Most students find themselves in a situation where they suddenly realise that they don’t know how to study. Previous educational demands may not have been as high and now what used to work for you - doesn’t. The following is designed to help you prepare more efficiently for your upcoming exams. Good luck!

1) Don’t Cram

Short-term memory doesn’t have enough space to retain all the information you will need for an exam. Also, cramming tends to confuse long-term memory where well-learned material lives, and can set you up for panic and "blanking- out".

2) Prepare Early

Try preparing for an exam well in advance. Break your studying into chunks, and review the material several times. The following is a study schedule that will help you to organise your study time.

1. Do an initial overview approximately a week or more before the exam. A 2 - 4 hour quick review of the material should suffice. This will help to motivate you and to determine the structure of the course, where your difficult material is, and the volume you need to cover.

2. Develop a plan for getting yourself through this volume of material. If possible, begin with your most difficult material, leaving the material you’re most comfortable with to the end.
Follow your plan!

3. At the beginning of each study period, do a 10 minute review of the material you covered in your previous study period.

3) Study "From The Top Down"

What does this mean? It means to work from the general to the specific. Start with a good grasp of the course's main ideas, then follow with the sub-topics and supporting details. It is easier to understand and retain material that is well-organised.

4) Repackage Your Material

Real understanding only occurs when you are able to “repackage” learned material in different ways. What an exam is asking you to do, in essence, is to take the material you’ve learned and put it together in a different concise format. So this should be how you focus your studying. Review the material and be able to use the information to answer questions, solve problems, write essays, and to define, explain and apply terms.

5) Don’t Attempt To Learn New Material The Night Before

Try not to take in any new material the night before an exam. You want to enter your exam as confident as you can be. Your time will be better spent reinforcing what you know rather than running the risk of frightening yourself by discovering something you don't know.