Over the years and especially in high school I’ve had to study for hundreds of tests and my very first AP. And through all that I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that have helped me get through them all with high scores and less stress.
The first one may seem obvious but take good notes, but what do I mean by “good” notes. What makes good notes? From what I’ve found notes need a couple of main things. To start they need to be concise you don’t need to include every and the or but that you see just write down the important things like “mitochondria powerhouse of cell” instead of “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” even though its only a few words it will add up over a whole lecture.
Now that you have got good notes what do you do with them? They may now be concise however it is not practical to read all of your notes to study. Instead what I recommend doing is taking big vocabulary and making flashcards to study them. Next for big concepts, I recommend writing down the concept and trying to remember a brief description of what it is about. And if you have a quiz before your test make sure to write down the questions you missed to study with.
Sometimes teachers aren’t able to go over all the material in a unit or they may add some challenging problems to a test. Instead of stressing about being unprepared you could look through your textbooks and find a similar question or information pertaining to it that will help you study. If that doesn’t work you can often find PDFs of textbooks that way you are prepared for any possible curveballs that could be on the test.
It is also a good idea to quickly review or quiz yourself before a test and if it is on paper then write down what you saw in your brief glance. As often you are studying hours or days before a test and may not remember everything. For example, if you are about to have a math test I’ve found it can be beneficial to quickly look over notes to remember any formulas and then write them down on the test so that you don’t forget them.
My final tip is one that is quite common but extremely effective. This tip applies when you are actually taking a test, which is to go past any questions that are taking you too long. Then continue through the test and come back to the question. In my experience, this helps me understand the question better and I often catch things I would miss. The main reason this is helpful is that oftentimes tests are timed and you are limited and wasting x amount of minutes on a question is not an option.
Thank you all for reading I hope you enjoyed and stick around for the next post!