My main technique from my engineering undergrad days was extremely effective and yet very simple and easy to describe and/or implement. It is:
1. Attend the lectures and take good notes. Don't write things down that are obvious or that you already know.
2. Before any exam, go back over the dozens of pages of notes and condense them down to 3 or 4 pages, omitting details that will be brought to mind by the things you are writing down.
3. Go back over the 3 to 4 pages, condensing them down to a single page, compactly written.
4. Go back over the single page, condensing it down to a single notecard.
The act of condensing requires you to internalize the knowledge enough to know what you have memorized and what you must still note down. And the act of repeatedly writing down the hard parts commits those to memory too.
By the end, the notecard has a handful of difficult to remember formulas and a bunch of keywords that prompt your memory to recall the salient details. In the US at that time, a single notecard was often allowed during exams, so the final work product was also that card.
(My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.)
This is very much what I did, but I would add two other things: study above your level, and read the history of the subject.
If an undergraduate read graduate level textbooks, especially overviews.
This gives one a sense of the context of the subject, an appreciation of "where it's going", a hint of why the subject is still interesting and under active development, and makes the undergraduate material seem almost innocent by comparison. It's much harder, of course, and you'll often find that the entire semester's material is covered in a couple of chapters at the beginning, but the feeling of "how the professionals really talk/think about the subject" is hugely important for getting a feel of the thing.
The history of a subject is great for giving the human context, which is hugely useful for grokking how things developed organically, as well as the personalities involved. It can really help remembering stuff.
Before going back to college to do Maths and Physics I went out to the local university to get advice as to how to study the subjects. I was told to get Feynman's Lectures ((in)famous) and Boas' Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences (extremely terse but excellent). I did, tried my best, and in retrospect still think they were taking the piss. And yet, when I went back to university a year later, there were so many ideas and intuitions already in place that although the Maths was still computationally difficult the concepts were not as strange as they might have otherwise been.
In college itself it was the library that was the real draw, so many amazing texts just there for the reading. To be fair, the professors were wonderfully patient and encouraging.
But mainly, just keep at it, hour after hour, without comparing yourself or your efforts to anyone else. It's hard enough without imagining other people looking over your shoulder. I remember a number of young ones who, though brilliant in school, found university just that bit beyond them. Take frequent breaks, even holidays, and remember, above all, that exams are perhaps the worst test of learning we have yet devised apart from all the others.
thank you for this; the very first time i am hearing this (reading the overviews of high level books), and now it makes sense, but I did not do this as I was studying, nor was I told to, by my profs!
Maybe this needs a seperate set of resources to be maintained, say we read a book, it should have resources to suggest higher level texts that would be helpful for this review.
> My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.
Then one of the following is true: you have an exceptional memory, have been reviewing the content since then, or are dramatically overestimating your recall. It has little to do with your technique.
What’s your strong comment based on? Rewriting notes is effective because the student can’t proceed without proving understanding by writing new material based on the subject. In the process, the formulas and concepts are repeatedly recalled and tested. Once understood, these concepts provide context for new concepts and information which allows broader and deeper understanding to accumulate. If you are thinking of the Forgetting Curve, keep in mind that years can go by between reviews, and that’s for arbitrary information, not concepts and methods that reinforce other concepts and methods.
That's how authors of the past compressed and encrypted important knowledge. This is why we've ended up with pearls like "everything is water" and unless you know what "everything" and "water" mean at this level of compression, this is just a funny allegory.
Another trick is inventing symbols to compress common concepts, much like the gzip algorithm. Your notes become an Egyptian papyrus to an outsider, but to you they contain all the info without omissions.
My maths/physics undergrad was mostly spent trying to solve a lot of problems and exercices. I don't think I've had to actively memorize things. I still remember a lot of things.
On the other hands, there are subjects that I've been trying to learn just by reading or watching youtube videos and my knowledge stays very superficial.
I did the same but in addition I read things out quietly and asked myself questions about what I just wrote down and read. Not simply reciting the core points but trying to understand why they were put in that place, what makes it necessary for them to be that way and how they fit into the broader context. Additionally I'd "circle back" every now and then, i.e. question what happened in the previous page, then in the previous chapter.
It got extremely addicting to learn once I got the hang of it. It is remarkable (and quite frankly insane) how much knowledge you can absorb and internalize in a coherent way if you just blast every sense with that input and force your mind to "live and breathe" a certain topic.
(I still became an unemployed loser but at least I can learn fast!)
I strongly disagree with trying to condense to a very compact form. You almost always will lose information and understanding that way. Remember; the devil is always in the details. However engaging in the act of condensing called "Precis Writing" is very vital and a must. Just make sure to do it in conjunction with a Textbook and logically to whatever level feels comfortable to you (a page or two is fine).
The act of "compression" puts less obvious key points to the paper, allowing you to more easily memorize the more obvious parts.
The whole exercise is about committing to your memory more and more of the "easier" stuff, while extracting the few "root" ideas and a few least obvious points / formulas to write down.
You have to be careful with this (see also the comment by user "akomtu" in this thread).
When you know the subject already and you are just adding more on top, it may be helpful to reduce the new ideas to Keypoints/Keywords and hang the details off of them in memory. But when you are new to the subject you do not as yet know what to omit and what to keep; you are making a judgement call during "condensation" and thus it behooves us to be careful so as to not lose the core ideas which is bound to happen if you try to "compress" too much.
I agree and had a very similar technique. Only change perhaps was all my notes were written as question on the left, answer on the right. Id just run through the page(s) top to bottom with hand over the answer repeatedly. If it was long after a while id just write down a new page omitting the ones i was confident in by that stage.
I would say that this is great for school but not a technique that really prepares you for 'life'.
great, pretty much used the same technique. I would re-write lecture notes right after class into 3 or 4 pages, helped solidify the material right away.
This worked for medical school also for me. Except we had a note taking service so I didn’t have to take any notes myself. And I don’t like take notes on notes. So I just highlighted 5-10% of the notes that weren’t obvious the first time around in yellow, then about a page or two I didn’t remember from them in red the second time around. but this technique would not work for 95% of the population.
Actually remembering back, I didn’t bother with the notes. We had a syllabus with all the necessary reading material, and I just read that instead of the notes from the note taking service.
I would say that 2 is the most important. You have to spend time writing things and 3 and 4 are seem overkill and wasteful - rather just use the time go over 2 again.
1 depends on how diligent your are at attending class and how interesting the class is. I usually tried to find other student(s) who took notes.
That's interesting, in a similar vein I always thought the measure of intelligence was the ability to compress information. If you cannot summarize, then you do not understand the subject.
This is the same way I studied philosophy and law. That + immersion (go to bonus lectures if interest, join the academic community if you can) is superior.
I disagree. I'm intrigued by this technique as it forces you to engage with the material while also prioritizing information, something I've always struggled with. I'm excited to give it a spin.
2. take legible notes by hand on everything that goes on the chalkboard
3. do all the homework, and do it on time
4. make sure you understand how to get the solution to every homework problem
5. review notes and all homework problems as prep for the exam
I found this meant reliably getting at least a B in the courses at Caltech. Getting an A required considerably more work.
My high school technique of not bothering to do much of anything and still getting an A took a year and a half of abject failure at Caltech before I wised up. Fortunately, Caltech's freshman year was pass/fail, evidently they were familiar with people like me :-)
Also went to Caltech, and my progression was the complete opposite. Started out going to every lecture and trying to write everything down, but things just moved way too fast -- I'd write down every word and figure without ever internalizing it, and at the end of each lecture I'd have a crappy copy of the lecture notes and no memory of the last hour.
By senior year, my strategy was: don't write anything down, just try to follow the main thread of the lecture. Then afterwards, go back and read the textbook and take exhaustive notes then. Empirically I learned way more that way.
Maybe! But sometimes the professor really does just whiz through some proofs without a lot of pause or explanation, and even when I grok the content, rushing to write it all down was mostly counterproductive.
But yeah, I've also seen big gains from reading the textbook ahead of time
I'm glad you found what worked for you! Everybody's different.
I've counselled students headed off to college, and I'd give them my recommendations (these days, I included taking notes by hand as that seems to be far more effective, and leave the laptop at the dorm). None followed it at first, and got poor results, then did, and things improved dramatically.
One thing I wish I had done was get a cheap cassette recorder and record the lectures. My notes were effective at exam time because they'd evoke the lecture memories, but are gibberish today because they completely lack context. I'd also have something special today to donate to the Caltech archives. All those lectures are lost to time.
At Caltech we had separate "wretch" sessions, short for recitation, where a grad student would help us go over the exercises. These were invaluable to me. (Special thanks to Mark Zimmerman, who saved my adze in freshman physics.)
> Doesn't the lecturer give out notes ahead of time?
Sometimes. But the thing about taking the notes by hand is it fixes it in your memory. Glancing over pre-printed notes just does not work (at least for me). I still have the pre-printed handouts on Special Relativity from Ph2, and I never quite understood it.
It's sort of like reading a programming language spec. I think I understand it, but trying to implement it shows I didn't understand squat.
I'm dyslexic, lecturers talk to fast for me to notetske anything other than utter scribbles in the margins. That's why I like have the slides in advance I can add to them as I listen. Actively listening is how I do most of my learning, I didnt really reread notes (much) or do any extra study before exams. (Again, dyslexia put me off reading (for a long time) although I did manage to read some textbooks ok but it took a lot)
> take legible notes by hand on everything that goes on the chalkboard
This is very person-specific.
For me, if I'm writing then I'm not actively listening. My brain can only do one or the other well. When I take notes, I'm not processing anything very well and I learn very little.
Instead, I generally only ever took notes on high level things, or on very specific details that mattered.
I also discovered that a surprising number of my professors were literally writing on the whiteboard the exact, word-for-word text that was in the textbook.
P.S. Hal Finney was in the dorm room next to mine. His technique for getting As at Caltech was to do nothing, skip the lectures, and flip through the text book a couple hours before the exam. On the other hand, there was a sad group who would work their tails off and still barely scrape by. Sort of like me at basketball camp. They'd usually transfer out after a year or two.
Sometimes (not saying this is your experience but it was mine) theres way too much information coming at you to write down. If you dont understand any of it, you will miss things while furiously note taking and it wont be an efficient way to learn. In that case better in my view to read ahead so you can focus your class time on the complex parts.
If you really need the full record you can always find a lecture recording, a textbook or someone elses notes
Simple and Direct process which works. This has been my experience too except i didn't do (3) & (4) diligently which directly affected my grades. I am not sure why people come up with elaborate frameworks (most of which are unworkable due to time, complexity and reqd. effort) for such a simple and fundamental process.
But one crucial step needs to be inserted into the above process to make it really work;
2.5. After the lecture whenever you have time, within 24/48 hrs sit down with the Notes and Textbook and go over the Notes in the context of the Textbook i.e. filling in the details and gaps in understanding. Try and engage in "Precis Writing" with Pen and Paper to get to the heart of the matter.
Doing all the homework on time mostly eliminated the bubbling panic that threatened to overwhelm me when compressing for exams. I still have unpleasant dreams themed with endless variations on that. I told my dad about this, and he laughed and said they were common, and were dubbed the "examination dream".
I've never needed anyone to analyze my dreams :-)
But this persistent dream makes me feel empathy for combat vets with PTSD dreams. It must be infinitely worse for them.
Right, we are often our worst critics when we fail to live up to some view of ourselves.
I was recently reading the book; The Words of my Perfect Teacher by Patrul Rinpoche which is a manual for introduction of Tibetan Buddhism and found it full of great practical advice on how to learn (anything). There is nothing new under the Sun. For example, here is a relevant passage;
Do not focus too intently, picking out individual words and points, like a dremo bear digging up marmots--each time you seize one item, you forget the one before, and will never get to understand the whole. Too much concentration also makes you sleepy. Instead, keep a balance between tight and loose.
Once, in the past, Ananda was teaching Srona to meditate. Srona had great difficulty getting it right. Sometimes he was too tense, sometimes too relaxed. Srona went to discuss the matter with the Buddha, who asked him: "When you were a layman, you were a good vina-player, weren't
you?"
"Yes, I played very well."
"Did your vina sound best when the strings were very slack or when they were very taut?"
"It sounded best when they were neither too taut nor too loose."
"It is the same for your mind," said the Buddha; and by practising with that advice Srona attained his goal.
Machik Labdron says: "Be firmly concentrated and loosely relaxed, Here is an essential point for the View."
Do not let your mind get too tense or too inwardly concentrated; let your senses be naturally at ease, balanced between tension and relaxation.
> My high school technique of not bothering to do much of anything and still getting an A took a year and a half of abject failure.
This is a common experience. University can be particularly hard on kids which have a self image of "I'm a good kid because I get straight A's".
Once you're selected to that level, you're in a narrower cohort with other nerds; you're not just going to stand above the crowd with next to no effort.
hm, I did almost none of that, missed 70% of the lectures, my (computer-taken) notes were a mess and I barely if ever reread them. Didn't miss homework tho. (french engineering school, my grades were hovering between 15-17/20, don't know how that translates to the US system).
Before that for the two "prépa" years I was definitely not the most studious given how many evenings were spent playing counter-strike, D&D and warcraft III at the dorm (miss you people), what really helped for the competitive exams allowing to get into the engineering school was doing additional exercises for 2/3 weeks beforehand ; this way I got much better grades than I had gotten for the previous two years.
So I'd err on the side of "it's mostly the exercises / homework which are useful"
As a former middle school teacher, I found that the evidence-based techniques that the author mentioned, such as "spacing" and "retrieval", were underutilized in classrooms due to teachers not knowing about them, as well as how tedious it can be to implement them. I founded a nonprofit called Podsie (https://www.podsie.org) to help with this problem, and we created a free tool that's essentially like "Anki for classrooms" so that teachers can help their students study more effectively in their classes.
Ideologically, I think Anki and Podsie are pretty aligned in our beliefs that personalized spaced retrieval (often referred to as spaced repetition) is a much more efficient and effective way to learn and retain information compared to other traditional review practices (eg. reading textbooks or going over notes).
Learning-wise, perhaps the key difference is that while Anki is very focused on the individual-learner, we're much more focused on empowering each teacher. This means that we've needed to build features like having different autogradable question types (eg. short answer and multiple choice), ensuring that teachers have easy-to-follow data reports on how students and classes are doing, and also providing teachers with tools to incentivize their students to regularly review on Podsie.
I've anecedotedly studied how much sleep is the most efficient before writing an exam, throughout the many I've taken at university. This is a bit different than long term rentention though, as my hypothesis was basically "if you think you're screwed for an exam, what's the optimal crammed studying/sleep ratio the night before?"
1. All nighter is never worth it no matter how little material you think you know.
2. If you're semi confident in the exam, prioritize getting a full sleep over a little sleep.
3. If you're not confident in the exam, definitely still aim for at least 5-6 hours of sleep.
That's what I've noticed when it comes down to cram studying, otherwise my performance goes out the window.
In my experience it gets more complicated depending on the days leading up to the event. Given good sleep for a good stretch of days up to the day before the exam, all-nighter can work out fine. But I guess there is a correlation between lack of discipline to get good sleep and not studying regularly so I can see that being a rare situation :-)
I think all nighters are bad idea, because my college mates who done them had ... less then smart answers to even simple questions.
They were smart, as people. But not sleeping whole night makes you dumb. And they inability to figure what was not memorized harmed their performance a lot.
Yeah this would make sense. I still do think all nighters would probably harm your memory retention even if you do it a couple days before the exam. I'd imagine the brain has more time to really process what you're studying if you sleep after doing so.
I always felt worse two days after all nighters than the day after. I feel like the next day isn't necessarily when you pay, once the morning comes around again you get a second wind
I have this same experience as well. During college, with exams in the mornings, I've also tried shifting periods: going to sleep really early just to wake up early and study for some hours until the exam.
That did not work well - a consistent sleep routine is very important!
Before any exam, I had a simple rule: I don't study after 6pm the night before.
Instead, I get a good book, or a movie I've been looking forward to, and I veg out and relax.
This always lead to a good night's sleep and a better exam result than if I'd stayed up late studying instead, hoping to learn just one more thing- that I would never remember due to lack of good sleep anyway.
> I can't sleep well, trying to do everything in my power to make sure I get enough.
Just a word of warning, I've experienced this becoming a bit of an obsession. I was losing sleep over not getting enough sleep. I'd bring the subject of sleep up in conversation a few times a week, making it almost part of my 'identity' that I was a bad sleeper, and I'm convinced this made it worse.
For anyone who thinks they might have the same problem, my unqualified anecdotal advice would be: Don't tell people you're a bad sleeper, even if you are. Generally don't talk about it too much. Do define some sensible rules (e.g. consistent wake-up time, no snooze, etc) and follow them blindly for a month - don't allow yourself to review or change these rules for at least a month, or you'll be thinking about sleep too often. If you have a sleep monitoring device, definitely don't look at the data more than once a month.
The thing that has made the biggest difference in terms of sleep quality was adding a magnesium supplement to my nutrition routine. It was an immediate change for the better and it’s held for years now.
For me Chelated, specifically doctors best brand. Perhaps better but when I looked into it last this was one of the best ways for deep sleep. Other types of magnesium do not work the same and can cause more GI issues IIRC.
Instead of sleeping at 11/12pm and waking up at 6/7am, sleep at 9pm-ish and be up by 4:30am. It's usually still dark, it's extremely quiet and perfect for study!
Pro tip: a nap in the afternoon really recharges the batteries for another work session.
A lot of people have the luxury, they just lack the willpower. I used to stay up until 2am and wake up at 7am thinking I had more time for stuff. Now I try to get 7h minimum every single day and every day feels twice as productive as when I'm low on sleep, despite having fewer hours in the day.
Something I've come to appreciate over the last year of studying Mandarin is how well paper works for studying as compared to anything digital. In the past I've often been frustrated by absorbing difficult materials like CS papers. I never gave much thought to the medium because PDFs are pretty convenient, you _can_ annotate them, it's easy to copy paste and search for you things don't understand, etc. However, I still struggled to finish reading and understand a paper. I'm realizing now that I'm much more capable to form understanding than I used to think, and the trick is going to 7-Eleven and printing out a paper instead of reading the PDF. There's something about being able to quickly skim, mark up parts of it, etc. that no digital format has matched for me.
If I was going university today, I'd never bring my laptop to class again.
There is evidence for this emerging from Neuroscience. Something about using Pen and Paper engages our whole body and brain and seems to aid and cement the learning process. This does not happen with a keyboard and mouse. I have now become a strong advocate of limiting technology usage in the classroom and learning to use it appropriately.
Wait, do people cram because they think it's a particularly effective study technique? I always thought it was just a byproduct of procrastination and putting off studying until the absolute last minute.
Think? Know! Cramming works in the short term due to the nature of mass testing.
Any sensible person identifies what they will be judged upon and maximises their effort towards that. Especially if we're in a world of credentialism. Which we are.
Agreed, I now greatly regret it knowing what I know about the theory of learning, but I crammed my entire way through college and graduated with honors. It's embarrassing to say but I can recall close to 0 of the facts or formulas that I regurgitated onto any of my exams.
I can assure you that 99% of ALL students have done the same whatever they may claim otherwise. This is simply due to our educational system and social/biological pressures.
The way i have tried to remedy this in my own self is to buy lots of books and try and give myself a proper education in the sense of really understanding something to the extent possible with the amount of work and time i am willing to invest. There is no pressure, no deadlines, no competition but simply a desire to learn and understand i.e. knowledge for knowledge's sake.
The use of technology in the above endeavour is problematic. The Internet is a huge distraction and time sinkhole and there is too much junk to sift through to get at any actual nuggets. Hence i use it to get an idea of a subject domain and then try to get actual books to study in that domain.
The final point is to sit with pen and paper and take notes, read aloud the subject matter to better imprint on the mind, all aimed towards engaging the body with the mind to strengthen the learning process. Typing on a keyboard does not have the same effect.
I always understood "cramming" to mean studying everything in a condensed block of time in just the few days before an exam. That's orthogonal to prioritizing what to study, which I think most people would agree is a smart strategy. But perhaps the word has different meanings to different people.
And people continue with what succeeds. If it worked once, and it worked the next hundred times, why would you change? That it's not efficient or effective in the long-term is irrelevant unless they step back and consider their objectives. Which most people don't seem to do on a regular basis.
it really depends on the situation. the gold standard for retaining knowledge is short, active (ie, not just re-reading notes/books) study sessions spread out over many days.
but this takes a lot of time discipline. if you don't care about the material and just want to pass the test, I find dumb cramming methods like retyping all the professor's powerpoints the night before work pretty well. I got lots of As in classes I didn't care about that way. I forgot almost all the material later, but it left me with more time to study properly for stuff I was actually interested in.
who else here, after studying long hard (according to their level) topics, realized that there's also a notion of smoothness/patience ? rushing is rarely required to reach eurekas. A little bit of playful intellectual contemplation is often enough.
That clicked for me at some point in college. When I had my epiphany moments on calculus one or two years after taking it, but with the extra time applying it I just "got it" one day. It switched from mechanical application to actual understanding. Same thing happened with a number of other subjects. Classes where I had little time (I took a couple summer courses that had 5-10 weeks to cover a semester's worth of material) did not stick with me in the same way unless I had an opportunity to reuse it later. Classes that I never reused (Latin) stuck with me better, though, given their duration (a full academic year) versus an Old English course that was crammed into 5 or so weeks.
interesting, especially the 'actual understanding' ..
- when young, you coat stuff with more emotions than the topic itself, it feels hard, or advanced, or hard, later on you simply look at it naked
- the patient eureka is clearer and larger, it really feels as if suddenly you're simply sitting on top of a nicer viewpoint and effortlessly you can connect more pieces in more ways
I think that is what Feynman technique is much about. You spend time writing questions of what you still don't understand recursively until you have understood it all.
It begins by understanding what you don't understand.
Once you understand something after spending time trying to understand it and writing down your understandings and non-understandings, you typically have little problem memorizing it.
I am currently learning chess tactics using the Woodpecker method, i.e., a modified version of spaced repetition. The idea is to do chess puzzles over a fixed duration, say 4 weeks, and then repeat the same puzzles, each time aiming at halving the necessary time.
I cannot yet comment on its effectiveness, but Tikkanen, the author, used it to get from International Master to Grandmaster.
kata is making a repetitive movement, so that you can make the movement naturally, without thinking.
While it is most well known as martial arts training, there are kata for most traditional Japanese arts, even tea ceremony. In the west it has gotten used for any sort of repetitive training used to reinforce a skill.
AS a 45+ years old student, I can relate a lot to the spacing thing. Gone are the days where I could memorize in a matter of hours, now it takes weeks.
Memory as a "rebuilding" mechanism is also so true. I have to understand everything I study in minute details, else my memory just bumps on the slightest not-yet-understood thing. It's excruciatingly painful 'cos it needs a lot of work.
(I have a background in compsci and now I'm studying data sciences at master level, which means : maths, maths, maths and maths and basically no compsci; I like maths, but that's quite a bit more involved than 20 years ago and 10000% more than 2 years ago when I was a PM :-)))
More like how to memorize effectively for exams. Maybe take a step back and realize that systems the rely on exams and memorization (like tech interviews), don't produce greatness.
The techniques discussed aren't just about exams. In fact, if you just want to pass exams you can still mostly cram the information into your head for a lot of them. What the author discusses is ways to study (how often, how long, rotate through subjects or focus on one?) that lead to better long term retention.
Many skills involve some declarative learning (i.e. memorization) on the road to mastery. You can approach that declarative learning explicitly, or you can simply accumulate it over time while practicing whatever you're trying to learn. In many cases the former can be much more efficient and get you to mastery faster, so if that's your goal it's useful to know strategies for memorizing things.
I read a story about a math teacher having kids run on a treadmill before the class. Apparently that expansion of energy calmed the kids down, and improved learning.
The mind is connected to the body, so kind of makes sense that there would psychological benefits. Maybe similar to taking a cold shower in improving alertness.
Though Studying Effectively for me had different methods for Different subjects but massively floated around notes and constantly writing important highlights and ignoring the usual normal things.
When I say different methods for different subjects:
I mean like Maths: I focused more on redoing my full school book like 6 times in a Half plus would go beyond and redo other similar standard books with more difficult and complex calculations to make the level higher where normal hard problems would become easier.
For Literature: It was like reading the book, watching it in theaters and spending quality discussion time with some book worms and teachers.
One of the most useful models of technical learning I've learned is the "illusion of competence"; the fact that you can follow along with somebody explaining or doing something is very different from being able to do it yourself.
I think this is the reason, people who skip lectures/classes but sit down with the books/notes and work on their homework/problems do pretty well.
There is a Chinese Martial Arts saying which i always keep in mind;
To show one the right direction and right path, oral instructions from a Master is necessary but Mastery of a Subject comes only from one's own incessant self-cultivation.
Early in my CompEng program I would revise by condensing notes, rereading and practicing areas I didn't understand.
With the breadth of some topics (looking at you analog electronics) it was often hard to prioritise study to maximise exam marks.
By the end of my degree I realised the best practice was just doing past exams. And I found if I could consistently get 100% on previous exams that would translate to at least 80% on the actual.
It made me realise that the faster path to good marks was optimising for answering exam questions rather than a deep intuitive knowledge of the subject.
>the faster path to good marks was optimising for answering exam questions rather than a deep intuitive knowledge of the subject.
Right. This is the bane of our educational system i.e. they prioritize for "grading" rather than "understanding". I have met many who were considered smart/genius because of their good grades or where they graduated from but with regular interaction turned out to be pretty average in their understanding. They have simply optimized their "Social Signal".
You can absolutely make cards for practicing procedures, or even math proofs. A mathematician used it to learn proofs. He even derived new proofs from his deck of cards, and add them as cards.
It takes some imagination and experimentation to figure out how to break down subject matters into something you can study with cards.
And I think that imagination is also a part of the studying process! Trying to figure out how to split information-dense cards without losing context is what takes me the longest. But I find that the act of splitting them out helps me remember them better!
There is not much utility in memorizing proofs. The primary work should be in trying to understand them. The amount of memorization should be small in math.
When I was taking grad analysis, we had to memorize the proofs, as the professor was guaranteed to ask for the proof of one textbook theorem in each exam. I was incensed, but when I memorized the proofs for the final exam, I noticed more "proof patterns" than I had during the whole semester, and got a lot better at the subject.
Memorizing without understanding is useless. Memorizing with understanding is much better than merely understanding.
You 100% dont have to memorize proofs for that. If you put in work to understand to proof, then you have to remember maybe one tricky step or something like that to reproduce it. Again, just because the proof is on exam does not imply you have to memorize it.
Also, way better way to test is to put similar made up theorem on exam. Which means you cant just reproduce what you memorized without understanding.
If you use flashcards for learning, you are doing rote learning by definition. There is nothing more rote then making cards and then memorizing their content.
It is also absurd way to learn stuff that has relationships in it.
I zipped a five-year undergrad program into three while maintaining a better-than-perfect GPA, while still balancing extracurriculars and a decent social life.
I don't think I ever nailed down a particular study habit, and did many things this article says not to do. I was/am a night owl and often stayed in the engineering buildings late enough to greet the night-shift janitors. I could cruise through weeks on 4.5 hours of sleep/night and kept tabs on which gas stations had the best energy drink promos. The handful of times I started homework or projects or exam review early ended up backfiring, so I stuck to cramming and my tests would still turn into the answer key.
I did follow some of the advice here, particularly between different but related topics (e.g. heat transfer and fluids, Java and data structures), but even there, I found looking for the relationship between two seemingly disparate topics to still be useful (e.g. electronic circuits as thermal circuits in heat transfer). I think what I'd like to emphasize is that everyone just needs to find whatever works for them, which may or may not be what works for a majority of others. I fortunately went through undergrad right before the deluge of productivity porn, and could definitely have fallen into the trap of worrying too much about how to study instead of just studying.
>I think what I'd like to emphasize is that everyone just needs to find whatever works for them
If only it were this easy! As the article points out, often what you think works best for you is actually just what you're used to. I think switching up studying habits every so often is good practice. Forces you to try new things and see if they make an impact on your retention.
It's difficult to pin down 'best' because it's so subjective; my 'method' was the best for my transcript but not for my sanity. I think whatever you're doing at the time is the best, until it isn't, though I definitely agree on switching it up, and working with others helps socially and academically from my experience.
I found this thread super useful and took some notes highlighting the discussions below
I thought i would share for others benefit too... (formatting is messed up, my notes are in MD format, i lost the sub-indentation on these notes, i can just add a new line )
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- paper over laptop
- SRS, anki
- you can use it to learn a mathematical formula, but not to learn how to apply it.
- write notes, summarize it down to pages at end of session; called as 'making cheat sheets'
- a few days down, summarize it further down and more, till you have it like a card.
- study above your level, and read the history of the subject.
- If an undergraduate read graduate level textbooks, especially overviews.
- This gives one a sense of the context of the subject, an appreciation of "where it's going", a hint of why the subject is still interesting and under active development, and makes the undergraduate material seem almost innocent by comparison.
- It's much harder, of course, and you'll often find that the entire semester's material is covered in a couple of chapters at the beginning, but the feeling of "how the professionals really talk/think about the subject" is hugely important for getting a feel of the thing.
- The history of a subject is great for giving the human context, which is hugely useful for grokking how things developed organically, as well as the personalities involved. It can really help remembering stuff.
- just keep at it, hour after hour, without comparing yourself or your efforts to anyone else.
- Take frequent breaks, even holidays, and remember, above all, that exams are perhaps the worst test of learning we have yet devised apart from all the others.
- understand proofs over memorizing them
- as little memorization in math. Memorizing without understanding is useless. Memorizing with understanding is much better than merely understanding.
- Read the textbook before attending the lecture
- if you find yourself unable to take proper notes, and seems like the lecture moves too fast, this is the issue.
- Even if lecturer provides notes, some self-written ones BY HAND are useful for retention
- Sleep more important than cramming on exam night
- All nighter is never worth it no matter how little material you think you know.
- If you're semi confident in the exam, prioritize getting a full sleep over a little sleep.
- If you're not confident in the exam, definitely still aim for at least 5-6 hours of sleep.
- Sleep early, wake up early -- study notes before exam
- make sure you the study session is light to medium; brain has limited stamina that will be depleted little by little, either during exam or while studying
- all-nighters actually make you worse
- even intelligent people have less than smart answers to simple questions
- Magnesium supplement to help sleep routine
- Magnesium Glycinate, .Chelated, specifically doctors best brand.
- Woodpecker method - , a modified version of spaced repetition.
- Book : Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley
- A well structured course that will leave you with effective tools to maximize your learning potential.
- Feynman technique
- write questions of what you still don't understand recursively until you have understood it all.
- begins by understanding what you don't understand.
- Once you understand something after spending time trying to understand it and writing down your understandings and non-understandings, you typically have little problem memorizing it.
- Duration of class (1 yr ) over intense study
- longer the duration, the better
- katas - japanese - making a repetitive movement, so that you can make the movement naturally, without thinking.
1. Attend the lectures and take good notes. Don't write things down that are obvious or that you already know.
2. Before any exam, go back over the dozens of pages of notes and condense them down to 3 or 4 pages, omitting details that will be brought to mind by the things you are writing down.
3. Go back over the 3 to 4 pages, condensing them down to a single page, compactly written.
4. Go back over the single page, condensing it down to a single notecard.
The act of condensing requires you to internalize the knowledge enough to know what you have memorized and what you must still note down. And the act of repeatedly writing down the hard parts commits those to memory too.
By the end, the notecard has a handful of difficult to remember formulas and a bunch of keywords that prompt your memory to recall the salient details. In the US at that time, a single notecard was often allowed during exams, so the final work product was also that card.
(My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.)