Why do some students study hard but aren’t the best? And why are there other students who don’t even invest half the time and effort in their studies, but get good or even excellent results? Learn tips on how to study for exams in a short time with intelligence, instead of wasting countless hours of your valuable time.
Since you only have a short amount of time to learn, make sure you supercharge your motivation as it plays a crucial role in smart studying. Motivation is related to competence, self-determination and autonomy, which are important in the learning process.
The way you study is crucial to your success. Therefore, our recommendation is to study smart, which will help you save a lot of time with unfocused attempts to “study hard”.
You will have to invest the appropriate amount of effort to study for exams in a short time, there is no other way. But this article will guide you on how to make the most of the time you invest in learning.
The purpose of this article is to allow you to cut down on unnecessary parts of your studies and focus on what’s important in that short amount of time.
Tips on how to study for exams in a short time
This article is divided into three parts:
- The preparation;
- B) Mindset focused on organizing information for you to remember;
- C) Concept of “intelligent study”.
The preparation
1. Have a study plan
You want to study smart, right? For this, you need focus, discipline and organization.
Fulfilling these requirements on a daily basis without having a good routine would cost you a lot of time. Instead, the first tip on how to study for exams in a short time is to create a study plan in which you:
- specifies the day you start preparing for the test;
- creates a daily schedule of tasks you want to accomplish during prep;
- create a detailed to-do list (keep an eye on what’s really important);
- lists the books you need to read (only the important sections you actually need to know for the contest);
- specifies the various tasks and exercises you want to do for preparation.
Depending on the difficulty of the test and how many weeks or months you have to study, you can also categorize the weeks/months for preparation into different phases, from:
I. basic knowledge update;
II. study, revise and do exercises;
III. intensive – social life on hold.
How to do it the smart way? Having a clear objective of what you’re aiming for with your plan helps you avoid wasted hours, and also allows you to direct your focus to what’s important.
2. Summarize
Proofs sometimes involve many books, most in the 500 to 1200 page range.
And even if you only have a few chapters to read for the contest, we recommend that you create summaries as you work on the book.
That way, you lay the foundation on which you can build during the next phase of study without having to read the book again.
In addition, you also train yourself to quickly identify key statements in large texts that are likely to be tested on the exam.
As a result, it will be easier to ignore large amounts of extraneous data while analyzing the book.
3. Separate the wheat from the chaff
While listening to a lecture or reading a textbook, try this: Continuously separate important information (“Can this knowledge be tested on an exam?”) from unimportant (“Am I rambling or listing irrelevant data?”).
Write down relevant points to study and add notes to your script or lecture notes . Making these additions to your script will help you capture key coherence later on.
You can also highlight important phrases or passages from the text so that you can easily avoid reading large unnecessary chunks.
B) Mentality
1. When you study, give 110%
When he tries to study for exams in a short time, he almost always studies for long periods to memorize and understand the contents given.
The big mistake here is to study a lot and for long periods, but without concentrating on what you do. You are distracted by your cell phone, internet, TV, radio, telephone, friends or any other entertainment imaginable.
The biggest tip on how to study for exams in a short time is to give 110%. Keep distractions to a minimum and do your best to avoid procrastination .
If you have a time limit of 1-2 hours, make the most of that time. Then have even more leisure time.
How to study smart: when you study, do it in a focused and appropriate way, avoid any kind of distraction and use the time you have to the fullest!
2. Continuity
Doing nightly revisions a few days before the test will not only exhaust you, it will force you to wade through the data instead of studying properly.
Rather than opting for every night, consider spending half an hour after each day doing recaps, ie reading a chapter from the book, doing a summary, or doing some exercises.
All this preliminary work will help you spend more time studying (during the preparation period) instead of having to get involved with all kinds of inefficient tasks like extracting data from your textbooks, trying to do arithmetic operations and building an understanding. etc.
Why is this smart? If you’ve already done the groundwork, you can focus a lot more on smart ways to study for exams in no time.
C) Concept of “smart study”
1. Don’t try to memorize, understand!
This tip on how to study for competitions in a short time is fundamental.
One of the biggest mistakes of studying too much and not smartly is trying to memorize everything, which takes a lot of time.
Mechanical memorization is fine and acceptable if an upcoming exam requires you to reproduce what you’ve learned word for word.
However, the higher you rise in the educational system, the less important it is to memorize and reproduce, as your understanding and ability to draw consequences will be tested.
In most cases, memorization corresponds to hard study, not smart. Focus your attention on understanding the content being taught.
2. Keep the Bigger Goal in Mind
Making a car can serve as an example of the learning process. The teacher provides the “know how” during classes, for example, detailed knowledge of how a mechanism works.
Textbooks and other materials provide you with the chassis, frame, tires and bolts. But it is up to the student to make use of the know-how, to use it in the combination of the delivered material.
It is the student’s job to assemble the car and keep the larger goal of what is taught in mind.
If the student stubbornly tries to memorize the position of each part in the car, he will not be able to (re)build a car from thousands of individual parts. Memorizing the different names for each part won’t help either.
Only by bearing in mind that the know-how and material are available for creating a car can the student effectively prepare for the next test.
3. Perfect your type of study
There are fundamentally four basic types of study: Visual, Auditory, Emotional and Kinesthetic.
To study for exams in a short time in the smartest way possible, you need to figure out what kind of study you prefer.
Once you know what works best for you, align your learning process to get the most out of it.
Students who are “mathematically gifted” must put their notes into worksheets and graphs; kinesthetic learners imagine the learning material as vividly as possible; language learners discuss the material with others or record your voice while reading the material aloud, etc.
