Have you ever spent 1 week studying for a test and still felt like, maybe you didn’t study enough to pass?
Is there a way to be 100% sure that you’ve studied enough to pass your exam?
There is, and it consists of answering 2 key questions that will serve as your personal gauge to know when t’s ok to stop studying for your test and fell certain you will pass.
The reason why it’s difficult to feel 100% sure about your grade on an upcoming exam is because you don’t know what the questions will be. You don’t exactly what about the Creb’s Cycle the professor is going to ask you. But really what it comes down to is, most students also don’t know how to properly assess their own knowledge of the material.
They just aren’t good self-quizzers and assessors.
If you want to reach a point where you feel confident about how long you studied for and when you can officially stop, you’re going to have to learn how to perform a self-assessment on your knowledge of the exam material after your study sessions.
The only indicator you should be using to determine whether or not to stop studying for your upcoming exam should be your level of understanding of the material.
But, how do you know when you’ve mastered or fully understood the material?
One of the ways is by asking yourself these two self-assessing questions.
- Question 1: What information do I know for sure?
- Questions 2: What information am I still shaky on?
If you’re confused on how to tell what information you know for sure, here is a good way to tell: If you can accurately explain a concept, compare and contract main ideas, give examples, know how to solve a problem and when to use a certain equation without looking at your notes or referencing your textbook, you have a pretty good mastery of the material.
Once you’ve honestly answered each of these questions, your next step is to compare the lists to the class objectives, study guide, syllabus or exam chapter guide given to you by your professor.
If you find that you know 70-90% of the information on your class objectives, study guides and syllabus content for this exam, it’s a pretty good chance that you will pass your exam.
However, if you find that you only know 25%-50% of the material, topics, chapters and study guide your professor expressed you should know, you have a bit more studying to do.
This is where the list you created in question #2 becomes important.
Now that you know you have to study more, it’s important that you have a strategy and plan for how you will spend the rest of that study time.
The majority of your time should be spent on the topics you listed as being “shaky on”. You need to clearly identify that other 50%-75% gap of the topics you still don’t know.
Use the class objectives, your professors powerpoint titles, textbook titles and any study guides as a guideline to complete your “still need to learn” list.
Over the next couple of days your focus should be on re-learning this information using any method that makes the most sense to you (i.e youtube videos, textbook, tutoring) and periodically testing your knowledge on it.
Some of the ways you can test your knowledge are by:
- Answering the questions at the back of the book.
- Free writing a summary of the chapter for 10 minutes off the top of your head.
- Creating a mind map of the main points of the chapter or lecture and how they relate
- Trying to explain the topic to your study group, family member or friend.
- Solving mathematical or scientific problems from the back of the chapter or study guide companion of the book, without using your notes as a guide.
At the end of each of your remaining study sessions you want to ask yourself the two questions again.
- What information do I know for sure?
- What information am I still shaky on?
If at the end of those study blocks you feel like you’ve mastered 70%-90% of the material being covered on the test, you can stop studying. If you’re still under the 70% mark, you start the re-learning process of that missed material again. You repeat this process until you get yourself up to 70%-90%.
Obviously you can tell that this system will not work if you cram the night before a test. There just won’t be enough time to study and re-learn information. So if you are going to use this process, you have to give yourself 5-7 days before the test to start your studying sessions.
If you answer these two questions at the end of each of your study sessions you’ll know exactly what it is that you know and what it is that you still don’t know, so that you can go back and do something about it before it’s too late.