How to study for a test

The short version: start earlier than feels necessary, study in short goes rather than long ones, and spend most of your time trying to remember things rather than reading them again.

Here’s what that looks like as an actual plan.

Three weeks out: build the set

Go through the topic and make cards as you understand each bit. Not all in one evening — a bit at a time, while the confusing parts are still fresh.

Keep them small and keep them honest. If something on the syllabus doesn’t make sense yet, don’t make a card for it. Go and understand it first, then come back. Drilling a card you don’t understand teaches you the words and not the idea. Writing flashcards that work covers how to word them.

Two to three weeks out: fifteen minutes a day

Open Review once a day and clear whatever’s due. That’s it. Usually it takes ten or fifteen minutes, and on a lot of days there’ll be barely anything waiting, because most of your cards are sitting on a long gap.

This is the part people skip, and it’s the part that does almost all the work. Fifteen minutes a day for two weeks is about three and a half hours, and it will beat a six-hour night by a distance you’d find hard to believe.

Press Not yet whenever you didn’t know it. It costs you nothing and it’s the only way the schedule can help you.

One week out: switch to Learn

Keep doing your daily Review, but add some Learn. Learn makes you type the answer instead of judging yourself, which is a much harder test and a much more honest one.

Cards you thought you knew will fall over here. That’s the point, and finding out now is the whole reason to do it a week early rather than the night before.

Three or four days out: take a practice test

Sit a full practice test in one go, without stopping to look things up. Then read your answers back.

What you’re looking for isn’t the score. It’s the pattern: which topics were shaky, which questions took far too long, which ones you got right but weren’t sure about. Those last ones are the dangerous ones.

Then make cards for what you missed and carry on reviewing. There’s still time for those cards to come round twice.

The night before: do less than you want to

One light pass through Review. Whatever’s due, and nothing more.

Don’t start new material and don’t stay up. Sleep is when your brain files the day’s work, so a late night undoes some of what you did that evening. This is the least fun advice in this guide and it’s the best supported.

If you only have three days

It happens. You can still do a lot, but you have to be ruthless about what you skip.

1. Find out what’s actually on it. Twenty minutes with the syllabus or a past paper. Studying the wrong material carefully is worse than studying the right material roughly.
2. Make cards for the highest-value facts only. The definitions, formulas and dates that carry marks. Thirty to fifty cards, not two hundred.
3. Study three times a day, not once. Morning, afternoon, evening. Three twenty-minute goes beat one hour, because the gaps between them are where the work happens.
4. Take a practice test on day two, not day three. You need time to act on what it tells you.
5. Still sleep. Genuinely. Trading sleep for an extra hour of revision is a bad trade at every level.

Three days won’t get you to the same place three weeks would. It will get you a long way past where you’d be after one long panicky night.

Things that feel like studying and aren’t

• Re-reading your notes. Feels smooth, teaches you almost nothing. The familiarity is the trap. If you want to use your notes, cover them and try to say what’s on the next line.
• Highlighting. Same problem, with a pen in your hand so it feels more active.
• Making the set and never studying it. Making cards helps. It isn’t the part that makes them stick.
• Studying the cards you already know. They’re nice to answer. That’s why people do it. Let the schedule decide instead.

One last thing

Studying a set of cards you wrote for a test in three weeks’ time is a strange kind of faith, because on any given day it doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything. It is. The whole method is built on gaps that feel too long while you’re in them.

Next: why cramming feels like it works, or how Machi.study decides when to show you a card.