Study Hacks

Contest Update: This Saturday I’ll be announcing the rules for the HP Magic contest. If you’ll recall, I’m giving away 5 brand new computers, a wireless printer, a bunch of free software, and more. While you’re waiting for my contest rules to be announced, check out this site for a list of the 49 other blogs also participating.

Post Update (4/8/09): Stefan from the Dutch School Kid blog has posted an article summarizing his experience trying to use this technique to study for his own biology course. 

Panic Mode

It was two weeks before her biology final, and Allison, an undergraduate at McGill University, was starting to panic. She had been trying to review her class notes but found the process increasingly tedious. Her concentration would not hold, and the material was not sinking in.

Allison knew she was more an audio than a visual learning, but recognized early in the semester that David’s technique of recording entire lectures to review later would be too inefficient. (The lectures were loooonnng and dddrrryyy.) She needed something more punchy.

That’s when she noticed the iTunes icon on her computer desktop and hatched a clever plan…

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Tangent Troubles

Calculus is easy. Or at least, it can be. The key is how you digest the material. Here’s an example: when you’re first taught derivatives in calculus class, do you remember it like this…

Or do you intuit this image…

As I will argue in this post, for any technical course — be it calculus, physics, or microeconomics — the key between an ‘A’ and a struggle comes down to this distinction. Below I’ll explain exactly what I mean and reveal how top technical students use this realization to consistently ace their classes.

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Note: I was away for the holiday weekend, attending a college conference. Because of this, there was no Monday Master Class yesterday. Today’s post will take the place of both yesterday’s Master Class and the normal Wednesday post.

Professorial Wisdom

I often recommend to struggling students that they talk to their professors. My philosophy: when a class is giving you trouble, figure out exactly why and then craft a customized solution. Your professor’s input is an invaluable piece of this process.

But here’s the thing: a lot of students have no idea how to approach a professor. As an academic in training I’ve witnessed this firsthand. In this post I want to describe four common mistakes students make when asking a professor for help. I pair each with a suggestion of what to do instead.

Way #1: Saying “I don’t understand this at all.”

Many students see professors as a magic wisdom-imparting machine. To them, the very act of attending office hours holds out the promise of instant understanding. This leads them to show up and say, in essence, “I don’t get it,” and then sit back and wait for glorious comprehension to flow like water.

Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work that way.

The professor has spent hours teaching these subjects, if he could make you understand them from scratch in one short conversation, he wouldn’t have spent so much time going over them in the lecture hall.

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The Study Time Paradox

A common complaint I hear goes something like this: “I studied for hours and hours, reviewing every practice problem I could find, or re-reading every assignment and all my notes, and then, when I sat down for the test, I had no idea how to answer the questions!”

I call this the Study Time Paradox because no matter how hard these students study, their grades don’t seem to improve. In this post, I want to describe a solution to this problem; a simple hack that requires 5 – 10 extra minutes a day but can produce significantly better grades.

Story Time

Lurking behind the Study Time Paradox is the following truth: there’s a difference between knowing information and understanding concepts. This should sound familiar. This is the same observation that motivates the use of question/evidence/conclusion note-taking and quiz-and-recall test review instead of transcription and rote memorization. (See here and here for more on the Study Hacks approach to note-taking and exam prep, respectively.)

The piece of advice presented here, which I call the Story Telling Method, is a complement to these strategies. It can be described as follows:

• After each class, tell a “story” about the material covered—a five minute summary of the concepts that drove the lecture.
• Don’t bother writing it down. Instead, just say it to yourself while walking to your next class. Treat it like you’re a literary agent or movie producer pitching the lecture at an important meeting.
• Cover the big picture flow of ideas, not the small details. Answer the question “why was this lecture important?”, not all the information it contained. Play up the flashy or unexpected.

For example, after an Art History lecture, you might tell the story of early renaissance artists clashing in Italy, and how and why Cimabue and Gitto—the superstars of their era—were able to break out. You can do the same for technical material. After a calculus course, for example, you could talk about what problem a derivative solves and how integration extends the idea to do something even cooler. You don’t need to review the chain rule, instead explain why the hell someone would want to know the slope at a point on a curve.

Constructing a Framework

The Story Telling Method has an important benefit: it takes the large volume of information you just received and organizes it within a coherent framework. Not surprisingly, this makes it much easier to retain this information. Later, when you approach exam studying, having this narrative framework reduces review to a simple task. By contrast, if you approach studying with just a large pile of notes — even if they are taken carefully in the question/evidence/conclusion format — you might have some long nights ahead of you.

The Rise of the Mini-Hack

I call this type of advice a “mini-hack” because it’s a small thing that you can easily integrate into your existing schedule; it’s something you do between classes, not a big new commitment. At the same time, however, it can generate a big boost in your performance. I’m fascinated by this type of advice as I think there is great potential in replacing major habit changes with a constantly evolving arsenal of small little tricks. Expect to hear more of this style of tips in the future. And as always, if you give this strategy a whirl, let me know how it goes.

The SAT Season Looms

Over the past two weeks I’ve received three different e-mails asking for advice about SAT prep. I assume, therefore, that we’ve entered a season during which many high school students have begun to look ahead to this most dreaded of the standardized test family.

In this post, I want to summarize the system I typically recommend for high-performance SAT preparation. This advice is motivated by three sources: (1) my own experience preparing for the SAT (which I took only once and did pretty well on); (2) the results of a survey I conducted last fall about test prep habits that worked; and (3) observations I made about how a group of my college friends prepared for the LSATs (all three got into Harvard Law School, so they must have done something right.)

The Practice Test Tsunami

My system for SAT preparation works as follows:

1. Skim the Princeton Review Book. I find some of its advice to be simplistic (for example, all that nonsense about Joe Bloggs), but it also offers some concrete strategies for tackling the main question types. In particular, their methods for dealing with ratio problems on the math section, and analogies on the verbal section, are fast and work well. Learn these. They make a difference.
2. During a 5 - 10 week period leading up to the test, take 2 timed practice tests per week. Do one of the tests in one sitting (with breaks calibrated to match the real SAT.) I recommend setting aside a weekend morning each week for this beast. I also recommend the public library as a better location than your noisy house. The other timed test you can be split up. For example, tackle a timed math section one day and a timed verbal section another. Spread these out. If you attempt too much review, you’ll burn out and stop working all together. Similarly, if you don’t take the timed test seriously — and really concentrate — they don’t help nearly as much. So set aside serious time for serious concentration.
3. Go back and review every single wrong answer. Taking the timed tests will get you used to working under pressure. To further improve your performance, however, it’s crucial that after each timed session you review every single question you got wrong; determine why you got it wrong and why the right answer is right. This post-mortem is by the far the most effective tactic for improving your ability to consistently nail the harder questions.
   (Bonus Tip: A reader wrote me this morning to reveal a twist to the wrong question review process. She recorded her wrong answers on note cards, and then did a quiz-and-recall review. As she took more practice tests, her pile of hard question note cards increased. Each day, she did a fresh Q-and-R on her trouble spots. The result? She claims that it quickly revealed patterns that immediately improved her performance. Her math score — where she was having the most trouble — bounced up 150 points in one week!)

If you find this workload too brutal, start earlier and spread it out more. For example, there would be nothing wrong with starting review now for the October test date. You can do only one timed test per week, and take some weeks off. Don’t make the mistake of equating pain with quality review. The two are unrelated.

But What About…

A few final notes. In my (unverified) opinion, this technique works better than the Princeton Review prep courses. The students who benefit from the prep courses do so because it forces them to take timed sample tests. If you can do practice tests on your own (and follow-through on the resulting post-mortems), you won’t gain anything new from the formal courses.

Second, I’m not a huge believer in memorizing vocabulary lists. The only way to hit the 700 range or above on the verbal section is to read, a lot. If you’re younger, start reading as much real books as possible. (Like many high-scorers on the verbal section I begun reading adult fiction and non-fiction early.) Memorizing words might boost a not high score to slightly less not high, so if that’s you, then, I guess, you can memorize if you want. On the other hand, if you’re a bookworm, you’ll probably find that with practice your scores get where you need them to be without memorization.

Whatever you do, however, don’t buy those stupid fake novels with SAT prep words bolded. They’re a waste of print and an insult to anyone planning on attending college. If you’re in doubt, drop me a line, I’m happy to recommend any number of real books that will boost your vocabulary while having the advantage of not being terrible.

What worked for you? 

Exam advice week here at Study Hacks is winding down. So sad! Next week it’s back to the normal mix…

An Inspiring Space

Two days ago, I spent an afternoon roaming Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which, in its new building, is situated right on the harbor. While exploring the main exhibition space on the the fourth floor, I stumbled into a room they call the mediatheque. It was stunning. The ICA’s architecture has the fourth floor cantilevered out over the water of the harbor. This particular room hung off the bottom of this ledge, and featured a steep set of descending tiers. At the bottom was a full-length picture window through which only water is visible. (See the picture above.)

The full effect is hard to describe. You lose your sense of height and location in space. Are you in a ship? In a building? Are you a few feet above the water or hundreds? Very Zen.

My first thought: this would be a damn good place to work on a paper.

You Can’t Do That!

For many students, this thought reeks of heresy. Conventional wisdom says: studying happens on campus, or, if you’re feeling particularly crazy, maybe in a Starbucks near campus. And that’s it. It is supposed to be a grind that takes place in in the same old boring libraries surrounded by the same old boring people. And by the end, with your eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, and your skin sallow and whitened from fluorescent saturation, you can grin, feebly, and announce: I survived…

Here’s my question: does it have to be like this?

Beyond the Ordinary

At Dartmouth, I frequently sought ways to challenge this conventional wisdom. When I would see the hooded sweat-shirted masses trudging toward the library at the beginning of finals period, I would turn and run in the opposite direction. I was known to drive 20 minutes away from campus to study at bookstore where no one knew or cared that my school had exams. I would sometimes tackle thorny take-home exam questions while walking the banks of the Connecticut river. Anything to avoid the cinder-blocked study lounges that most students believed — bafflingly — that they were contractually bound to inhabit during this period.

Introducing Adventure Studying

I call this tactic: adventure studying. The basic idea is simple. Our minds crave novelty. If you work on exam preparation and paper writing in novel environments, it becomes easier to engage the material, be more creative, form stronger comprehension, and, overall, dare I say it, perhaps even enjoy the process.

My Challenge to You

I’m embarrassed, however, that as an undergraduate I didn’t have the confidence to push adventure studying as far as I should have. I want you to make up for my shortcoming. I want you to push the adventure studying concept to its limits. What is the most outrageously exotic yet undeniably perfect location where you can migrate your exam preparation or final exam writing? Try it.

Ignore ingrained student traditions of camping out in libraries and study lounges. Redefine finals period to be a source of personal reflection and novelty and intellectual adventure.

Some examples of adventure studying possibilities:

1. If you have a car, spend a day reviewing in a completely different town. Preferably one that is small, and idyllic, and more than 30 minutes from campus. Switch between little cafes, the public library, and parks. Meet the locals.
2. If you’re near a body of water and live somewhere reasonably warm: spend a day reviewing in your bathing suit. Cycle through: reviewing; napping; swimming; then back to reviewing. I’ve never tried running through flashcards at the end of an ocean-battered jetty; but I imagine it’s not a bad way to learn those art history dates.
3. Head to the nearest big city and camp out at museum. Find your own local equivalent of the ICA mediatheque room.
4. If your family owns a vacation house that has been opened for the season: camp out for a couple days. Bring a friend. Study during the day, have philosophical, semi-incoherent conversations at night. (Don’t, however, go late-night drunken skinny-dipping. According to the movies this will lead to you getting eaten by a shark.)
5. Load up some quiz-and-recall study guides in your backpack and hike some place isolated and wild. Switch between studying and wandering and reading and zoning out in a Thoreau-esque state of blissfulness; like Into the Wild — but, hopefully, with less death. Who says you can’t review on a 5000 foot summit? It’s better than the library basement.

The Golden Rule of Study Advice

I’ll let you in on a critical secret: no one cares how or where you study. You don’t have to punch a time card when you enter the library. The dean doesn’t track how you spent your day. Take 100% advantage of this reality.

Just because it’s “tradition” to spend the week before exams holed up in the library in some macho display of academic self-flagellation, this doesn’t mean that you have to follow this path. Why can’t you study alone on the beach? Or in your parent’s cabin in Maine? Or sitting on a bench near that crazy, completely enclosed Egyptian Tomb they have setup at the Met?

The Zen Valedictorian Tackles Finals

You might have noticed that I tagged this article with “The Zen Valedictorian.” I think the adventure studying concept fits nicely with the ZV philosophy. It’s about the larger goal of constructing the college experience you want, not stumbling through the path of least resistance.

If you take up the adventure studying challenge — and I hope you do — keep me posted. We want to hear about your adventures. I’ll share the best with the full gang. Bonus points for pictures.

Exam advice week continues here at Study Hacks. I’m posting Wednesday’s article a little early because I’ll be gone tomorrow morning and I wanted to make sure you got your productivity fix in a timely manner.

So Much Waste

Finals period is tough. I can’t change that. But as I watch students slog through this process I keep remarking at the amount of unnecessary stress. The main culprit: waste.

Too many students begin exam prep without a (sufficiently detailed) plan. They have, at best, only a rough idea of how they’re going to review before they dive straight into a pseudo-work grind. Cue the red-eyes; the coffee-stained hooded sweatshirts; and, of course, the early morning competitions to see who slept less. (“You went to be at 4 last night!? For shame! I’ve only slept 18 minutes in the past 9 weeks.”) It’s tedious.

Waste Elimination (The Good Kind)

Exam prep doesn’t have to be this hard. If you’re willing to spend a few more minutes planning, and if you can put aside that childish impulse to procrastinate on absolutely everything until the last minute (it’s not a genetic trait, chief, you’re just being a lazy ass), you can eliminate most of this wasted time from your prep schedule. This elimination, in turn, will push the experience from overwhelming and terrible to hard but manageable.

Trust me, it’s worth it.

In this post I explain the simple mechanical process I used to prepare for exams back when I used to have lots of exams to prepare for. (Ah, the joys of being a senior graduate student.) Yes, it requires that you start things early. But it works. You can follow the plan more or less blindly; avoiding the ill-fated need to draw upon your limited will power to make decisions on a daily basis.

Cal’s Patent-Pending Mechanical Exam Preparation Process

I’m not usually so formal with my habits, but, for the sake of exposition, I’ve clustered the main ideas into clean bullet points. As usual, I expect you to customize, challenge, and experiment with the system until it best fits your situation:

1. Gather and Plug.
   Spend 20 minutes on each course. Gather together all the material you need to review. This might require printing your notes off your computer. If there are any holes in this material — a missed lecture or, perhaps, an important reading you didn’t get to — make plans in the immediate future to plug the gaps.
2. Construct Battle Plans.
   Once you fill the gaps you’ll be left with complete collections of information to review for each course. Spend some time to come up with a review battle plan for each of these piles. These plans should consist of — and only of — specific review actions with well-defined endpoints. I can’t stress the latter part enough. I don’t want to hear about you blindly flipping through your book for hours. You need to specify exactly how you are going to review and how you’ll know when you’re done.
3. Take a Break.
   If you don’t have time to step away for a day or two, then you started too late. You need time to clear your head before the next step.
4. Make Your Plans Less Dumb.
   Look back at your battle plans with a fresh eye. Ask yourself: where can I make this more efficient? Most likely, you’ll find several strategies that are redundant or could be replaced with something more streamlined. It’s easy, in the heat of the pre-exam moment, to get overzealous with your planning. Always assume things will take longer and your schedule will be tighter. Be prepared by cutting, cutting, and then cutting.
5. Schedule Your Battle Plans Using the Two Day Rule.
   Assign the different pieces of your battle plans to specific days leading up to the exams. When doing so, I suggest the following simple rule which, if followed, will provide a significant stress reduction: schedule each battle plan to finish two days before the relevant exam. There is something magical about never having to study the day before the test. It’s like a whole different (relaxed) experience. I know, I know, you’re probably saying right now: “I can’t finish a day early! I’m such a wild and crazy procrastinator!” Sigh. Here’s my response: “Man up.” You’re not starring in a National Lampoon movie. No one is impressed that you can put off work.)
6. Execute.
   Notice I’m avoiding the “s”-word here. “Studying” is for pseudo-working grinds. You’re executing a specific plan custom-designed to minimize time and stress. Bonus: Kelly over at Hack College will pound one beer for every time you work the phrase “I’m executing a specific plan custom-designed to minimize time and stress” into casual conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex.

In Conclusion

A lot of this might reek of common sense. But that’s also the smell of advice that might actually work. Approach your exam prep like a robot and you’ll be surprised by how smoothly it goes.

The Crowd Speaks

Enough about me! Last week I asked you to share your most effective and unusual study hacks. You sent in some clever strategies. Below are five of particular interest. Hopefully these will help stimulate your own thinking toward the sheer variety of approaches that are possible for mastering your academic environment.

I’m sad to report, however, that I don’t actually have t-shirts, as promised, that feature a smiling picture of me with the caption “Straight-A Students Do It On Schedule.” Although I thought this was infinitely clever, I was informed by Julie that, in fact, it’s infinitely not.

HACK #1: Study in Character
Submitted by jlb

Faced with a tough academic challenge? Imagine a character that would handle it well. Then tackle the challenge in character. Reader jlb admits to being a procrastinating perfectionist. But it when it came to earning his PhD in the classics, he invented: The Efficient Classicist. When ever it came time to work, he first asked “what would the efficient classicist do?”

As jlb recalls: “I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I knew exactly how an efficient classicist would behave, and I stuck to it. Inventing this fictional character helped me to get beyond my limiting ideas about myself.”

HACK #2: Memorize by Connecting to the Unforgettable
Submitted by Vincent

When faced with a straight memorization task, as in a Latin or foreign language class, don’t resort to rote review. Instead, connect each word to a strong visual that ties to both the word itself and its meaning. Not just any visual, mind you, but outrageous, unforgettable visuals. Use sex, drugs, booze, the thought of crazy old Mrs. Hannigan naked — whatever will stick out in your mind.

Reader Vincent describes how he learns Latin words 8 seconds at a time: “To learn “procella” (Latin for “storms”), for example, I imagine Hilary Clinton fervently making a speech on a stand as a “pro” (I mean pro as in an advocate) for “cellars” (of lots of beer) while thunder (”stormy conditions”) strikes in the background. When you do this two to three times a week, it becomes second nature.”

HACK #3: Quiz-and-Recall Using Idea Maps
Submitted by Dominic

When facing a class that presents a large amount of detailed information, using quiz-and-recall method on the raw facts can become overwhelmingly boring; not to mention that it becomes easy to miss the bigger picture connections and ideas that will help you on an advanced test. Try this instead: organize the information into idea maps that connect the information to bigger concepts which in turn connect with each other. When studying, try to reconstruct the idea map from scratch.

As reader Dominic explains: “During an exam, the first thing I do for each problem is to ask: ‘what part of the idea map does this belong to?’ Usually the problem’s core concepts then become clear. Ever since adopting and refining the above strategy, I have received nothing lower than an A in my advanced biology classes.”

HACK #4: Visualize Your Way Into a Flow State
Submitted by David

We work best when hit that magical moment of flow where everything else in the world drops away and your concentration is at its peak. Reaching this state, however, can be tough when you’re in a crowded study lounge, surrounded by over-caffeinated pre-meds loudly debating whose recent panic attack was most spectacular.

To combat this, head to a library that is quiet and that has nothing to do with what you study. This reduces stress and helps you relax. Once there, visualize yourself levitating in the air and looking at the back of your own head. This exercise, when enacted in a calm environment, helps you fall into a flow state.

As reader David explains: “I do this visualization exercise and it allows me to immediately enter the flow state. Having a relaxed environment just reduces the temptation to focus deadlines or upcoming tests and instead concentrate on accomplishing what needs to be done.”

HACK #5: Meditate Your Way Into a Flow State
Submitted by Michael

Not big on visualizing? Reader Michael (of the University Scholar blog) recalls a recent study by Dr. Heidi Wenk-Sormaz that demonstrates how 20 minutes of meditation produced better results on a subsequent concentration task than 20 minutes of relaxing or working on another problem. Take advantage of these concentration-boosting powers of meditation. Consider a quick 10 to 20 minutes of getting your zen on before class, before studying, before working on a paper, before a big test, or, even if you’re just having a hard time getting your motivation amped up.

As Michael notes: “Meditation is easy. You don’t need to find a meditation center or sign up for yoga. All you need to do is sit comfortably, on your knees, in a chair, or cross-legged on the floor and focus on your breathing.”