Figure Out When to Start Studying

Let’s start at the very beginning: the planning phase. If getting a good grade on a test is your ultimate destination, then having a study plan is a road map to get there. If you’ve ever studied for tests in the past and felt like you ran out of time to fit everything in, you’ll know exactly why the most important first step is to budget how many hours you have to work with.

The truth is, you actually begin “studying for a test” from the very first day you take a class—or even before. Preparing for a test should ideally be a natural extension of the focused work you’ve been doing with that subject all along. Done right, studying is more like revising since if you’ve planned ahead, you’ll already have taken useful notes, reviewed them, done homework assignments and practice, and made summaries as you went along. The final days and weeks before a test are when you gather everything together and make sure that you’re prepared for what you’ll face on exam day.

You need to answer two basic questions:

• What do I need to cover?

• How much time do I have available?

Sounds basic, but many students find themselves in trouble because they fail to answer one or both. Be warned: answering “everything” to the first question and “as much time as I can humanly squeeze in” is a recipe for disaster! You need to be specific. To decide what you need to focus on, you may use a guide or outline given to you by your teacher, or you can consult past papers to get a feel for the scope of what you’ll be tested on and to what depth.

This first question is not just about content, though, it’s also about how you’ll be expected to show your understanding, i.e., the form your questions will take. Again, past papers will give you an insight, but you can also think about the kinds of exercises and homework you’ve practiced throughout the course. We’ll look in more detail at different study techniques in later chapters, but essentially you will be dividing up your available time on different study tasks. These tasks could be:

Reading

Making summaries of what you’ve read, e.g., mind maps

Memorizing details, e.g., making and using flashcards for key terms

Worked practice, such as with geometry or algebra problems

Completing past papers

Once you understand everything you need to cover, then you can look at how much time you have and how to budget this time strategically. For example, you may be studying for a biology exam. Based on your teacher’s guidance and the formats of previous papers, you understand you need to cover chapters four to eight. You start by making a list of all the tasks you need to complete; for example, “read through all the chapters again,” “make summarizing diagrams of processes,” and “complete practice questions at the back of the book.” Then you make an estimate of how long each of these tasks will take you—being generous!

How do you know how long you’ll need for each task? You can guess, for one. Or, you can use what you know about yourself from previous study sessions. The most accurate way, however, is to actually measure it. For example, do a test run where you read a half chapter and time how long it takes you. Then you multiply this by eight to get an estimate of the time needed to read all four chapters. It may seem like this extra step wastes time, but in fact, it ensures you don’t waste time later.