How to make a study schedule before an exam

Write the date of the exam at the top of a page, then count back the number of weeks ahead of you. Next, cut the syllabus into ideas, not page numbers. An idea is something you can make yourself repeat in one sentence, the definition of a word, a formula, a date, a step in a mechanism. This split is more useful than a plan by chapter, because you will then be able to quiz yourself idea by idea.

Sort them into three piles, the ones you already know a little, the ones that are new, the ones that scare you. Do not spend too long ordering them perfectly. For finals, AP exams or the SAT, the material is often huge. A simple schedule you follow beats a beautiful chart you drop after three days. Keep room for the unexpected, a missed class, the flu, an extra week of homework.

In the first weeks, each idea goes through a serious first session. Rawson and Dunlosky tested 533 students and more than 100,000 responses scored by hand. Their advice concerns this first session, recalling each idea correctly 3 times (Rawson and Dunlosky, 2011). In practice, you read the idea, hide it, say it back. If you miss, you look, you start again, until you get it.

Quizzing yourself is not a bonus added at the end. Dunlosky and colleagues rank practice testing among the two techniques rated high utility, with distributing your study, while rereading is rated low utility (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Karpicke and Roediger showed, on vocabulary, that retesting a word already known had a large positive effect on delayed recall, unlike studying it again (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). Your first weeks are therefore for getting ideas in, with questions, not with successive rereads of your notebook.

Once the ideas are learned, you come back to them at spaced intervals. The rule from Cepeda and colleagues is to work out the gap as a fraction of the time before the exam. With an exam in a week, the best gap is about 20 to 40% of that time. With an exam in a year, it falls to about 5 to 10% (Cepeda et al., 2008). Worked example, exam in 10 days, go back over the ideas 2 to 4 days after the first session.

For a distant deadline, for example a final at the end of the semester, the plan is simple. You learn one part of the material each week, then return to the earlier parts at wider and wider gaps. Rawson and Dunlosky speak of relearning 3 times at widely spaced intervals (Rawson and Dunlosky, 2011). In a table, you note for each idea the date of the last session. You do not need a fancy tool. A sheet with four columns is enough.

The closer the exam, the shorter the gaps, since they are a fraction of the time that remains (Cepeda et al., 2008). The last week is therefore for going over mostly the ideas you still miss. Do not redo everything in order. Start with those that failed in the last session, and only then go quickly through those you got right.

The night before, plan a light last pass and keep time for sleep. Sleep takes part in the consolidation of memories (Rasch and Born, 2013), so it is not lost time. Avoid the trap of doing more at the last minute. Kornell found that spacing beat cramming the night before for 90% of the participants, even though most thought the opposite (Kornell, 2009). If your schedule is well made, the night before is for checking, not for learning. You can also reread your list of ideas and tick the ones you are sure you could talk about without notes.