How To Study Effectively For Exams

There are two stages to this method:

• The creation stage: the objective is to generate high quality essay plans for every possible title that you could receive in an exam.
• The memorization stage: transfer all of these essay plans to memory by methodically using active recall, spaced repetition, spider diagrams, and flashcards.

Benefits of this technique: you will be able to memorize so many essay plans by the time your exam is due, that a lot of these will come up at the exam anyway (or similar ones, so you'll have the possibility to compile bits of the memorized information to generate great essays from scratch).

• Start with a question.
• Use Google to get as much information as you can about that particular question (articles, review papers, everything that could answer your question). Keep all the information in a research document.
• Create the plan and start developing its sections.
• Look at the lectures and recommended reading list and finish your essay.
• Give yourself one day to do this for each essay (keep in mind Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time you allocate to it).

• These flashcards are blocks of content that can insert into the essays you have planned. They also work for essays you have not prepared in advance: you have blocks of knowledge in your head that you can put into your new essay.
• Everything that is in your ANKI is going to get uploaded into your brain.
• Use them to memorize the paragraphs of your essays.
• Use keywords at the front of the cards: for example, the title of a paper you are going to discuss in your ANKI, a theory, or a concept.