How To Study For A Midterm 101
Studying for a midterm is stressful. If you’re new to them and haven’t prepared, you are about to be baptized by fire. If you’re reading this, then you want good grades. I support your decision, but it’s not as simple as someone telling you. Some of these techniques take a little getting used to before they can be fully utilized. We start out with simple study techniques that progressively get more complex.
Time-Slaying Test-Taker
Time management is your proverbial ax. You need to lay the ax’s edge to the whetstone all semester. The old adage goes, don’t cut a tree with a dull ax, idiot.
You want ax-chopping like The Shining meets Rocky. Maybe no one ever taught you how to manage your time, study, or you’re the first of your family to go to college. Trade school would’ve been a more lucrative idea. That’s ok though. You’re here now…so let’s move forward.
You manage your time by staying ahead of it. It’s like trying to drive through a city with no grid. You need a plan of action. Micro-goals: tiny goals that create a sense of constant victory in vanquishing your foe, the tree.
Outline
Having an outline of the material is your personal map, bequeathed by Athena herself. You can map out your plan if you have a beginning and end. Then, fill in the gaps. You can categorize by chronology, importance, levels of difficulty, etc. Make so many outlines (during your college career) that you know the exact blueprint for your own academic success.
Study Guides
If your teacher is nice enough, there will be a study guide. When you get a study guide, it’s mostly a vague outline of the material.
Turn that class, study guide into a personal study guide by using it as a template. This where you combine all that seemingly disparate info into one comprehensive booklet. Normally it’s chronologically ordered: you’ll not want to rely on that, as it can inhibit chunking (more on that below).
Active Reading
In How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler, he gives some good advice on what one needs to do to actively read:
- Familiarize yourself with the contents section
- Read (skim) as much of the book as you can (while ignoring things like the footnotes or terms you don’t understand)
- Go through it again, now with a fine-tooth comb
- Check the book’s index for key terms
- If you’ve purchased it, mark the crap out of it: highlight, notes in the margins, questions, etc.
Rote Learning
While this might seem like the most intuitive, it isn’t the most efficient. It’s not even close to efficient. If it were a part of the government, it would be a sub-department of the IRS.
Most of the time, you won’t be able to get around rote learning unless you hone your other studying skills. It is ill-advised to put stock into your ability to recall things that you didn’t remember well in the first place (rote learning). It’s good for a quick test but bad if you need to remember that stuff for an exam. It’s the off-brand junk food of the study techniques.
FlashCards and Online Study Guides
Flashcards are absolutely helpful in recollection. Sparknotes and CliffNotes are the first study guides that come to people’s minds.
The Richard Feynman Technique
This technique is often unintentionally used by those leading study groups. The first instance I could find on the internet of someone explicitly using this phrase is blogger Scott H. Young. Here are the links to their YouTube video and the PDF accompaniment.
Here are some afterthoughts that Young adds:
- “If you’re trying to remember an idea for a test, you can focus on creating better analogies or simplify the words even more to understand it more vividly” (Young)
- “[I]f you want to use this technique to study for tests, go through the technique without looking at your reference materials. That’s a really good way to self test, to see if you understand the ideas deeply.” (Young)
Method of Loci
You’ll hear some people say that—when they take a test—they envision the side of the book that the info is located on. Sometimes they’ll say that they remember where the teacher was standing when they heard the info. It’s more or less like that, except you pair more complex things with the material.
Visualizing the Absurd:
A naked magician saws a naked lady in half. She is wearing one red shoe and an eyepatch. They each have symbols on their body parts.
That’s how you remember a formula for math class. Red could be the chapter, the eyepatch could symbolize an imaginary number, and the satanic numerals can do the rest.
Visuospatial Memorization:
Walk around campus and put your absurd visualizations in actual places. You can then recall the areas. Place all of a chapter on the streets you walk, the building you live in, or the places where you grew up. The best places to store info are in your visualizations of an FPS video game (first-person shooter). After hours of playing the same maps, you will start to memorize the details and can place things there.
Chunking
This is your saving grace. Link the new stuff to as much of the memorized stuff as possible. Link previous classes’ material to the new material. Link the material to tragic events that are burned into your skull. Anything to remember that boring material.
Ask Annoying Review Questions
Be that person who takes up most of the midterm questions, but be prepared. You need to ask at least one question. You have several written down. Prepare them prior to the midterm review class (if there even is one). If you don’t ask questions and have to retake the class, you just spent ≈$1,800 on a valuable lesson.
Free Online Educational Material
Reddit or Quora are the graveyards of the questions that have been asked by people like you, looking for answers. It won’t take long to hunt for the answer if you just do a Google advanced search.
YouTube channels like CrashCourse, 3Blue1Brown, etc.
Websites like Khan Academy, Coursera, Open Culture, etc.
Take Mini-Breaks Whilst Studying
Schedule breaks with breathing time. Go take a walk without your electronics. Unglue your eyes from the blue lights. Go outside and breathe in some high-quality, non-farty air.
Exercise
The Wikipedia article “Neurobiological effects of physical exercise” states that the benefits of aerobics include feeling less stressed and improving your memory. Stress is a key ingredient in forgetting things. Assuaging stress is an absolute necessity when it comes to tests.
Tutor
Find someone to help you out. Be it a classmate, someone in the same class but different timeslot, someone who’s taken the class, etc. Hire one in your price range. Go see what your college has to offer.
Studying Philosophy
It takes a different method to study this subject, especially if you’re taking an upper-level course.
- Dialogues are the most time consuming and have the most fluff (i.e. Plato and Berkeley)
- Philosophical sentences can be half a page: the faster you read those 5 separate ideas, the better you’ll begin to understand the sentence (if you’re not a strong reader, get ready for a rude awaking)
- You might not be stupid, it might just be the translation—some translators are horrible at their jobs and there’s no reason the book should’ve been assigned or published (and they should be punished for their crimes against students)
- All that sweet, public domain info might be online (unless there’s only one translation in town)
- There are many free study guides for this subject
Accommodations
If your prayers to Athena have gone unanswered, and you are ready to vomit every single time you take a test—no matter how well you know the material—then something might be wrong.
If you have a learning disability (like dyslexia), please for the love of Athena, tell your advisors so everyone cuts you some slack. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t let them know. No one would expect you to play the trumpet when all you know is oboe. Same here.
