Speaker 1: So during primary school, I can't remember sitting a single proper test. And of course, we did have the occasional like spelling test. But for my primary school, at least we never did a proper test. And that's pretty normal, right? Primary school is just about having fun. Secondary school is where it properly starts, they all said. So picture this. I'm in secondary school and it's a lot different. I'm actually learning stuff and I'm doing loads of subjects like Latin, Japanese, French, TT science. And it's all quite new and alien to me because in primary school, we had one teacher. We had one teacher for everything and we didn't have the facilities to do language, TT science, all these subjects. So I found this quite difficult. Right. This transition was a really big jump for me. But different to primary school, we now had tests. And especially now, end of years were now a thing. I'd heard about these before. And these are kind of like this insidious rumor that at the back of your mind, end of years, end of years, end of years. And everyone like all the teachers would talk about in the last term end of years, this end of years, that end of years are so important. Like you all need to revise for your end of years. And so I was going to start to study for these and start to prepare because these were the first set of exams I'd properly do. And these are quite important. But then something quite literally earth stopping happened. The virus coronavirus, there are fears a rapidly spreading virus has reached Australia. It will be characterized as a pandemic. COVID-19. School shut down as the virus spread across the globe like a wildfire. School scrambled to set up online lessons and team scores. And that's quite literally something the world had never seen before. Right. But most importantly, our end of year exams are now going to be online. As a student, you know that while leading up to a big test, the last term, like the last couple of weeks before that test, you have the most valuable and most important lessons, because that's when you learn how to like properly revise. The teacher gives out revision materials. You recap the topics so you can consolidate your gaps in the knowledge. And that like those couple of weeks are the most important. But in the chaos of COVID, I didn't get these. And so I just sat mindlessly on my chair and listened to the team scores that half the class didn't join. The team scores that the teachers didn't know how to manage. The Wi-Fi issues, the mic issues, the camera issues all hindered our learning. And you can't really blame the teachers, though, because it was really sudden. But I didn't revise one single bit. Everything was chaotic. And before I knew it, it was summer and our end of year started. We were all sent a PDF of all our exams on a computer, and we were told to time ourselves, make sure to not look at notes and like just do the test and submit it. And what do you think happens when you give a year seven a PDF of all the tests to do at home? But I don't know a single person who did those tests legit. I remember I was doing my French speaking tests, right? And it was like you have to turn your camera on and then you spoke face to face. And I remember I had my team split screen and I had Google translate open on one side and I had like a sheet of paper with my questions like balanced on that side. And I was like just reading off that. But the most serious consequence of this is that I still didn't know how to study because I still hadn't been taught to me. And because of lockdown and all the tests we did at home, I had no way of building up my study skills. And revision was still something that wasn't required. Fast forward to year eight end of years. And this time there's no avoiding them. I have to study. And we get a one week after during May and straight after this half term we have our tests, right? So this half term is known as revision week. And so I wake up nice and early on the first day of revision week. I sit down with all my books. I like spread them out across the table. But then I realized I have no idea how to study. I have no idea what I'm doing. And so I got a notebook, like one of those puka 100 page notebooks, the thick notebooks. And I start to rewrite all my notes for all my subjects into that one notebook. And I did that for eight, nine hours a day, right? Because it was so much content and there was just so much to rewrite. It was so boring, but I had no idea what else to do. I needed to prove to my parents because they'd always be asking like, Oh, are you revising? You're revising, right? And I needed to be able to show them something. That's what I thought. So I was writing down in this notebook and filling out this notebook. It seemed like the best option. And I sit in a call with my friends for hours and I just be writing, writing, writing. And I studied for eight hours every day, right? Surely I do well. And I did. Everyone was like, wow, you did so good. But I was secretly so, so disappointed because even though I'd study for eight hours every day, I'd done nothing that week but study. I did. You don't understand. I did nothing but just write, write, write for hours and hours and hours. I filled up that entire notebook. But even so, I still hadn't done as well as I hoped. And I knew that this wasn't it. Up to this point, I'd never been taught how to learn. Learning how to learn. And maybe you're like this too. Never being taught how to learn, how to study is detrimental because although you spend so much time, the amount you learn and remember is minimal. The note making strategy and just rewriting all my notes might have worked then because that was year eight. The amount of content was easy. And I was also sad enough to have my entire day free to just do that. But now that's just not the case. And compare this to this year's mocks. I study not even two hours a day. During study leave, I went to the gym and I did all the things that I wanted to. And I only studied for maybe one or two hours a day when I did. And I did better than ever. It's because I learned how to learn. My biggest takeaway. And if I had a time machine, the thing I want to tell year eight me, sitting like in front of the desk with like all his books and like rewriting everything. The one thing I want to tell him is to do active recall and whole patching. When you practice a piano piece, you don't just play through the entire piece once every single day over and over and over again. Right. And if you do, that's why you suck at piano. You play through it and then you get caught at a certain bit. You just keep messing that bit up and you can't get the hang of it. And so you isolate that and then you practice it. You do left hand only and then you do right hand only. And then you like do it at a slower tempo. You bring it up until you can play that bit right. You patch that hole. You have this one section that's really fun and easy. Like the intro bars are free. They're so easy, but they're fun to play. But you don't need to practice that bit. You just need to consolidate the parts that are hard and you keep messing up. And it's the same as studying. I was still making notes on addition and arithmetic laws when that's like the easiest part of the piano piece. That's so easy. I didn't need to write that. But I was still wasting my time writing my notes because I was just writing notes on everything. Spending your time equally on all topics is dumb and inefficient because you patch the hole and practice the bits that you're bad at, where you're going to lose marks. I wasn't doing this for study. And it seems so obvious, but I just didn't know this. And the funniest thing was I would literally be practicing piano, but the thought never occurred to me that this is the same concept. But how can you see where you're bad and where you're messing up while studying? It's not like you can finger your textbook like a piano and it makes a wrong sound. And that's why you have to do past paper and topic questions. The problem with notes is you can't get notes wrong, right? Because you're just rewriting them. Past papers, you can check the answer and you can see where you made an oopsies mistake. You can look at the mark scheme and you don't make that mistake again. It's so simple. And oh, yes, but a lot of people are literally younger than me, me as well. I didn't know how to do this. But this is literally the secret, like the hack of studying and getting good. And the best part is since it's past papers, you know that this is like an actual exam paper. And so the first couple of questions test you on the easy stuff one markers. But then they go into like the harder conceptual topics and they test you on like a broad range of things. And so you literally know what you need to revise and you know, like the kind of split of like topics that they're going to ask you with. And it even literally gives you the mark scheme so you can memorize the answer and know what you need to be writing. It's quite literally a cheat code. And I can't believe I wasn't doing this sooner. And how did I discover this? I discovered this from like a Reddit post under a student subreddit. And the best advice that you'll get while learning isn't from your parents, not even your teachers, because when they were learning and when they were revising, it was not only a different like exam thing they were doing, and it's outdated. It might not be suited to the subject you're taking or the thing that you're doing. Because if you really, really think about it, if you want advice on how to like get jacked at the gym, you want advice from the person who is jacked at the gym, not some fat person who looks like they've never gone to the gym, right? And so that's why the best advice you'll ever get about how to learn is from other students that are currently doing the same things as you. And that's exactly why I created Stuco, your students. If you found this video useful or you want to get more advice about all things students, join my free community of superior students. First link in the description. I hope you enjoyed this student stories and comment what you want to see next.