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Spring is upon us – in the north of the country it actually feels as if we’ve gone from winter to summer with no transition. That means that the final exams are around the corner. A friend who studied in Pretoria once said, “If you leave your final push till the jacarandas are flowering, it’s far too late.” But … you haven’t done that, have you? You’ve been conscientious and serious, all year through…?
Yeah, right. Very few people are conscientious and serious throughout. If you didn’t put in all the hours you now wish you did, let that go. What’s done is done. Yesterday is what it is. Today and tomorrow and the next crucial weeks are under your control. Use every minute.
Until the end of your exams, you have to put in at least four hours of study a day, six days a week. More would be better. Consider fitting in an extra two or three hours over the weekend. (This will not really work for medical students, engineers and others with a lot of practical work. Try and find your own formula to fit in both work and study. It may help to talk to your mentors and peers.)
This does not mean a block of four hours. Make your schedule work for you. Perhaps you want to do one hour from 5:30 – 6:30 in the morning, or 11 – 12 at night if you’re a night owl. As long as you know where your untouchable study hours sit in your day. A total of at least four hours, at least an hour at a time. One needs time to settle into your work.
So: the first thing to do, is go back to your schedule and make sure you have those four hours a day blocked out. This is your priority for the rest of the year. Clubs, societies and hanging out with friends have to take a back seat – even your mom may have to accept a whatsapp call rather than Sunday lunch!
We all use different tools to run our schedule – on your phone, on your computer, in a paper diary. I want to suggest that you make a separate one for these next few weeks, print/write it out and put it where you will see it constantly. Make it big and clear. The suggestion below is just possibility. You may want to do it your own way.
Break your four hours of daily study time in two parts of two hours each. Then plan what will happen in that time.
| Week starting | Monday Session 1 | Session 2 | Tuesday Session 1 | Session 2 | Wednesday Session 1 | Session 2 |
| 22/9 | ||||||
| 29/9 | ||||||
| 6/10 | ||||||
| 13/10 | ||||||
| 20/10 | ||||||
| 27/10 | ||||||
| 3/11 | ||||||
| 10/11 |
While you still have classes, session 1 every day should probably go to new work. Keep up, prepare for the next class, make sure you understand what was said today. You may also have a final round of tests coming up. Fit that work into Session 1. Session 2 must be allocated to working towards the exams. Remember the difference between URGENT and IMPORTANT? That’s what we’re dealing with here. Session 1 goes to work that is urgent AND important, session 2 to work that is not urgent, but very important.
In allocating the time in session 2, use the principles of spaced repetition, which we have introduced before. This is a tried and tested way to counter the “forgetting curve”: (Click here to hear a medical student explain how it works.)
Spaced repetition means going back to the same material again and again, but with bigger gaps between the sessions. A good pattern is to revisit it after one day, after five days, after ten days, and then again the night before the exam.
So: let’s say you decide to spend an hour (two pomodoros) on each of your first two exam subjects on Monday evening. On Tuesday, you go back to the same sections and test yourself.( If you work well in a study group, this is a perfect opportunity to test each others’ recall. Otherwise, you could use AI. Just ask: “Ask me questions about …” Or you do it the old-fashioned way, staring into space and saying out loud what you remember.) The parts you know can be put aside till next week. The parts you don’t know need more work, and you must return to them again the next evening, together with different subjects or sections you haven’t covered yet.
Plan your schedule to fit in rotations like this (day 1, day 5 and day 10) of each section of the work. Do as many as possible, going back over the work time and again.
This careful planning will probably take you at least an hour. It is an hour well spent. The best way to prevent panic is to have a plan. Becoming familiar with the work, doing it again and again, will give you enormous peace of mind, and you will be able to sleep soundly before the exam. That will push up your marks in itself. You must sleep. While you are awake, and especially if you’re doing hard mental work, toxins collect in the brain. It is “washed clean” when you sleep. You cannot think clearly when you’re tired.
Next week we’ll talk about using AI to master those tricky sections of the work that you have just not been able to understand fully.
Happy studying!
The GRAD team
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