How to study effectively for exams

Developing effective study skills is essential to success in school, regardless of your course of study. Impending exams often cause anxiety. However, getting good grades is within your reach once you learn a few important study strategies.

Team Up

Team work

Studying with others leverages your effort and helps yo to see bigger payoffs as you work to get better grades.

Tips
Team up with one other person, or even a few, and meet regularly to review course material. As an exam nears, ask your instructor to identify material that will be covered so that you have a clear idea of how to focus your study habits.

Quizzing and discussion
Pair up with a study buddy and quiz each other on the material. When alone, write and re-write material that seems especially challenging for you to learn. Listen to how other students answer questions when quizzed and ask for clarification to help fix the information in your mind.

Discussing the material with others also helps you to learn it better, and on a deeper level,so that recall will be easier.

Use Memory Tricks

Memory tricks

These can enhance your study techniques and offer you greater confidence when facing a test, as well as help you to remember the information.

Alphabet games

For lists of information, try to create a sentence using the first letter of each item in the list. One common example of this is the sentence, "Every good boy does fine." This sentence jogs the memory and helps people to remember the musical notes E, G, B, D, and F.

Association

Another memory trick is to associate the piece of information you need to remember with something you already know. For example, a psychology student trying to remember the function of the hippocampus might think of it as a hippo on campus. A campus is a place where memory is needed and that helps the student to remember that the hippocampus helps in the memory function of the brain.

Tips

There are many of these memory tricks and some are very common. A quick search on the web will turn up many widely-used tricks to remember frequently-used sets of information.

Explore your Textbook's Website

Study guides

Textbook publishers often maintain websites that contain tools to help students. If your textbook doesn't offer the website address in the textbook, do a search on the web for the publishing house, then look up the textbook from there. A treasure trove of tools may await to help you study for exams. These often include electronic flash cards, review questions, and practice tests.