Here’s A Simple Way to Revise for Exams Better Than Ever Before
Make studying for exams easier, more interesting and more effective just through asking questions. This article is 920 words long and will take 3 to 4 minutes to read.
Years ago as a student, I stumbled upon a method that makes revising incredibly simple. I had forgotten about it until I saw a young lady highlighting her way through a text book on the train the other day…
The traditional way of revising for an exam is to read books, highlight passages, write notes and continuously review things. The aim is to remember important information. It’s boring, frustrating and highly ineffective. With a little knowledge of how the brain works, you can make a very clever improvement in how you prepare for exams.
The traditional method is ineffective for two reasons:
1. Remembering through repetition alone works on a very short term basis only.
2. Memorizing things doesn’t prepare you for what you have to do in the exam.
With the following method you can memorize with greater effectiveness and train yourself to sit exams at the same time.
If You Want a Better Answer, Ask a Better Question
Whenever you revise and go through books or papers, stop highlighting or writing notes and instead create questions.
For example, using the old method:
(History) 1960 Nixon fails to become president of the USA.
(Geography) A volcano is formed of a magma chamber, a pipe, a vent and a crater. A branch pipe and parasitic cone often forms.
(Science) Gas expands when heated. When constrained by volume the pressure increases.
New method:
How many presidential elections did Nixon fail to win? In what year were those elections?
What components make up a volcano? In what order are they formed?
What happens to a gas when it is heated? What if you do that in a sealed container of fixed volume?
If learning facts alone is not enough, then ask questions that get you to speculate, or ask questions of the same type that you will be given in your exam. For example:
If Nixon had won the presidency in 1960 what would probably have happened in Vietnam? or to the Space Program? or….?
If you wanted to prevent a volcano from erupting what could you do? What technology would you need?
What would you need to know to work out the maximum internal pressure that a can of soda could withstand before rupturing?
And that’s it. Simple and effective. You can kill two birds with one stone. This method allows you to remember with greater ease and precision than the traditional method and it simultaneously gets you to think as you will have to in the exam.
Now for the explanation, so that you understand why this works and why it is a superior method.
In traditional fashion for this blog, let’s look at the root cause of the problem - the exam itself, or more precisely, the purpose of the exam.
The Purpose of an Exam
It’s a method of measuring how much knowledge you have. Even more importantly, it’s a measure of how much skill you have with manipulating the knowledge to solve a problem.
Imagine it this way: you are a potter and you receive an order to make a pot. You are given some clay by the customer, but it’s not enough to make the whole pot, so you add some more clay to do the job. You take all of the clay and form it into the pot ordered.
In an exam, the order is the question, or problem to solve.Your clay is the information that you are given and what you already have. The pot that you make is a result of your skill at forming the clay to satisfy the order given.
When you revise in the traditional manner, all you are doing is identifying the clay that you might be required to use and where it is. That is not enough to do well. You must practice forming the clay into pots. Since you don’t know what the orders will be on the big day, you must practice forming lots of different types of pot: round ones, square ones, tall ones, short ones, plain ones, colorful ones and so on.
If you don’t do this then when you actually sit the exam you will have clay but little or no skill at creating what the customer wants. Trying to develop that skill during the exam is going to give you a poor result.
Why Questions are the Answer
Asking a question is a stimulus that demands a response. It’s a customer order to your brain and it will always respond with some kind of answer. Asking questions engages your mental capacity to solve problems. It forces you to work with the material at hand. In doing so, you develop the skills that you need to create satisfying solutions, products, or answers.
When you create questions instead of notes, you immediately start to manipulate information. It puts your brain to work. It demands mental activity. Creating notes or highlighting things does almost nothing for you. It’s too passive. That’s why it’s very ineffective.
The Naturally Easy Way to Improve Your Recall
It is very difficult to remember things in isolation. We remember with greater ability when we connect a new item to something that we already know and can remember without fail. When you work the information by answering a question, you naturally connect it with things that you already know in order to create the answer. This increases your likelihood of remembering things by default. It saves you the hassle of trying to specifically remember things (if you are like me, then you find that boring, frustrating and very ineffective).
So there you have it - an easier method than rote memorizing and a superior method for exam preparation.
If you are a student or a teacher, then please let me know if you will use this method and the results that you get.
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