Speaker 1: If you're watching this, it probably means you have an exam coming up that you want to pass and more preferably want to do well at. Finding the motivation to study while juggling work and other obligations can already be very difficult. And then there's the added anxiety of sitting the exam itself. But there are some ways to best optimise the time you spend studying so you can feel more confident come exam time and come away with the result you want. Failing an exam is an undesirable option. Obviously, you don't want to have to repeat a subject and extend your degree and you don't want to have to completely restudy the course material in preparation for a repeat of an exam like the bar exam which you can only take once every six months. And if you have Asian parents like me, you just have it ingrained in you and that you just simply cannot afford to underperform. So if you're watching a video like this, it's safe to say you're not just looking to pass but you want to do well. I've learnt a fair bit from preparing and sitting exams throughout high school, university, law school and most recently after having passed a New York bar exam after having moved to New York from Australia. In this video, I'll share some of the study techniques that I've found to have worked well for me as well as some bonus tips towards the end. If you're struggling to get the results that you want, then these tips will definitely help you out. So let's just jump into it. The first tip is to get a bird's eye view before diving deep. The initial step in preparing for any exam is to go through all the materials and expose yourself to everything that will be tested. You should be going through the topic outlines, you should be looking at the topic headings, the topic descriptions to get a feel for the entire subject and for what to expect in the exam. It's sort of like preparing an itinerary for when you travel to a different city. You have an idea of the things you want to do, what you want to see, things you want to eat but you need to locate them all on a map so you can work out the best way to get through everything. If you don't bother to look and see where everything fits relative to each other, you'll waste a lot of ground walking around in the wrong direction, backtracking and more likely than not, you probably won't get through everything you wanted by the end of the day. Getting a bird's eye view of all the topics that are going to be covered just helps you appreciate where all this stuff fits in and how different topics might relate to each other. It's important to do this first so you know what's ahead of you and before you start diving deeper into a specific chapter or a topic because getting this bird's eye view gives you a reference for how much content there actually is and you'll get a better sense of how much time you should be spending diving deep into each topic. And at this stage, it's okay to not 100% understand everything you're reading. I think the focus at this point is to get through the content and to try not to get stuck rereading things over and over because you know this is the first step of the process to go through everything and that you'll be drilling down deeper further down the track. The second tip is to stop taking notes. Okay, I mean this might sound controversial but I'm not saying that notes are bad at all. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the act of typing or writing the notes and summarising each chapter or lecture is a bit of a waste of time. Note-taking is essentially rewriting or paraphrasing the material. It's passive and it's easy and because it's like an easy thing to do, we just like doing it. It gives us like a sense of achievement that you know we've written a certain amount of pages of notes and that we've made like quantifiable progress but this is the real problem in taking notes. It creates the illusion of productivity. Okay, so if you don't write the notes, what do you do? Well, just go find some notes. There've definitely been people that have taken the subject before you and you can find some notes that have been written before and for a lot of subjects and classes, there are revision guides out there. Previously, I'd just be sitting in a lecture jotting down literally everything the lecturer was saying just without thinking and then even before class, I'd be going through chapters and writing them out and trying to summarise them and a lot of the time, I was sort of just writing things out word for word as if writing it down in a document was just searing it into my brain but taking wholesale notes like this isn't actually helping you understand or absorb the content. As a rule of thumb, you shouldn't be writing anything down that's in the lecture slides or already in the course materials. You should only be writing down key things that are not on the slides or questions that you have for yourself that you feel you need to do a bit more research on. The third tip is to focus on understanding rather than knowing. It is a mistake to try and memorise things without any purpose other than to regurgitate it out at the exam. Memorising takes a lot of mental effort and the things you've memorised will quickly just leave your mind. In order to actually retain the information and knowledge you need to properly understand the information but how do you know if you've actually got a good understanding? It's safe to say you have a good understanding of something if you can explain it simply to a five-year-old or explain it in plain terms to someone that doesn't have any background or context on the topic and a really simple and good way to test your understanding is to literally try and explain concepts to your friends or your parents if you're at home and let them ask follow-up questions and make sure that you can sufficiently explain those as well. Doing this will expose whether or not you really understand the subject matter or whether you need to dig a little bit deeper. Tip number four is active recall and practice testing and what this is is basically prompting yourself to actively retrieve the information. Like I said before, collecting information through writing notes or reading notes is just not that effective. Yes, I can't deny it does work. I'm not saying it doesn't work and I used to do this before but trust me actively retrieving the information just helps you retain knowledge so much more efficiently. By forcing your brain to retrieve the information you ensure that you're actively learning it rather than just passively. Not only will you be more likely to remember the information but by doing active recall it helps identify topics that you don't quite understand fully yet and might require a bit more attention. If you're just reading through pages and pages of notes and then just being reminded of what the content is it doesn't really make you aware of the gaps in your knowledge. Whereas if you just did a bunch of questions and a few of them stumped you you'd immediately know that the topics that those questions were tackling that's where you need to focus your energy on. So we take advantage of active recall by using flashcards or practice questions or mock exams. Out of these options I honestly prefer doing practice questions and mock exams. Flashcards are useful when we need to memorize really specific information but I just don't feel like it helps that much when it comes to the application of that information. Mock exams are really great because the purpose of studying is to do well in these exams. So pretty much we're just optimizing for exam performance rather than just trying to absorb as much knowledge as we can. Honestly we're all just trying to pass an exam to get some form of qualification. It's a means to an end and unfortunately that's just how the education world works. Preparing and studying for an exam and then doing well on that exam doesn't actually translate into real world practice. Often how we prepare for an exam doesn't really apply practically to what we do day to day. I was working in law firms for over five years before I took the New York Bar exam and not much of what I was studying for the bar was really relevant for practically doing the job. But exams are a game that we have to play so if we're going to play it we might as well find the best strategies. So by doing these mock exam questions you'll get a feel for the potential questions that could come up in the exam and by looking and reviewing the model answers against your own you'll get a better idea of what examiners are expecting in a specific response. And I feel like just doing a lot of mock exams and making a lot of mistakes those just create you know red flags in your brain so that in the future when you see a similar question those bells just start ringing and you know that you've seen something like this something like this has tripped you up before and you know exactly how to navigate it. Mock exams also mix in topics. The questions won't be sequential by you know their topic like you've studied it. This is called interleaving. This also really helps reinforce your knowledge but I have to say active recall is hard work. It's much harder than just reading the notes 100 times. Continually testing yourself requires more cognitive effort than just reading and highlighting words on a page and it can be really disheartening to just jump into a bunch of questions and just get a whole load of them wrong or just not even know where to start. So there is this real temptation to just read your notes till you feel 100% comfortable that you're ready for the exam and then start doing practice questions and mock exams. I'm telling you now it will take you so much longer to get to that point of feeling comfortable. I'd definitely recommend doing questions as you're going through the material and then just jumping into doing mock exams as soon as you've covered everything at least once. There are no stakes in you scoring 0 out of 10 in a practice exam. So don't feel disheartened. You just need to remind yourself that because this process is harder than just sitting there and reading notes, it definitely will pay dividends later down the line. Tip number five is to focus on your weaknesses. It's a very easy temptation to just focus on things that we're good at. It makes us feel good when we get things right so it's easy for us to, you know, jump into those specific topics and what often ends up happening is that we are naturally more comfortable with the topics we were taught first because we've had longer to sit with them and we end up neglecting the topics that are at the tail end. So like I said before, doing active recall can help you identify your weaknesses and once you know what they are, you just have to make more of a concerted effort into studying those areas. This also applies when you're studying for multiple exams, multiple subjects, whatever. Don't just stick to the subject you feel confident in. You need to make sure that you are addressing your weak spots. Tip number six is to not leave it to the last minute. We've all crammed for an exam before. I don't know about you guys but for me, it's honestly the worst feeling to go into an exam underprepared. Reading the questions and having no idea what the answer is or just hoping that there are certain topics that aren't going to come up because you know if they come up, you're screwed. So I would always, always, always do everything in my power to not have this feeling. So you just need to be proactive and start early. Do the bird's eye view. Work out how much content there is and work out how long it's going to take you to cover those things. There is this concept called the forgetting curve which is a memory model created by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus which hypothesizes the decline in memory retention over time. And the way to combat the decline in memory retention is to reinforce the information periodically. And by consistently interrupting the decline of the curve over time, that information becomes part of your longer-term memory. Really, all of this is just a fancy way to say that cramming isn't going to help you. If you cram it, you're just going to forget it very quickly. And consistency really is the key here. For example, if you're allotting yourself 14 hours a week of study time, it's better to do two hours a day rather than just leaving 14 hours to do on the weekend. And the more time you give your brain to sit with the information and the more sleeps in between study sessions, the more the information will just sink in. And studying with a good buffer of time gives you room to make mistakes and to fail. Like I said earlier, tackling difficult questions is the most effective way to learn the information. But if you don't give yourself adequate time to make those mistakes, you won't have time to address them. And on a quick note, I really do not recommend studying right before an exam, especially like right outside the door before you're about to walk in. You'll already be sort of jacked up on adrenaline. You'll be nervous. You'll feel anxious. So you just won't be absorbing anything. It just does not help. And honestly, it will probably make you more anxious, especially if you're maybe doing some questions and you see something you don't know. And then you just start spiralling and panicking, thinking you don't know anything at all. So whatever you've done up to that point, you just need to trust that it's enough. Okay, so now we have some bonus tips. Study with like-minded friends, people that are also motivated to do well in an exam. They don't necessarily need to be doing the same subject or the same exam, but as long as you're around people with the same intention and the same goals to pretty much just set aside time to study and try to be as productive as they can, it's always generally pretty positive. It makes it fun and light. You can socialise and chat during breaks. You can go for walks with each other. You can grab food. And having that camaraderie and support, you really can help motivate each other to just push through, especially when, you know, we just want to procrastinate and slack off. And if they are doing the same exam as you, you can share the notes you've found. Hopefully you didn't write them yourself. And you can quiz each other. You can ask each other questions. And by having people ask you questions and you're teaching someone else, it's also really beneficial for your learning. Another tip is to just have your own specific workspace that's separate from your comfort zones. At home, if you're in your bedroom, if you've got your bed right there, you've got the TV nearby, you probably have your PlayStation nearby. With all those things, you know, just like an arm's reach away, it's just so easy to shift out of the really focused mindset and into the lazy, chilling mindset. You need to make a more deliberate choice to study. So it's always better to physically go somewhere different that your brain sort of associates with focusing, either a coffee shop or a library. If you really have to stay home, make sure it's not somewhere in your bedroom. Maybe go outside to the dining table, somewhere that you're not typically hanging out normally, just to create that distance. Another tip is to always leave time to unwind. Don't glorify grinding yourself into dust and pulling all-nighters because it's just a complete lie that, you know, if you're not pulling all-nighters or doing 12-hour study days, you're not gonna do enough. You cannot neglect your physical and your mental health. Don't stop your weekly activities. For me, that was playing basketball, or going to the gym, or socialising with your friends, or even watching your favourite TV show. Of course, don't go out partying every night or binging new TV shows when you have exams around the corner. But you don't need to miss things like birthday dinners with your friends and your family or become a complete social recluse. Ultimately, having a balance is the key. Locking yourself up and distancing yourself from society puts a lot of pressure on yourself. You feel isolated, and when you do sort of break out of that, you feel guilty. This all just adds to the anxiety and stress on top of, you know, the underlying anxiety and stress of studying and doing the exam in the first place. And when you're in this state of mind, you're not gonna study effectively. If you have a clear understanding of how much work there is to do, you should be able to plan out and still maintain your normal day-to-day activities while studying in the lead up to the exam. Another tip is to trust the process. Unlike going to the gym, you're not gonna see physical gains. You can't see or feel your brain growing and your knowledge increasing. There's no magic number of questions to do that equates to you understanding the concept. Some people get it quickly and others, it takes a bit more time. But you need to trust that the study and the preparation that you put in will pay off. And my final tip is to enjoy the process. Studying in high school and university does not need to be a negative experience. And it really shouldn't be. I look back really fondly on the times I spent in the library with my friends in the lead up to exams. And yes, doing well in the exam is important because it is a means to an end. But you do need to take a step back sometimes and remember that not doing as well as you expect is not the end of the world. Sure, if you fail, it can set you back. It really sucks. But failure is something that everyone deals with. So don't put all this pressure on yourself and fall into the trap of thinking that you'll only enjoy yourself past this certain exam or feel like you'll only be happy after you get a certain result. Make sure you have balance and enjoy the process as you're in it. Because I guarantee you, once you reach that goal, once you achieve what you set out to achieve, there'll be another goal down the road and it all starts again. And then you'll be looking back wishing that you enjoyed yourself more. So by looking and planning ahead and by using these active recall strategies and by focusing on more active study techniques rather than passive ones, you'll definitely feel more prepared to take on whatever exam is coming your way. It's sort of like growing a plant. You can water it and give it sunlight and it will grow. But there are certain things you can do to help facilitate that. And that's what these techniques are. They're sort of the specific and special soil or the fertilizer that you use to help your plants along. Over the years, as I applied these study tips to my routine, I really did find a significant shift to my efficiency and effective retention of information. I honestly was that person that was handwriting my notes because it took longer to handwrite than type. And I thought that as I handwrite it, it's sort of etching it into my brain. But after making an effort to focus on active recall and doing more practice exams and targeting my weak areas, I realized that writing notes was just an easy way for me to rack up hours and to feel like I was studying a lot. And it wasn't actually helping all that much in the end. All the exams I've taken over the years have been very different, but the techniques still apply just the same. It's not rocket science, and you definitely can do the same. Anyways, hopefully that made sense. Let me know if you had any questions down below. All right, bye.