicking right there.
Also the article I mentioned earlier about planning mode versus robot mode, you can find
by clicking right there.
Hopefully you found these tips to be helpful.
There are definitely going to be a lot more coming in the future as I'm trying to make
this channel the ultimate resource for studying in college so definitely hit the subscribe
button below if you want to get those tips every single week.
Otherwise, good luck on your finals, use these tips to study more efficiently and please
manage your stress, take breaks and make sure that you're staying sane.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching my video on acing your finals.
If you found it helpful you can support this channel giving the video a like on YouTube
or sharing it with a friend and also if you want to get new videos on studying better
coming out every single week on Thursdays just hit that subscribe button that you can
find right there.
If you happened to miss last week's video it's over active reading strategies, and you
can find it by clicking the moving picture below there.
If you want to find any resources that I talked about in this video and extra links, they're
all listed at the companion blog post which you can find by clicking the orange button
right there.
Also I have a little bit of an announcement to make.
I'm actually writing a book called Ten Steps to Earning Awesome Grades While Studying less
and it's going to be absolutely free so if you want to get that book it's coming out
right as the new semester starts in January.
Click the picture of the book right there, you can sign up for the email list or the
College Info Geek blog and you will get that book for free when it comes out in a few weeks.
I'm very excited to release it to you so definitely check it out.
Also if you want to suggest any video topics or anything else of this sort, follow me on
Twitter @TomFrankly or leave a comment on this video and I will get back to you.
Thanks!