I have to give credit to Scott Young: it was talking blogs with him back in 2007 that helped convince me to start Study Hacks. The fact that I link to Scott’s material again and again and again and again should tell you that we think in similar patterns.

The reason I’m bringing up Scott today is that he’s about to graduate from university. One of the things that intrigued when I first met him four years ago is that, like many students I profiled in the red book, he had the ability to score top grades without needing to study much.

It turns out that he kept this up: He will graduate this month with a GPA that hovers between an A and an A+, even though he almost never studied for more than a handful of hours.

In honor of Scott’s graduation, I asked him if he would share his secrets. I don’t want vague philosophies, I told him. Study Hacks readers are more interested in a blow-by-blow case study of exactly how he studied for a specific test, including screenshots of his notes and a careful accounting of his time.

Fortunately for us, Scott agreed. Below you’ll find the details of how he scored an A+ on a corporate finance exam that had a 50% failure rate at his university. His total time studying: 3.5 hours.

Take it away Scott…

The Student Secrets of Scott Young

“Looks like you have a test to write.” It’s noon and an unexpected test isn’t how I like to spend my lunch hour.

The subject is chemistry. Mostly multiple choice, a few essay questions. It’s one of those regional contests, which explains why I’m the only one being forced to write it. I haven’t even taken the class being tested.

Three weeks go by. “Congratulations, looks like first place–and a check for $400.”

Undeserved Talent?

That was my senior year in high-school. One university degree later, and not much has changed. My average stayed between an A and an A+ throughout college, and I still rarely study more than 2-3 hours before an exam.

For most students, these results are profoundly unfair. I didn’t study harder; I studied less. I wasn’t taught more; in the first example, I hadn’t even taken the class in question.

But it wasn’t just me—I’ve met dozens of learners who make my accomplishments seem banal. Polyglots that speak dozens of languages. Students who coast through triple course loads. Savants that can memorize sequences of ten thousand numbers.

This bothered me. Scientists have known that differences in IQ are both genetic and environmental. This suggests that innate talent can’t explain everything, that there might be a difference in strategy which allows people to learn more with less studying.

The Strategy of Rapid Learners

The biggest difference I noticed between people who learned easily and those who struggled wasn’t being organized, study location or any of the common advice given to struggling students. It was how they learned the material.

Slow learners memorized, while rapid learners made connections between ideas.

When I first wrote about this idea four years ago, it generated a huge discussion. Many people came out that fit the generalization, heavy studiers tended to memorize, while effortless students made connections between ideas.

Even more, I believe these methods of faster learning are trainable. I’ve coached over 800 students since I first started on this idea, and I’ve had many that cut down on their studying by as much as 75%, while getting better grades.

In this article I’m going to walk you through exactly how you can apply these ideas to your studies. First, by going through one course I recently used the methods on, and second, by generalizing the ideas so you can apply it to any subject you’re taking.

Anatomy of an A+ (With Under 4 Hours Study Time)

Corporate Finance has around a 50% failure rate at my university, and I’ve known people who have taken it over 4 times before passing. Despite this, I was able to score an A+ with a total of 3.5 hours of studying total for the final exam. Let me walk you through how I did it.

Summary Version

The quick version of what I did isn’t terribly revealing. My 3.5 hours were divided between only two tasks:

1. Ninety minutes creating a notes compression for the core concepts. (This involves cramming all the key facts and concepts onto a 2-sided paper)
2. Two hours completing and correcting one practice exam.

Here’s a scanned copy of one side of a notes compression I did for another class:

The purpose of the notes compression is to give a good once-over of all the material. It functions as a double-check, making sure there aren’t any conceptual holes or forgotten details. Second, it lets you see the course as a whole to get broader connections between ideas spaced apart in the lectures.

Similarly, the practice exam also works as a safety check. I scored a 90%, so I noted my few errors and finished my studying. Had I scored lower, I would have repeated the exercise with a few studying tactics until I got the grade I wanted. In this case, I was able to avoid problems the first round.

Now this version of events isn’t particularly enlightening. If you take a typical 10-20 hour studying session and replace it with ninety minutes of cursory review and a practice exam, and most students would fail.

The power of the method doesn’t rely on the last minute checks, it’s about how knowledge was engineered from the beginning. Let’s go into more detail to see how this could be achieved over an entire course.

Detailed Version—How to Ace Finals Without Studying

There are a few principles to successfully executing a near-zero studying time A+. I’ll list them here, and keep them in mind when I walk through the specific examples:

Principle #1: Learn It Once

This principle asserts that the correct time to learn something is when you first approach it, either in your readings or lectures. Waiting until the end to study results in a lot of wasted effort and poor grades.

Whenever I uncover a concept that doesn’t immediately click into place, I invest time right away to figure it out. This results in a focused effort to repair any holes in knowledge before they tear at the foundation.

Principle #2: Knowing is Being Able to Teach

If you can’t explain something simply, it means you don’t fully understand it. In keeping with the learn-it-once philosophy, the way you can tell you haven’t learned something is if you can’t teach it.

This is the litmus test to assure that Principle #1 is upheld. If you can’t, out loud or on paper, explain the idea without confusion or contradiction, stop and figure it out right there.

Principle #3: Memorization is a Last Resort

The final principle is that memorizing is a vice to be used only when absolutely necessary. Too many students use memorization as their first weapon of choice and therefore miss out on all the hard, but ultimately time-saving, insights they could have created through connections.

Some knowledge is better memorized than deeply understood. But after taking classes in math, law, psychology, business, economics, computer science and many other areas, I would say that these are in the minority. Medical students and legal scholars need more memorization than mathematicians or physicists, but the principle remains true.

Part One – Learn Concepts by Analogy

So keeping these three principles in mind, learn it once, teach-to-know and memorization as a last resort, I progressed through the class and applied it to each concept or fact, as they were covered.

A good way to do this with concepts is through analogy. If you create metaphors or analogies, that allows you to create connections between the idea and understand it on a deeper level. This is generally my first point of attack against any idea that initially seems hard to remember.

I’ll take an easy example from early in the course and walk through it: present-value of money calculation.

The goal is to learn this formula and concept deeply so that (a) you don’t ever need to relearn it, and (b) it becomes a solid foundation for all future ideas that are based off of it.

It can be tricky to create strong analogies if you’re used to memorizing everything. Here’s one approach I’ve used that helps lock in the ideas:

1. Break down the formula, idea or concept into smaller pieces.
2. Ask, “Why?” to probe for patterns in the structure.
3. Suggest some possible metaphors that fit the pattern.
4. Use the metaphor to explain the idea.
5. Strengthen the metaphor and repeat the process.

This process looks laborious, but with practice the entire series of 5 steps can be done in less than sixty seconds. I’ve simply broken it down to atomic components so you can follow through if you get stuck.

With the present-value formula, my first step would be to break it into rough parts. A casual observation shows me that there are several lumps of money, occurring at different times. These are then being divided by an interest rate, which also has an exponent on it. These are then all added together to give one dollar value.

The next step is to use the question “why?” to probe the ideas. Why are we adding the values together? A: Because we want to know what several cash payments spread out over time would be worth as one payment today. Why are we dividing by the interest rate? A: Because that’s how much extra money in interest we could make if we had the money today. Why are we compounding the interest rate? A: Because interest payments compound, and exponent represents how many years of interest would have accumulated, if we had the money today. This could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Now we can suggest some possible metaphors that fit this pattern. Off the top of my head, I think of perspective drawings, car leases, rocks falling to earth and trees growing. Some have vaguely similar properties (trees grow, money grows) others are identical (car lease payments versus lump-sum purchases).

The final step is to explain the idea to yourself in terms of the metaphor. If I used the perspective drawing analogy, I would say imagine that the lumps of money are drawn in cash bags, down a hallway. The interest rate is the angle of view, or how quickly far bags shrink. Finally the equation is as if you cut the amounts off the canvas and added them together in the same place.

This is a pretty involved example, but most of the time this process is quick and can even be done during class. I drew pictures for clarity, but you can walk through these five steps mentally to save time.

Look through the ideas and think of simple examples that can allow you to explain the concept to yourself. Only if you get stuck do you need to go through the above 5-step process I outlined to create an analogy.

Side note: You don’t need to remember every analogy you create. They serve as scaffolding for understanding the core concept. Once you build several metaphors, you should be able to remember the idea without referring to metaphors or analogies–you’ll just “get” it.

Part Two – Learn Facts Through Association

For a class like Corporate Finance, concepts are the majority of the work. If you can truly “get” the big ideas, then there isn’t a lot of need to know lists of facts. Still, as in all classes, there are facts that need to be memorized.

One such fact is that a bond’s yield-to-maturity is normally expressed as a quoted annual rate, compounded semi-annually (at least in Canada). Forgetting this fact would have cost marks, as this fact is assumed in a lot of the questions.

Continuing from the three principles, the best way to remember facts is through association. Similar to handling concepts, you want to create a few connections that will allow you to remember the idea. With this example, I made a couple of connections:

• This quoted annual, compounded semi-annual was the same for mortgages.
• In the case of mortgages, the result is that you end up paying more effective interest than you would guess, given only the quoted rate. (i.e. the banks trick you on the payments)
• Bonds are normally paid out semi-annually, so it makes sense that they would compound, semiannually.

Unlike for concepts, it’s possible you may forget some of these connections and forget a key fact. That’s why, particularly for factually dense classes, some memorization might be necessary. Either through repetition in practice questions, mnemonics or flashcard-style review.

However, by starting out through associations, you create a mental hook that makes remembering the idea easier.

If you can follow these two parts—using analogies and imagery for concepts and associations to remember facts—then you can greatly cut down on the amount of review you need to learn the subject. If you spend a few minutes after every class practicing these methods, they can become automatic, so they happen automatically whenever you read a chapter or attend a lecture.

Acing Any Class Without Studying

I’ve walked through an example from one class, Corporate Finance. How can you apply this to whatever you’re learning?

Most of the process is the same, but I’ll give a few more notes for generalizing the methods:

#1 – Handling Factually Dense Courses (Anatomy, Medicine, Law, etc.)

The association method still works for these classes, but there are a few more techniques you may want to work on as well:

1. Group related facts together. My example only covered a solitary fact, but often facts in large classes have groupings that you can use to generate associations.
2. Translate facts into concepts. Sometimes you’ll only be required to learn a fact, but turning it into a concept (which you can use the metaphor method) can make it stick further.
3. Learn visual memory techniques such as linking, pegging and vocabulary association. These are outside the scope of this article, but they are powerful ways to cut down the amount of memorization necessary.

#2 – Managing Creative Problem Sets

Many classes require you to go beyond the ideas presented. Instead of just understanding the basics of an idea, you need to apply it to different situations, or solve logic puzzles that might otherwise be difficult.

There’s two ways you can handle this. The first is to do a lot of practice problems and build what Cal describes as hard focus. The second approach is to create more connections and metaphors to understand the idea from a wider range of perspectives. The best method is probably to do both.

These types of courses also brush up on the third type of knowledge you may need in a class, skills. In addition to facts and concepts, you need to build intuition through deliberate practice.

Learning More, By Studying Less

I’ll admit, a lot of these methods can seem overwhelming at first. To summarize, here’s the basics for doing well with less studying:

1. Learn by connections, not by memorization.
2. Learn things deeply the first time, don’t let confusion compound.
3. Handle concepts by creating metaphors and analogies.
4. Remember facts through association first, repetition second.

If you follow this approach, it makes sense that it’s possible to ace exams with relatively little studying. After all, if you’re able to lock in knowledge as it comes to you, there isn’t much need for dozens of hours in the library. Learning becomes easier, and even fun.

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Author Bio: Scott Young writes a popular self-improvement blog and is the author of Learn More, Study Less. If you enjoyed this article, you can join Scott’s free rapid-learning newsletter to get a free copy of his rapid learning ebook with bonus tactics and case studies.

Note From Cal: If you want to find out more about Scott’s approach to studying, also check out the page for his online course Learn More, Study Less: regardless of whether you want to sign up for his course, this page contains links to many of his blog articles on this topic.

The Pre-Med’s Lament

I recently received the following e-mail:

“I’ve failed both of my tests in Organic Chemistry 2…I don’t know what I’m doing wrong…no matter how much I review or study my class notes, nothing seems to work.”

This is a familiar lament. I recently reviewed the student e-mails I’ve received so far in 2010, and discovered that I average around one “I failed my Orgo exam!” e-mail per week.

That’s a lot of unhappy pre-meds.

I decided it was time to write a definitive answer to this common issue.  This post details my famous three-step plan for turning around a chemistry disaster.

Step #1: Reset Your Mindset

In 2002, the psychologist Carol Dweck, then at Columbia University, working with her graduate student Heidi Grant, received permission to study the students enrolled in the fall semester offering of general chemistry. Earlier research by Dweck found that most students sort into one of two mindsets: fixed versus growth. As she explained in a 2009 speech:

• “Fixed mindset students believe their intelligence is just a fixed trait…they worry about how clever they are…they don’t want to take on challenges and make mistakes.”
• The “growth mindset [students] think ‘no,’ [it's] something that you can develop.”

In their Columbia study, Dweck and Grant explored how these mindsets affected performance in the chemistry classroom. Their results were striking.

As they concluded in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper describing the experiment: students with the growth mindset scored higher grades in the course and, perhaps more crucially, were much more likely to recover from a bad midterm grade to score high on the final. By contrast, once a fixed mindset student scored low, he was unlikely to escape the spiral of self-doubt that followed.

Put another way, Dweck and Grant demonstrated: pre-med courses do weed out students, but they’re not culling the smart from the dumb, instead they’re separating the adaptable from the non-adaptable.

(In the context of medicine,  of course, this makes a lot of sense: students who are able to adapt to novel and difficult situations, aggressively trying different strategies until finding one that works, will fare better under the pressures of med school, residency, and eventually full time medical practice.)

This research indicates that a student faced with a bad grade on his first exam must embrace the following ideas…

• This grade is a reflection of your study strategies and previous experience with this style of course.
• It has nothing to do with innate intelligence.
• It has nothing to do with the amount of time you spent studying. (A factor which is often irrelevant to academic performance.)
• Therefore: If you want to improve, you need to improve your study strategies.

TO SUMMARIZE: A bad grade doesn’t mean you’re lacking some mythical chemistry gene, it simply means your approach to the course is sub-par — hardly a catastrophe.

Step #2: Redesign Your Strategies

There’s no magic bullet study strategy that will guarantee you an A on future exams. But there are some high-level guidelines that most successful strategies follow.

Let’s start with an important law of (academic) nature that any smart plan should obey:

The Law of Mental Energy
Every concept presented in your chemistry class will require between 15 – 60 minutes of hard focus, including time spent asking clarifying questions, before you understand it well enough to ace related questions on an exam.

There’s no escaping this law. This is why the standard strategy of taking haphazard notes throughout the semester, and then holing up in the library three days before the exam, is destined to fail — there’s simply way more hard focus required than you can cram into such a small time frame.

Remember: hard focus is hard. You can’t sidestep this hardness in a course such as chemistry. If you don’t build a study plan that respects the need for this difficult work, then you’re unlikely to succeed.

Here’s a simple rule to help keep this respect central to your efforts:

The 48 Hour Rule
Within 48 hours of first being presented a concept, learn it well enough that you could teach it to a classroom of your peers — walking them through related sample problems while giving an insightful running commentary.

If you respect the 48 hour rule, you’ll avoid the hard focus pile ups that scuttle many students’ grades. This rule takes the mental labor necessitated by the law of mental energy, and spreads it throughout the semester — maximizing the chances that it all gets done.

Here are a few tactics to help make the 48 hour rule a reality…

1. Insist on active review.
   Reading highlighted notes is worthless. Stop doing it. The best way to learn material is to explain the idea out loud, as if lecturing an imaginary class, without peeking at your notes. This is mentally draining, which is why most students skip it, but that discomfort is a good thing; it’s the sensation of your brain stretching to internalize the concepts.
2. Take notes in a format that’s ready for active review.
   Reformatting notes is a waste of time. Take your notes in a format that’s ready for active review. For example: write the sample problem clearly;  put the steps on separate lines, adding little commentary notes wherever possible; conclude with a clearly marked answer. To review this problem later, you can cover over everything below the problem and then try to recreate the steps to the answer out loud. If you falter, everything you need to improve your understanding is right there. The key is to minimize steps between the classroom and active review.
3. Ask questions immediately.
   You only have 48 hours to learn this concept, so the quicker you tackle confusions, the better. Here are five lines of defense to help make this a reality:
   • Concentrate hard in class, trying to understand the concepts as they are presented. (Remember the law of mental energy: you cannot escape hard focus, so it’s better to pay off some of this mental debt while you’re in the classroom.)
   • As soon as you’re confused, raise your hand to ask for clarification.
   • If you’re still confused, talk to the professor immediately following class.
   • If you’re still confused, use your textbook to guide you, and talk to a TA or classmate for additional clarification.
   • You’re final line of defense is to bring the question to office hours. Because you’ve already gone through the previous steps, you should be well beyond “I don’t get it,” and instead be able to pinpoint the specific area of confusion.
4. Schedule your review time.
   Put aside two blocks per week in your autopilot schedule for reviewing the material from the most recent class. (You are using an autopilot schedule, right?). The key is to make this studying a part of your weekly routine.

Notice, this approach requires time. It won’t devour your nights or cripple your social life, but it insists that you expend reasonably-sized blocks of hard focus on a regular basis throughout the entire semester. This truth inspires an important corollary:

The Hard Schedule Corollary
If you combined organic chemistry with multiple other demanding courses, then you’re an idiot.

As I’ve argued before, hard course schedules are giant sources of stress and difficulty that add little to no benefit. Many students labor under the misguided belief that taking a challenging course loads matters. Here’s the secret: no one cares about what specific college courses you took when, or how hard your semester schedules were. They’ll see your major. They’ll see your GPA. And that’s it. So for God’s sake, drop your double major, and stop trying to take three science courses at once, you masochistic fool! There’s no extra credit given for being overloaded.

TO SUMMARIZE: Learning complicated subjects requires the expenditure of lots of uncomfortable and difficult hard focus. Build a system that respects this mental labor.

Step #3: Refactor Again and Again and Again…

My canonical article on the danger of black box studying identifies a crucial question that must be answered to turn around poor performance:

Why did the students who got the top grades on this test score so much higher than me?

Ignore your instinct to brush aside the prompt with an ego-preserving answer of “they’re geniuses” or “they have no social life.” Really try to identify what specifically they’re doing differently. Don’t be afraid to ask them for details.

This simple exercise provides targeted feedback on what you’re not doing that you should be doing. Without this post-mortem, you’ll devolve into trying random study habits that sound sort of right and then tenaciously clinging to them as if they were there the result of divine inspiration. It means nothing that you tried something different. (So many of my e-mails start by the student noting that they tried some new note-taking strategy or review plan, as if failing with that one random approach that popped into their mind disqualifies all possible strategies from potentially helping.) What’s important is that your strategies are motivated by real world observation, and are then exhaustively evaluated and tweaked.

TO SUMMARIZE: Adaptable students constantly question why they’re studying the way they are, and then seek concrete feedback on whether their hypothesis is correct. They’re not afraid to make informed changes, again and again and again.

(Photo by quinn.anya)

From 30 Minutes of Studying to a 4.0

I recently received an e-mail from Ricardo, a sophomore majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland.  For the past three semesters he has maintained a 4.0 GPA — a feat he accomplished “without stressing at all.” At the core of his success is an unconventional technique that makes use of a wiki, his iPhone, and my infamous stealth studying philosophy. This technique is so effective that he dedicates only 30 minutes to review on the day before his computer science exams — yet still aces them.

In this post, I detail Ricardo’s method, including step by step instructions and screenshots…

Stealth Studying 2.0

Back in the early days of Study Hacks, I published a popular article titled The Art of Stealth Studying: How to Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work.  At its core was a simple idea:

If you can…slice and dice [test preparation] into a large number of small, 5-10 minute chunks, integrated naturally into your daily routine…it will feel to you as if you are doing no studying at all.

In researching the red book, I met a pair of straight-A students who used this approach to eliminate “studying” (i.e., large amounts of review in the days leading up to an exam) from their schedule altogether. The stealth studying article was my attempt to bring this wildly unconventional take on academic work to the attention of a wider audience.

I recommended that students immediately process their lecture notes into small, question-based study guides, and then study from these while walking between classes. These quick bursts, I argued, when spread out over an entire semester, can eliminate the need for long study sessions.

Ricardo took this basic idea, and then added a high-tech twist.

In more detail, he did the following:

1. He created a free wiki using PBworks.
2. For each course, he created a page on the wiki for the next exam.
3. After each lecture, he put aside time to add the relevant notes to his wiki.  To do so, he would create a subpage for each topic, and then list the main points, add snippets of sample code, or summarize any other information relevant for the exam.
4. Following the stealth studying philosophy, he would then access his wiki using his iPhone while walking to class and waiting for the lecture to begin, doing quick bursts of review. (PBworks plays nicely with iPhones, making it easy to browse the wiki on the run.)

These quick bursts of review, conducted throughout the term, prevented the need for long stretches of studying. Ricardo admits that on the day before an exam, he might take “30 minutes to look over my wiki, do a few sample problems that the professor posted, and then get a good night’s rest.”

His 4.0 over three semesters testifies to the surprising reality that this approach can really work.

In More Detail…

Let’s fill in some more details of what this strategy looks like in practice. I asked Ricardo to send me some screenshots of his system as used to study for CS 131, a class in object-oriented programming.

Below is the page he setup for the first midterm in the course (click here for a larger version):

There’s nothing flashy going on here. He links to a subpage for each topic that might be covered on the midterm. On average, his professor covers one topic per class, so Ricardo was adding pages at the rate of one or two per week.

Below is one of these topic subpages (click here for a larger version):

Notice that Ricardo uses basic formatting to keep the pages readable when accessed on his iPhone.

To study from the subpage above, he would convert each line into a question on the fly. For example, seeing the term “Binary Search Algorithm” on his screen, he would turn away from the screen and try to recreate the bullet points that follow from memory.

And that’s it.

This procedure assumes, of course, that you’ve already mastered the fundamentals of being an efficient student. For example, that you’re trying to really understand the information as its presented in class — raising your hand to ask questions when confused. (If you daydream through lecture, you won’t be able to create an effective study guide.) And that you have enough control over your schedule to ensure that these pages get made right away. (For students who deploy an autopilot schedule — or something similar — this should pose no problem.)

Beyond Computer Science

What strikes me about Ricardo’s approach to computer science was his willingness to start from scratch. The details of his system might not work for you, but the big idea of reducing a problem to its basics, and then coming up with an original strategy, is applicable to many situations.

Next time you face an energy-sapping academic, extracurricular, or even professional challenge, take a step back to ask two simple questions:

What do I really need to accomplish here to succeed? Ignoring the conventional approaches, what would be the least painful, most effective possible way to get this done?

The red book splits academic subjects into two groups: technical and non-technical. The former covers any course with problems to be solved. The latter describes subjects that have you express your knowledge with essay questions and papers.

This taxonomy, however, has a gaping hole: non-technical science courses. These include biology, psychology, or any other subject that requires you to learn lots of technical information, but tests you predominantly with multiple-choice and short-answer questions.

I thought it was time to put together a short, canonical guide to tackling this type of material…

Process, Polish, Perform

My philosophy for these courses is simple: reviewing for an exam should consist only of reviewing. There should be no time wasted learning material for the first time a few days before an exam, or slaving over reformatting notes into something studyable. If you can inline these tasks throughout the semester, the process of studying will be greatly simplified.

To achieve this goal, remember the three P’s…

Process

Attend every class. Take notes. I don’t care if the professor uses Power Point slides distributed in advance. Notes are not about capturing information. They are, instead, an activity that forces you to process and learn the information as it’s presented.

For non-technical science courses, I recommend using the focused question cluster format for your notes. This strategy has you pull out the important ideas and capture them in clusters of short, related questions.

Warning: Do not take old-fashioned transcription notes in class and then later transform them into focused question clusters. That wastes time. Eventually you will resent its difficulty and stop doing it. Wrangle the information into focused question clusters as the professor spews it.

Polish

Inevitably, some concepts will escape your understanding when first presented. Most students let these question marks slide until exam time, and then attempt, in a frenzied rush, to learn all of this missing material from scratch.

This approach guarantees that your studying experience will suck. It also increases the chance that you’ll bomb an exam due to a question you have no idea how to answer.

I want you to instead observe the 48-hour rule. When the professor describes something you don’t understand, immediately jot down a note and label it with a big question mark. (If you’re taking notes on a computer, use a long string of question marks; i.e., “????????????????????“.)

You then have 48 hours to replace that question mark with a focused question cluster.

As I explained in the red book, in my chapter on academic disaster insurance, there are a variety of strategies — listed below in order of their proximity to the initial confusion — that can help you fill in your missing understanding.

1. Raise your hand and ask for clarification right there in class.
2. If that doesn’t work, talk to the professor immediately following class.
3. If that doesn’t work, review your textbook and ask friends in the same class. (Do this the same day!)
4. If that fails, talk to the TA or professor at their next office hours. Don’t leave until your understanding is complete.

Inlining this learning into the semester, instead of waiting until the weekend before the test, will save you hours of aggravation.

Perform

If you followed the first two P’s, all the course material will have been processed and polished into a studyable format before you start to review. When it comes time to study, all of your effort can focus on refreshing material you already know.

My article on focused question clusters explains the details of this refreshing stage. The main idea, however, is that you must be active (not passive): answer questions, out loud, without looking at your notes, as if lecturing a class. If you can’t produce and explain the information from scratch, you don’t know it.

We are left now with one final question: How early should you start studying?

My recommendation is to construct a date/action list two weeks in advance. You won’t be studying intensely for two weeks. But this advance planning will allow you to slip the review in open pockets of time and therefore avoid late nights.

And that’s all you need to know to tame non-technical science subjects.

In the summer of 2000, a Dartmouth economist named Bruce Sacerdote published a paper titled Peer Effects in Randomly Assigned Roommates. His premise was interesting: Incoming students at Dartmouth are assigned to rooms at random. He knew, therefore, that when two roommates first arrive on campus, their behavior should have no more in common than any other pair of students.

Sacerdote’s insight was to wait until the end of the year and then look for traits that roommates had become more likely to share than random pairs. The idea was that these shared traits would be due to the roommates’ influence on each others’ behavior.

Sacerdote found that for some behaviors, such as major choice, roommates didn’t affect each other. But for one trait in particular, GPA, they had a lot in common. He attributed this finding to a simple idea: students’ study habits are heavily influenced by their peers.

It’s important that you recognize this reality, because these peer influences shape more than you might imagine about your own habits. Like a pair of behavioral blinders, carefully slipped into place without you noticing, peer influence may have prevented you from seeing a variety of radical strategies that could greatly simplify your student life.

In this post, I want to describe one such strategy…

The Definitive Guide to Acing Your Schedule

Studying for a class starts out as a crap-shoot. Until your first exam (and, more importantly, your first post-exam post-mortem) you have to take a random stab on how best to prepare.

Or do you?

One of the “laws” that emerges from peer-influenced study habit formation is that you must attack each course by yourself. Sure, you can bitch with other students in the same class, and maybe perform the occasional group study session, but in the end, it’s you alone battling the mysterious forces of your professor and his capricious whims.

Here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to be this way. Consider the following simple strategy for improving your performance in given course:

1. Setup a separate chat with your professor, your TA, and a student who took the same course in a previous semester.
2. In each chat session, ask the same question:
   

   If you were to write an advice guide about doing incredibly well in this class, what would the chapters be?

It takes around an hour to complete this exercise. But it’s results are near magical. Gone is the guesswork about notetaking, reading, and how best to review. In its place is specific advice that is tuned to the specific challenge you face. You’d have to be a real slacker not to do well with this treasure map in hand.

Yet almost no student does this…

With this in mind, I hope the advice in this post serves two purposes. First, it’s a great way to do better as a student; so try it. Second, and perhaps more important, it can act as a gateway that helps you move beyond the blinders of peer influence, and start seeking your own approach to mastering the college experience.

The most effective strategies for improving your student life are often also the simplest. You just need the ability to see them.

(Photo by jackbrodus)

I recently received an e-mail from a student who was struggling in his calculus class. “I’m out of options,” he told me. “I practice the problems in the book again and again, and I still do poorly on the tests.” He concluded that he just didn’t “get math.”

I told this story because it highlights a common problem. I’m not talking about math difficulties. Instead, the real issue here is the danger of hidden assumptions. This student was confounded by his assumption that reviewing practice problems is the way to study for math. He decided, therefore, that the only way to improve his grades was to spend more time. Not surprisingly, this did little help — leading to his catastrophic conclusion that he simply couldn’t handle the work.

He needed to change the foundation of his study philosophy, but couldn’t see beyond the surface.

Assumptions plague many areas of our lives, but study habits seem unusually prone to entrenchment. Consider your own academic strategies: How many resulted from rigorous thinking about what work best, and how many are the legacy of some random, ad hoc approach you adopted, for no real reason, as a freshman faced with your first test in the subject? For many students, the latter answer is distressingly common.

Fortunately, there’s a simple strategy that can free you from these issues. It might sound radical, but I’ve used it for years and recommend it frequently to students who write me for help.

The advice can be stated as follows:

At least once a year, demolish your current study habits. Force yourself to build a new collection of strategies from scratch.

As you build these new strategies, let these two questions guide you:

1. What state of preparation do I need to be in to do really well on the tests in this class?
2. What is the most efficient way to get from the raw information presented in lectures and reading assignments to this desired state of preparation?

These questions should sound familiar to disciples of the red book and the straight-A method. The key twist in this post, however, is that the frequent demolition of your strategies forces you to re-ask them again and again.

There are three reasons why this is a good thing:

1. It frees you from the grasp of particularly devastating hidden assumptions. Because you start from scratch once or twice a year, there’s no place for entrenched views to hide. They’ll be swept clean by the next demolition.
2. It acknowledges the fact that you learn more about studying as you progress through your student career. By rebuilding your habits ofter, you’re taking advantage of this accumulating knowledge.
3. It introduces novelty. Let’s be honest, it’s straight-up interesting to tweak new strategies and observe how they work. There are few (academic) pleasures greater than earning an ‘A’ while working significantly less than your peers. This novelty, of course, keeps life interesting and can help stave off deep procrastination.

If we return to the math-impaired student from the opening, we see the potential benefit of this strategies cast into stark relief. If he demolished his current study habits, and started from scratch, he would probably realize that rote reviewing of practice problems might not be the most efficient solution. Forced to build a new system, answering the questions above to help guide his actions, he would likely stumble into something that actually works for him.

You too could be in a similar situation – held back by hidden assumptions that are crippling your potential. Eliminate this possibility by embracing the power of starting fresh.

As longtime Study Hacks readers know, I’m a big promoter of the autopilot schedule. In case you’re new, let me briefly review: The autopilot schedule is a set of fixed times and locations for finishing your regular work each week. For example, you might decide to always tackle your history reading assignments Monday morning, from 9 am to 11 am, in the study carrels found on the 6th floor stacks of the main library.

The shadow course, described below, is a simple optimization to the autopilot schedule that can generate huge benefits.

An Imaginary Course

The shadow course method asks that you adjust your autopilot schedule to include an additional course. This course doesn’t really exist, but you pretend like it does. (The name comes from the fact that it shadows your real courses.) Set aside a reasonable amount of time in your autopilot schedule for handling the work for your shadow course; I recommend allocating roughly one hour per course per week.

Here’s the key point: use the time set aside for your shadow course to begin ridiculously early preparation for tests and papers in your real courses. The key words are “ridiculously early.” Starting from week one of your semester, you have to use your shadow course blocks toward this end.

For example, you might use this time to…

• …reformat your notes into study guides that are ready for review.
• …write mini-textbook chapters that cover the material.
• …fill in holes in your knowledge by going to back to the textbook and preparing targeted questions for your TA.
• …review the big ideas from recent lectures by giving talks on the subjects to imaginary classes.
• …practice the proofs and problems from technical courses to master the insights.
• …work through hard concepts using the notebook method.
• …begin collecting and building a database of sources for a large research paper.

To help cement the habit, and to make it an enjoyable part of your student schedule, I recommend that you choose the most exotic possible location for your weekly shadow course time blocks. For example: in the woods (if you’re at Dartmouth, I personally recommend the cross country trail for doing quiz-and-recall lectures); a quiet cafe; or anywhere else equally contemplative and separated from your daily student life.

The Power of the Shadow

The effect of the shadow course can be immense. Imagine, for example, that you divide your shadow course time evenly among your real courses, giving you an extra hour of preparation per course per week. In a 15 week term, this means that when you arrive at the end of the semester, you’ll have an extra 15 hours of preperation under your belt for each final and major paper you face.

Imagine how much better you would have performed on your last test or paper if you had been able to set aside 15 extra hours to prepare.

To make things even better, because this time is spread out across an autopilot schedule, these hours all maintain a high intensity of focus — a feat which would be impossible if this time was condensed into a small number of long study session.

The result: your performance enters A* territory while reducing the amount of time you have to study or write at the last minute.

But I Don’t Have That Time!

Some students will complain that they simply don’t have enough time in their schedule to add an entirely new class. I’m sympathetic. But let me make the following strong suggestion: if you don’t have time for a shadow course, consider quitting something to make time. The benefit gained from your shadow course hours will swamp the benefits gained from whatever boring club you ditched to make room. And studying spread out over the entire semester causes much less pain than studying crammed into reading period.

The Power of Non-Conformity

To steal a phrase my friend — and one of my absolute favorite bloggers — Chris Guillebeau, there is real power in non-conformity. This holds especially true for students. There’s something about thumbing your nose at the conventions followed by your peers and, instead, doing something completely, ridiculously different, that can help pry you out of a rut and make outstanding things happen.

(Photo by Absolut1)

Welcome to Week 4

This is the fourth and final post in our four-part series 4 Weeks to a 4.0.  Let’s do our review. In week one you gained some control over your schedule. In week two you mastered taking notes in class. And in week three you streamlined your assignments. In other words, we’ve covered all regularly occurring academic work. This leaves us only to tackle the big infrequent stuff. I’m talking about studying for exams and writing papers.

Week 4 Assignment: Create Project Folders

Your assignment for this week to adopt the project folder method, which I describe below. This simple method streamlines the process of studying for exams and writing major papers. I used it throughout my time at Dartmouth, and swear by its effectiveness. You can also see aspects of it in action in our ongoing finals diaries series.

The Project Folder Method

Buy a box of plain manila file folders. Set aside one folder for each exam and paper you having coming up in your semester. Label the folders with the corresponding subject and exam/due date.

For the exam folders, do the following:

• Print the relevant class notes and assignment notes. Label each clearly. Add to the folder. If you took notes in a notebook, either make photocopies, or just rip the pages out of your notebook.
• If the exam is for a technical course, include problem set solutions, past exams (if the upcoming exam is cumulative), and any sample tests made available by the professor.
• On the front cover of the folder write out a study plan using the date/action list method. A date/action list is a collection of specific review actions labeled with the date when you will do the work. The key word is “specific.” Don’t put down: “4/23 – study.” Instead, put down something like: “4/23 – meet with TA to discuss how to solve the problems I got wrong on the last four problem sets.”
• Mark each of these dates on your calendar to remind yourself you scheduled work. If you end up needing to change the plan, mark the new plan on your folder and change the relevant dates on your calendar.

For the paper folders, do the following:

• At first the folder will be empty. As you gather research materials, however, this is the place where they all go. This will keep you organized.
• On the front of the folder, use the date/action list method from above to construct a plan for researching and writing your paper. Follow the same rules as with the study plans. That is, record pairs consisting of a date and a specific action. This plan will probably change more than a study plan as you get going, so make sure you record all changes on your folder and your calendar.

Once you’ve created the folders, follow their corresponding plans. If you’re having a hard time fitting in time for all of your exams and papers, then you may need to do some emergency schedule clearing, setup a visual panic schedule, or perhaps even declare a temporary activity vacation. But don’t hide from what has to be done. The project folder approach makes the work you face explicit and unavoidable — allowing you to better spread out the work and streamline the steps.

Summing Up…

Once you finish this week’s assignment you’ll be done with the program! These lessons aren’t a miracle cure. For example, it’s possible that your schedule is so overcrowded that no amount of smart habits can save you. It’s also possible that you’re suffering from deep procrastination, which thwarts attempts to follow even the most basic advice.

But if you stuck with the program for all four weeks, your technical study habits will be better than 99% of all students, which should put you on track to better grades and less stress.

For those of you who followed the program, let us know how it has been working for you. 

This is the first post in the finals diaries series, which follows a group of students through their quest to improve their study habits in time for spring exams. We start with Travis, a freshman physics major from Caltech. In May, he faces a brutal multivariate calculus exam. This leaves him a little less than a month to toss out his existing habits, which he candidly describes as “less than stellar,” and embrace a more efficient academic lifestyle.

Plan A

As with all of my volunteers, I asked Travis to describe his current plan for preparing for this test. He replied:

It will boil down to taking a couple of weeks before finals and figuring out what I don’t know, trying to brush up on what I may have forgotten, and doing some example problems.

This, of course, is exactly the type of vagueness that drives students to last minute scrambles and incomplete preparation. Luckily, Travis still has time to change his ways.

The Date/Action List

Let’s be blunt: the “plan” Travis sent me is not a plan. It’s a collection of vague behaviors. So I choose to ignore it. Instead, I asked Travis to construct a date/action list. You’ll learn more about this technique in next Monday’s 4 Weeks to a 4.0 post, but the basic idea is as follows:

1. Create a list of specific actions that can each be completed in
   one sitting. The key word is “specific.” Terms like “review,” “go
   over,” and “study,” are not allowed. It needs to be more on the level
   of: “construct a review guide for lectures 1 – 4 consisting of…”
2. Date each action with the specific day between now and the exam in
   which you will complete it.

This list of date and action pairs is a real study plan. Anything less specific is a recipe for stress.

Plan B

Travis liked my suggestion and was quick to construct his first attempt at a date/action list. It read as follows:

• April 25: Draw up review sheets for previous lectures, including key concepts,definitions, etc; cross-reference with textbook, as well as relevant example problems
• April 30: Choose 5-10 example problems (see review sheet) to work through. Ask TA’s for help if needed.
• May 8: New review sheets for lecture April 25 – May 8. Focus on tying together new material with old stuff.
• May 9: Work 5 example problems from material from Apr 25 to May 9.
• May 11 – May 15: EXAMS!

This is much better than his first plan (“figure out what I don’t know…do some example problems”). But there’s still work to be done.

Fixing Travis’s Date/Action List

The date/action list Travis provided suffers from a few common planning flaws. (Making smart study plans is hard! A lot of students underestimate the experience and effort that goes into preparing in an efficient manner.) For example:

• He discusses constructing “review sheets” but doesn’t specify what these actually contain.
• He adds “concepts” and “key definitions” to his review sheets but schedules no time to review these items.
• He proposes to study 10 – 15 example problems from each set of review sheets, but it’s unclear that these will cover all the material that needs to be learned. (It’s just an arbitrary number.)
• And of course, the biggest planning sin of all, he deploys ambiguous verbs. “Work through” example problems doesn’t tell me how, exactly, he is going to make sure he has mastered the insights.

Here were my suggestions:

1. Be more specific about “review sheet.” Consider building a mega-problem set for each week of lectures (a popular concept from the red book). That is, a collection containing a representative problem from the book, class, or problem set for every concept that could be covered on the exam.
2. Replace the ambiguous action “work through” with a specific active recall strategy. For example, to review a given mega-problem set means that you can answer every question, while narrating your steps outloud, without peeking at your notes. If you can do this, you’re done with the mega-problem set. If you can’t, review the right answers and come back later to try again. Nothing less will work for math.
3. You will need more than 1 day to complete this review. I would suggest at least 3 to 5 sessions. A smart trick is to schedule a TA visit in the middle of these sessions to brush up on the problems that confused you during the review. This leaves time for you to practice your new understanding.

Moving Forward

I’m currently waiting for Travis to construct a revised date/action list inspired by my suggestions. Here’s the thing: the eventual study plan we develop will include a lot of steps. But we’re talking about multivariate calculus at Caltech: you shouldn’t expect it to be easy, regardless of how smart you are.

The type of plan I’m pushing on Travis is the type of plan that leads to top scores. It’s also low stress, as it rarely requires more than a couple hours of work on any given day. We’re a long way from “figure out what I don’t know and do some example problems,” but we’re honing in on what actually works.

Stay tuned for more updates on Travis and our other finals diary volunteers.

(Photo by Hermes)

Unlike many hacks you read here, the strategy I want to describe today is not designed to reduce your study time (though I don’t think it will add much to your schedule either). Instead, its purpose is to help you transform from a good student into an exceptional student.

It starts with the simplest possible tools…pen and paper.

The Notebook Method

This method applies to the following academic situations, among others…

• Writing an essay or paper.
• Working on a problem set or technical take home exam.
• Tackling a difficult book or reading assignment.
• Designing a project for a computer science or engineering class.

The idea is simple…

1. Buy a sturdy college-ruled notebook dedicated to the relevant class. (I use the 100 page, 1 subject, college-ruled Stasher by Roaring Spring, but many people also swear by the Black n’ Red.)
2. Buy a good pen. (Nothing beats a black uniball micro 0.5mm.)
3. Take your notebook and pen and go to the most relaxing, meditative, non-distracting place possible. The deep stacks of the library is okay. Hiking 30 minutes into the woods or onto the dunes overlooking a windswept springtime beach is even better.
4. Spend 1 – 3 hours working out your thinking on the task at hand in the notebook. Spend the last 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page that you mark with the date and a title.

For example, here is a snapshot from a page of my PhD thesis notebook:

Preceding this summary page in the notebook is another few pages of rougher notes, also from today, on which I was trying to work through the tricky details of these same ideas. This final page details the polished result of this thinking. I needed to get this right, and a long afternoon with my notebook was the only way I could coax what I needed from my mind.

Inside the Method

In an age of distraction, the notebook method produces a rare commodity: high-quality thinking — the type of thinking that can make a student into a star.

Its power sources from the following truths…

1. Writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you’re thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies. It’s hard work! You’ll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere. Eventually you gain familiarity with the novel sensation of deep thinking.
2. You can’t check e-mail using a spiral-bound notebook. You also can’t update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel. If you’re high up in the library stacks, or, better yet, in the woods or on the beach, it’s just you and your notebook. Eventually your urge toward distraction will give way.
3. Paper facilitates creative thinking. You can draw arrows, and circle concepts, and sketch structures. Something about a good ballpoint scraping across a thick-grained paper stock unlocks areas of your mind that tend to hibernate when you’re slumped over your laptop in a crowded study lounge.

This method applies anywhere that requires deep creative thinking. Use it to figure out your argument for an English course, or to master organic chemistry equations, or to deduce why, exactly, that Nietzsche book frustrated you so much on your first read through.

Regardless of how you apply this method, its result will be the same. It takes you out of student survival mode and helps you down the path toward mastering the increasingly lost art of good, hard, deep thinking.

Related Posts

• Adventure Studying: An Unconventional New Approach to Exam Preparation
• An Adventure Studying Case Study
• How Two Extra Hours Can Make Your Paper Two Times Better
• Conquer Complicated Material with the Mini-Textbook Method

(Photo by Absolut1)