Mastering Exams: The Power of Spaced Repetition for Effective Studying (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: In school, we're always taught what to study but no one ever teaches us how, and even if someone did, it's often the wrong advice. And one of those is the belief among students that if they study too far from the date of the exam is that they will likely forget what they've just learned. So they tend to cram only days before the exam. And actually, I also used to cram when I was in my premed. But I soon realized that after a few days, I couldn't remember anything I just studied. But after I discovered the book Make It Stick, I learned about the benefits of spacing out my studies or spaced repetition and it helped me learn everything much faster and gave me back my time for a lot of other things. And it even helped me rank first in the internal medicine board exam. And so in this video, we're going to talk about what is spaced repetition and why is it effective and how to use it in your studies. So let's get into it. Now spaced repetition involves the studying of information several times but allowing a time gap between each study session. And the length of the time gap depends on the study material, factors such as the subject's complexity and the student's familiarity with the study material. They all influence the ideal spacing between study sessions, with more difficult or unfamiliar material requiring shorter time gaps. So it's just basically the opposite of cramming. Now spacing out your studies might sound counterintuitive because why would you study for an exam that's still days away, which means you will likely forget all about it and you would have to put in more effort to remember it the next time, right? But it is this extra effort of trying to remember the previously forgotten information that will make the learned information much clearer, more memorable, and will ultimately strengthen the mental connections to other recently learned material. So how do you space out your studies? So in this example, I'm going to share with you the method I used to rank first in my internal medicine board exam, where I only had three months to prepare. The first is I scoped the subject, which is where I got the list of topics that I needed to cover, and I decided how much time I can allocate for studying them. The second is I assigned one topic for each day. Now here's an example of what I did when I studied for my internal medicine board exams or the PSBIM, which consists of 12 subjects. Now as you can see, I placed cardiology topics to study on Monday, pulmonology topics on Tuesday and so on. When I have already assigned all 12 of the organ systems for each of the first 12 days of my study schedule, on the 13th day, I would then go back to studying cardiology because by then, there's already a space of 12 days that happen in between the repetitions of the specific subject, which is cardiology. Now I know doing this will feel uncomfortable at first because it will feel like some amount of forgetting has already occurred and you will have to work harder to recall the previously learned information, but this will ultimately help you remember more information for longer and will reduce the stress and anxiety that we all know comes with cramming study materials the night before the exam. If you want to know more about how to study effectively for some of the important subjects in med school, you might want to check out this playlist over here. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next one. Bye.