How to Prepare in 24 Hours Before Your Exam

you have 24 hours before your exam and you are freaking out right now June I promised myself that I wouldn't procrastinate I promised you I wouldn't procrastinate but yeah I did again and I can't afford another bad grade I really need to do well in this exam but I only got 24 hours what do I possibly do well I got you I'm going to tell you exactly what I've done in the past because the truth of the matter is I've experienced that too yes I'm a de list biom medical engineering student I'm getting both my bachelors and my masters at the same time with the neuroengineering concentration I've had a lot of academic success but it doesn't mean I didn't experience what you're going through because the truth of the matter is life gets in the way so whether it's a fault of our own or whether it's just something that happened to us sometimes we find ourselves in these circumstances and I want you to be able to save this video and come back to it every time that it happens to you hopefully it's not too many times though we're going to get right into it the truth is you got 24 hours the last thing you want to do is hear a long intro my name is June Yu if you're new to the channel welcome if for returning welcome back make sure you give this video a thumbs up give it a comment and subscribe but let's get immediately into it step number one prioritize your study material you're going to be doing this in really three specific ways the first way is to identify your weaknesses and if you followed my content for long enough you know I talk about my learning system and I think that this Learning System is something that you should have adopted by now but this is exactly why you should have done it because it would have helped you in this current moment I just have to quickly interrupt for a very important piece of information I just got off the phone while I was editing this and I need to share this with you right away ladies and gentlemen I am so excited to say that we are officially back next week limited release and it's going to be available for immediate dispatch this is my learning system it's one that that I could not tell you how much time and effort went into making this Learning System is one that I've talked a lot about across all my platforms it's the one that I've been utilizing and I attribute a lot of My Success to uh the last four years of my biomedical engineering degrees and now I've seen this help thousands of you in your classrooms I've seen videos and pictures of it it's the most surreal experience ever on my end and I'm just so happy that I can help you guys with this book and I've been working extremely hard to make a restock possible and it's not always the easiest thing to do but the fact that the time is here um and it's next week it is the coolest coolest thing ever so what I want you to do is put your email into the link that I have in the description box below and you're just going to be a part of the wait list so that I can email you directly when the books go live next week so that you don't miss out on your chance to snag one uh because I assume that they're going to go really quickly so yeah I'm so excited but let's return to the rest of the video so we've talked about priming is what you do before class we talked about what you do during class but this third stage is where all of your time there would have saved you time here okay so those post class immediate reviews that's when you're looking at the Active recall questions you create during class you practice them and then you reflect on your strengths and weaknesses why do you do this so because if you find yourself in circumstances like this you know exactly where to focus your material on you know what your weaknesses are and you know to spend majority of your time there cuz if it's a strength of yours you probably just need to freshen up on it more than actually spending large chunks of time on it so if you followed my content if you know the Learning System then great you're already settled on this part but if you haven't done that just yet yet I still urge you to take about 30 minutes to do this okay so obviously it won't be as accurate or as indepth as if you would have done it along the process before your exam with the Learning System but here what you should do is grab your syllabus look at the topics that have been covered leading up to your exam and try to figure out areas in which you remember pretty well and the things that are going to be your weaknesses that you should spend more time on the second way you're going to scope down your material is by speaking to your friends if your friends have been keeping up with the material right and they understand the material and they know what's going to be on it and because they've shown up to every single class and maybe you haven't they've heard the little remarks by your professors that said hey this is going to be on the exam so make sure you know this it's important to speak to them right it's important to to gather information from your close group at school people that you trust you know other good students and see if your professor had hinted at any content emphasis that you might have missed upon or you you want to just speak on to your friends in case that they know that some parts of it are harder than other parts and they can let you know of it now so that's the second way of doing it the third way you're going to be doing it is looking at past papers right so past papers you have to be careful here right so I think what people do is they have this over dependency on past papers and that's not what you want because the truth of the matter is your past paper isn't going to be your exam especially if you get into higher education right so maybe if you are starting out and your professors are really kind that they'll give you a very similar exam but in my case that's like never the case but it's helpful to to think about certain content emphasis that you'll get while looking at past papers right even if the questions aren't going to be similar and so that's another great way to do that so you got three ways there that you're going to be scoping the material that you're going to be studying again the whole idea here is knowing that you have a very limited SP of time you want to be ensuring that you're using that to the best of your ability so make sure you follow this first stage the Second Step make a document however you want to do this whether it be a Google doc whether it be just a notebook piece of paper whether it be an Excel sheet however you think that this is going to work well for you and now that you've scoped down the material create a list of that material and start to color code them right so based on how comfortable you feel recalling that information so what I use personally is a green yellow and then red system so green means I recall the information sufficiently yellow means that I recall it adequately that there's some areas for improvement and then red just means that I don't know the material at all but this is a great way to keep track of it but the reason why I'm telling you to create a document for this is because as you start studying the material what I want you to do is actually on that same document next to the topic or next to the concept start to write important parts of it right if there's certain weaknesses or if there's certain really repeated things that you know are probably going to be on the exam you should just write them on that document why because it's going to be a perfect cheat sheet for you and we'll talk about this later on in the steps but during exam day you can immediately review that you can have assurance that okay here's all of the things that I know that I should probably focus upon and then I have that sheet I can go through it really quickly right before exam it'll help reduce anxiety and it's just a great way to do like last minute studying on the day of so take this seriously right so create that document you probably already created some sort of document while trying to scope down your study material now that you have it create a digital or a physical version of it and then have space to write down next to it some things that you want to notate as you go through the process of actually studying it step three create a study schedule I know probably what you're thinking about right now again you're probably thinking oh my gosh I'm freaking out I'm panicking I should just get right into studying the material but trust me these first three stages are extremely important because you're setting yourself up for Success right so that when you are studying the material and you get into that it's meaningful you're doing it in a time efficient and effective manner so this part also shouldn't take you long but it's important that you do this before you get into the material and that's creating a schedule for yourself so what I usually recommend is about 45 minutes per weakness now that's obviously dependent on how quickly you're able to absorb that information it has to do with what concepts you're talking about what subject you're talking about but usually 45 minutes is a great Focus number because 45 minutes is usually long enough to enter a flow State and not too long where you're bogged down by distractions and then you should have five minute breaks um that break it up right between your uh studying and then um into your next study session you should have breaks always include breaks I know that you're tempted to just study like eight hours straight but trust me the efficiency decreases dramatically and you want to be uring that you're making the most out of each weakness study session and by doing the breaks in between them it's a great opportunity for you to recover your focus your energy and then be able to really uh tackle the next about as effectively as possible I think another important part about these breaks though is that they don't have to be just these 5 minute breaks that you're in Bedding but they can be also in Junction with let's say you getting ready for bed right like you getting ready to bed is probably going to take 15 minutes for you to wash up like that should be integrated within your study schedule so that counts for a break when you go and eat dinner which you absolutely should do you should eat food you should also include that as part of your brain and so create this study schedule where you have about 45 minutes per these weaknesses or these Concepts and then go ahead and integrate these 5 minute breaks or also additional breaks in between with your eating with I also think you should have some movement in your break so be active sometimes so you don't want to fall asleep obviously I think that's a great basis to have in terms of a study schedule again it doesn't have to be perfect but then of course ensure that you're spending some time right before you go to bed reviewing your strengths as well so majority of this time it's going to be focused on your weaknesses but of course we're going to freshen up on our strengths as well at the end step number four I believe it is make use of your friends here again okay so what I mean by this is your friends if they've stayed on top of the material up to this point in time and they have their own strengths they might be able to explain to you some of them in a manner in which it is easy for you to comprehend where they remove the fluff of the textbook Source or whether it be a lecture that you might be tempted to look at but if your friend already knows material pretty well you should go ahead and just listen to them as they reduce the fluff and then just tell tell you the meat of of the content that's of importance now obviously in most cases I tend to tell you guys to not just take that at face value of what your friends tell you because your friend's ability to comprehend information doesn't guarantee that they know everything that you need to know and that's why you should always double check with it but at this point you're running out of time right so a great way to be efficient with this is make use of your friends um I I definitely don't think you should spend the majority of your time doing a study group for the remainder of the 24 hours just because it can be very distracting if you don't have the right type of people around you but if you got those few select friends where you know that there are really smart or that they're always on top of their material then go ahead and call them give them like a 10 15 minute call and try to figure out hey are there certain Concepts here that you could explain to me in a way that's easy for you to understand it's like a double win because they're prac practicing basically the fan technique you're trying to understand the material great it's a win-win make use of your friends it's a great opportunity for you to do that step number five find a focused space man this is so important because you got to find a space here now with this remaining time that's so limited that you are not being bogged down by distractions okay so if you are in a household that's really loud I've experienced that growing up maybe you don't study in your house right maybe you go out to a library or you go to a friend's house or you find a different environment that's going to be quieter now if you're forced to work inside the house still I have a perfect option for you hopefully you have some sort of noise cancelling headphones if not I use these um it's like a few dollars on Amazon just these earplugs they do a pretty darn good job of blocking out a lot of the noise I'll have a divider I I use this gring up so I literally bought one of those cardboard dividers and it's so important that you do that because people fail to understand that your mental focus usually follows your visual Focus so if you're visually distracted you'll be mentally distracted as well so divider does a really good job of eliminating those potential distractions visually and allowing you to really focus on the material in front of you or your pieces of paper or your computer whatever it is so I think a divider is a really great idea especially if you're in a busy chaotic space so you have your earplugs you have your headphones um you have your divider and the next one that you should have is a timer so this timer is really cool basically it's like the gravity timer you have like 30 minutes 60 Minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes and you'll literally flip it and it'll it'll give you the time and I I love this I I think you should always have a timer on you because if you're going to be sticking to your schedule you want to be ensuring that all your brakes are taking at the reasonable time you're taking the amount of of breaks that you should be having you should be studying for those 45 minutes or whatever you determine is effective for you a timer is a really important thing to have here right another thing that you should have snacks so you should have your dinners and and you should allocate time for that and I don't think you should be eating your dinner while studying just because um I think that's a very stressful thing to do like if you go and eat dinner just give yourself like 15 20 minutes to eat the dinner and then come back but throughout you might be hungry so have snacks that are not going to be sticky on your fingers have some nuts have some fruit but make sure you got some like forks and stuff so again your hands aren't sticky you got to go wash your hands but you should have snacks there for you so that when you get hungry throughout it you can continue to feed yourself and you can continue to sustain that level of energy without needing to get up and go to the kitchen and again interfere with your focus so if you have that in front of you you're going to be well suited in terms of your workspace to optimize for the most amount of success this is crucial you don't want to be bogged down by Distraction it's only going to grow in frustration if you got your door open people are coming in you're going to get mad at the people coming in trying to distract you you're going to turn off all your notifications on your phone you're going to lock in you got a little bit of time left let's make sure that this time is focused and it really counts step number six we are going to be using active techniques for our revision there are four ways that I'm going to be discussing about how you can do this the reason why you want to stay away from passive techniques is because one they're low utility two they take up a lot of time so when we're talking about like rereading something rewriting something this isn't the time for it I don't think there's really much of a time for it I think passive techniques can kind of go in the dumpster I think sometimes passive techniques can have a space but definitely not now when you are really limited on your bandwidth you should be utilizing active techniques so let's go through them before I go through them let's talk about what active techniques really are so it it's a great way to accurately assess your knowledge as you are constantly testing yourself without the source material in front of you that's like the most basic answer I could possibly give you but passive is like when you were looking at the material in front of you rewriting it rereading it all that stuff but what what you want to be doing is assessing your knowledge and actually forcing yourself to retrieve the information without the source material in front of you is really really important for understanding and retaining so a lot of times we focus on what can we put into our brains like what can we shove into our brains but it's just as important in research has shown that it's also as important that you you pull that information out with these active recall applications cool now that we're on the same page let's talk about some of the ones that I would encourage so I think the bluring method is fantastic so the bluring method is you find what source you will be reading you'll make it into a logical chunk for you and then you'll close the source and on a piece of paper you will blurt out you will write out everything that you recall from it so again just a simple way to accurately test for your knowledge now obviously you're going to have areas in which you don't remember great you you found areas to Target for your for the revision right now the areas that you did recognize and the areas you were able to recall accurately great now that's become a strength of yours and this is where you can start to change those colors on the document from maybe red to to yellow yellow to Green eventually so the blury method I think is a fantastic option if we're talking about the next one that I encourage you to utilize is the fan technique so the fan technique it's funny I I spoke about this earlier but maybe I should have explained what the fan technique was then it's your ability to explain a concept almost as if you were speaking to a fifth grader right so when I say that to you though you might be thinking oh I just have to simplify the information I just have to make it really really baby termed I just got to use really simple words but that's like half of the the task here it's also about making sure that the information is accurate too right and and a great way to supplement your explanations with analogies and examples and that will further require you to deeply understand the information first and then you'll speak it aloud and try to practice with it so a great tip I got for it if you just want to start out simple literally just get your teddy bears out get your I don't know whatever just imagine you have a friend get your pillows out and speak to them like they're the individual that you're trying to explain the concepts too um I think probably better Alternatives here especially as you're running out of time are one if you can do this with a friend if you can try and explain to them certain Concepts and they can correct you on areas um that that's ideal cuz that immediate feedback that you get is going to serve you well so sometimes you might think that you are simplifying and being accurate with a concept but then your friend will be like yeah actually I don't think that you understood that correctly like this is what I think the explanation should be like that's a great way to get immediate feedback but if you don't have a friend around you what I do all the time is I will literally record myself on my Mac and try to explain it the reason is is because I'll listen to that back in 2x speed and I will do that self assessment for myself so the find technique is great and the third way that you can do this are with practice tests and I think this is probably the best way to do this as you're running out of time again it had already scoped out the content for you and as you've done the learning and the fing techniques for the some of the areas that might have not been covered exactly on that past paper now it's your time to do that pass paper right it's your time to go through the process of answering these questions and and what what I encourage you to do though is when you are going through the past papers not just figuring out the right answers but truly questioning if you understand the material right like if you're going going to go through the past paper make use of that so in other words this is what I see a lot of times it's like you will take a guess and then you'll look at the answers right away and you'll think yeah that's kind of what I meant I I know that material and then you go to the next one and then you'll do that constantly but in reality you probably didn't know that material and most likely that question is going to be reframed different on the exam and if you don't know the material you're probably not going to do well on the exam question so be sure that that you are really challenging yourself to provide thorough answers even if it's a multiple choice question like actually explain or write down why those answers you think are correct before looking at the answer sheet but also take the time to think about the other answers and why they were wrong and just consider different applications in which that question could potentially be asked and this is really helpful right so this is your opportunity to really test yourself with these past paper questions but again it's only effective if the intention behind it if the process that you're applying is effective so so utilize this in terms of my advice and if you're going to use practice papers which I think you should approach it in that manner with with a lot of intention so if if those are the three main ways that you are going to be using active recall I think the fourth one that most people tend to skip out on that I think can be really helpful are different ways of learning an information right or different ways of viewing a piece of information so I think visual aids and pneumonics are great opportunities for you as well just because at the very least they break up the monotony of sometimes just trying to do the same type of revision instead when you can view knowledge with pneumonics or you can view knowledge with a visual diagram I think could be really beneficial I think diagrams are probably what I would recommend the most I think pneumonics have their place but I think depending on what subject and depending on uh what topic it might be hard to come up with these pneumonics and you coming up with a pneumonic might actually take more time than you just learning the material but when you are talking about these visual diagrams they can go a really long way so as you are starting to understand some of these Concepts right like you you've created a list of these important Concepts that are going to be covered on the exam already if you look at them and you start to group them and you start to create relationships between them it's your opportunity to really see the big picture understanding of everything and how things start to interconnect what do I mean by this well it's like I don't want you guys to fixate so much on these individual compon components because just CU you know individual topics doesn't mean that you're going to have the skill to synthesize them in real time on the exam and that's how most exam questions are when you get into higher education right they're inferential they're not going to be ones that um require you to regurgitate um a piece of information when you get into higher education it's all about trying to synthesize new knowledge with what you do know it's about contextualizing it's about comparing contrasting and that requires an ability to understand how these Concepts link together so diagrams are a great way to visually represent this so I urge you to try this yourself so we talked about the blurting method the fan Technique we talked about using practice tests but using them effectively and now we've talked about visual diagrams and potentially utilizing pneumonics as well step seven sleep as obvious as this might sound I know and I also know that you're probably tempted to not do this even though you know it's obvious don't pull an all nighter I'm going to be a hypocrite if I said that I never pulled an all nighter before but it's so ineffective because you have to understand the way the neuroplasticity Works your ability to consolidate information and to be able to retain it depends a lot on deep rest and that's usually your sleep that happens that night so absolutely sleep okay you should account for in your schedule an opportunity for you to sleep enough all right so you're probably not going to be able to sleep like your 8 n hours if you can fantastic but if you are really in a crunch and you're talking about these really really complex classes you might have to sacrifice an hour or two but you do want to make sure that you're getting quality sleep so that you're able to have that neuroplasticity happen you're able to also think about your performance right we know that when we are drowsy we're not performing at the level that we should be performing at so you're better off like even if you don't necessarily review every piece of individual information I would actually advise you to sleep then try to spend another 3 hours looking at that information individually why am I saying this because I just talked to you about the importance of a diagram and understanding how information links together the reason why you do that too is because sometimes when you have such an interconnected web and you understand why things are linked together and how things are linked together then you can actually fill in the gaps a lot of times even if you don't know the individual material at its depth you understand how it works in relation to the other pieces of information that's why that diagram is so essential and so that's why I would recommend that you would just sleep because if you can sleep and you have the higher performance the next day you're you're going to be able to challenge your brain to be able to look at those gaps of knowledge and fill them in yourself in real time under that pressure trust me I think that it's it's hard to convince somebody to sleep when they are trying to pull an all nighter but if you have organized your time in an effective and efficient manner so that you're covering your weaknesses you're taking time to freshen up on your strengths if you've done this those first three steps already then most likely you would have been able to manage that time so that you can go to sleep at a reasonable hour so make sure you sleep okay step number eight I'm going to talk about an all- Encompass what you can do on your exam day so you've gone through the part of revising you've done a lot of the hard work at this point but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be optimizing the day of and there are ways to do this the first is to make sure you eat a breakfast make sure you eat a lunch I don't know what time your exams are I take a lot of Master's classes so sometimes my are like 8:00 p.m. right and so even that gives me time to spread out my study schedule a lot more than if I just had the night before hopefully that makes sense but I am ensuring that I eat all my meals the last thing that you want to be doing when you're are sitting for an exam is hearing your stomach Rumble and not having the energy to finish an exam right your performance has a lot to do with the food that you fuel your body with with the ability to get a good night's sleep so don't discount the importance of that the second part here is to monitor your caffeine intake especially if you've lost a good amount of sleep you're going to be tempted to just dose up on caffeine but the issue is you get that jittery feeling you're you're super anxious um and now you have this whole testing anxiety and then you also have the fact that you didn't sleep and you you're dosed up on all this caffeine so I think caffeine is useful especially if you're tired um and it can boost your performance but just monitor how much you're taking okay I I I don't think you should be you you know drinking two cold brues like it's probably not going to serve you as well as you would like it to it's probably going to do a lot more damage and it's going to do a lot more harm than any good so just just monitor it but I think consuming It generally is is totally fine number three breathing techniques I'm not going to go into the ones that I use specifically but if you go up on YouTube and just search up breathing techniques there's a lot of guided ones for about like 5 minutes or 10 minutes weirdly enough they'll do wonders for you right because what happens a lot of times is we have this tension in our body that goes unnoticed like there's serious tension there and it influences our Behavior influences our cognitive function and just releasing some of that tension helps you be more like you it helps you to actually perform well under that pressure and just be able to recall the information the night prior effectively so breathing techniques are a great opportunity to do this but the best part is is like they they don't take long and and for those that think breathing techniques are weird like think about the greatest athletes like you look at Steph Curry you look at LeBron you look at your favorite football players like all of them have their breathing techniques that they go through before their games or during their games it's like the moment is big but but try to ground yourself try to be mindful of the situation and so that you're able to perform the way that you want to perform and you don't combust under the pressures of the external situation so I think that's really important for you to try now the next tip that I'm going to give you for the day of is probably the most important one and this is going to wrap everything up and that's to review your cheat sheet of weaknesses of topics that you knew were going to be a focus and that's why I told you to do this early on so now at this point what you should have is hopefully a list that has a lot of green on it obviously it's probably not going to be the case you're going to have some yellows maybe even some Reds but those Reds hopefully you'll be able to fill in the gaps in real time um because you're able to have a great understanding of how the information links or maybe the information just isn't on the exam and that then you're then you flucked out but yeah that's a great cheat sheet for you because you can immediately look at that and you can refresh through it and it does a lot of good in terms of reassuring you that you know the material because what happens a lot of times right before exams we're like our brains are going 1,000 miles per hour because we know the pressure that comes along with an exam especially if it's like weighted 30% or 50% of your score so when you go through that paper you're like yeah I do know this material yeah these are all the things that I needed to cover and I did Cover a majority of them does a really good job of visually showcasing to yourself that you know what you're doing and that you are as prepared as as you possibly could have been and now I'm going to wrap this all up by saying this I teach you how to do well in school right and I teach you that getting good grades is important but it's not everything right and what I start to see people do is they start to prioritize the grades more than the experience itself and then it makes the entire Journey absolutely miserable look if you can implement the right strategies and you can take your failures for what they are and then be able to change your techniques in real time it makes the journey a lot more fun it it allows you to control what you can control and then make incremental progress to where you want to be so even to this day it's not like I get Aid's on every single exam there are sometimes where I don't perform as well as I would like to but I take that for what it is it's like yeah that grade is not perfect but it's also not make it or break it right I'm still going to graduate most likely so I'm not going to put that extreme pressure on myself if even if I get a grade that I don't like but I'm also not going to just just ignore it right like I'm going to say all right maybe I don't leave just 24 hours on the clock before this next exam but I just want to say this as a word of reassurance if you're watching this video and you're applying these types of techniques I'm proud of you I genuinely am you are ahead of a lot more people than than you could imagine there's a lot of people that just give up all together and it's really unfortunate because um learning can be a really enjoyable experience if done right and hopefully these types of tips and techniques that I teach you really embody that I spoke at like 100 mph in this video specifically because I know that you only got 24 hours left so maybe I missed some things maybe some things were unclear and I'd be happy to clear it up in the comments below so please leave your questions there and I and I'm more than happy to help this is just really um came from this DM that I just got and this person was saying like June like I'm freaking out like please help me I created a whole voice message for them was about like 20 minutes long um but I was like this is probably something useful for all of you guys to hear as well so um take it for what it is utilize it save it so that you can have more success even if you just got 24 hours left uh give this video a thumbs up if you've learned anything and of course subscribe with that all being said until next time please take care of yourselves I love you guys so much and I'll see you all at the top

you have 24 hours before your exam and you are freaking out right now June I promised myself that I wouldn&#39;t procrastinate I promised you I wouldn&#39;t procrastinate but yeah I did again and I can&#39;t afford another bad grade I really need to do well in this exam but I only got 24 hours what do I possibly do well I got you I&#39;m going to tell you exactly what I&#39;ve done in the past because the truth of the matter is I&#39;ve experienced that too yes I&#39;m a de list biom medical engineering student I&#39;m getting both my bachelors and my masters at the same time with the neuroengineering concentration I&#39;ve had a lot of academic success but it doesn&#39;t mean I didn&#39;t experience what you&#39;re going through because the truth of the matter is life gets in the way so whether it&#39;s a fault of our own or whether it&#39;s just something that happened to us sometimes we find ourselves in these circumstances and I want you to be able to save this video and come back to it every time that it happens to you hopefully it&#39;s not too many times though we&#39;re going to get right into it the truth is you got 24 hours the last thing you want to do is hear a long intro my name is June Yu if you&#39;re new to the channel welcome if for returning welcome back make sure you give this video a thumbs up give it a comment and subscribe but let&#39;s get immediately into it step number one prioritize your study material you&#39;re going to be doing this in really three specific ways the first way is to identify your weaknesses and if you followed my content for long enough you know I talk about my learning system and I think that this Learning System is something that you should have adopted by now but this is exactly why you should have done it because it would have helped you in this current moment I just have to quickly interrupt for a very important piece of information I just got off the phone while I was editing this and I need to share this with you right away ladies and gentlemen I am so excited to say that we are officially back next week limited release and it&#39;s going to be available for immediate dispatch this is my learning system it&#39;s one that that I could not tell you how much time and effort went into making this Learning System is one that I&#39;ve talked a lot about across all my platforms it&#39;s the one that I&#39;ve been utilizing and I attribute a lot of My Success to uh the last four years of my biomedical engineering degrees and now I&#39;ve seen this help thousands of you in your classrooms I&#39;ve seen videos and pictures of it it&#39;s the most surreal experience ever on my end and I&#39;m just so happy that I can help you guys with this book and I&#39;ve been working extremely hard to make a restock possible and it&#39;s not always the easiest thing to do but the fact that the time is here um and it&#39;s next week it is the coolest coolest thing ever so what I want you to do is put your email into the link that I have in the description box below and you&#39;re just going to be a part of the wait list so that I can email you directly when the books go live next week so that you don&#39;t miss out on your chance to snag one uh because I assume that they&#39;re going to go really quickly so yeah I&#39;m so excited but let&#39;s return to the rest of the video so we&#39;ve talked about priming is what you do before class we talked about what you do during class but this third stage is where all of your time there would have saved you time here okay so those post class immediate reviews that&#39;s when you&#39;re looking at the Active recall questions you create during class you practice them and then you reflect on your strengths and weaknesses why do you do this so because if you find yourself in circumstances like this you know exactly where to focus your material on you know what your weaknesses are and you know to spend majority of your time there cuz if it&#39;s a strength of yours you probably just need to freshen up on it more than actually spending large chunks of time on it so if you followed my content if you know the Learning System then great you&#39;re already settled on this part but if you haven&#39;t done that just yet yet I still urge you to take about 30 minutes to do this okay so obviously it won&#39;t be as accurate or as indepth as if you would have done it along the process before your exam with the Learning System but here what you should do is grab your syllabus look at the topics that have been covered leading up to your exam and try to figure out areas in which you remember pretty well and the things that are going to be your weaknesses that you should spend more time on the second way you&#39;re going to scope down your material is by speaking to your friends if your friends have been keeping up with the material right and they understand the material and they know what&#39;s going to be on it and because they&#39;ve shown up to every single class and maybe you haven&#39;t they&#39;ve heard the little remarks by your professors that said hey this is going to be on the exam so make sure you know this it&#39;s important to speak to them right it&#39;s important to to gather information from your close group at school people that you trust you know other good students and see if your professor had hinted at any content emphasis that you might have missed upon or you you want to just speak on to your friends in case that they know that some parts of it are harder than other parts and they can let you know of it now so that&#39;s the second way of doing it the third way you&#39;re going to be doing it is looking at past papers right so past papers you have to be careful here right so I think what people do is they have this over dependency on past papers and that&#39;s not what you want because the truth of the matter is your past paper isn&#39;t going to be your exam especially if you get into higher education right so maybe if you are starting out and your professors are really kind that they&#39;ll give you a very similar exam but in my case that&#39;s like never the case but it&#39;s helpful to to think about certain content emphasis that you&#39;ll get while looking at past papers right even if the questions aren&#39;t going to be similar and so that&#39;s another great way to do that so you got three ways there that you&#39;re going to be scoping the material that you&#39;re going to be studying again the whole idea here is knowing that you have a very limited SP of time you want to be ensuring that you&#39;re using that to the best of your ability so make sure you follow this first stage the Second Step make a document however you want to do this whether it be a Google doc whether it be just a notebook piece of paper whether it be an Excel sheet however you think that this is going to work well for you and now that you&#39;ve scoped down the material create a list of that material and start to color code them right so based on how comfortable you feel recalling that information so what I use personally is a green yellow and then red system so green means I recall the information sufficiently yellow means that I recall it adequately that there&#39;s some areas for improvement and then red just means that I don&#39;t know the material at all but this is a great way to keep track of it but the reason why I&#39;m telling you to create a document for this is because as you start studying the material what I want you to do is actually on that same document next to the topic or next to the concept start to write important parts of it right if there&#39;s certain weaknesses or if there&#39;s certain really repeated things that you know are probably going to be on the exam you should just write them on that document why because it&#39;s going to be a perfect cheat sheet for you and we&#39;ll talk about this later on in the steps but during exam day you can immediately review that you can have assurance that okay here&#39;s all of the things that I know that I should probably focus upon and then I have that sheet I can go through it really quickly right before exam it&#39;ll help reduce anxiety and it&#39;s just a great way to do like last minute studying on the day of so take this seriously right so create that document you probably already created some sort of document while trying to scope down your study material now that you have it create a digital or a physical version of it and then have space to write down next to it some things that you want to notate as you go through the process of actually studying it step three create a study schedule I know probably what you&#39;re thinking about right now again you&#39;re probably thinking oh my gosh I&#39;m freaking out I&#39;m panicking I should just get right into studying the material but trust me these first three stages are extremely important because you&#39;re setting yourself up for Success right so that when you are studying the material and you get into that it&#39;s meaningful you&#39;re doing it in a time efficient and effective manner so this part also shouldn&#39;t take you long but it&#39;s important that you do this before you get into the material and that&#39;s creating a schedule for yourself so what I usually recommend is about 45 minutes per weakness now that&#39;s obviously dependent on how quickly you&#39;re able to absorb that information it has to do with what concepts you&#39;re talking about what subject you&#39;re talking about but usually 45 minutes is a great Focus number because 45 minutes is usually long enough to enter a flow State and not too long where you&#39;re bogged down by distractions and then you should have five minute breaks um that break it up right between your uh studying and then um into your next study session you should have breaks always include breaks I know that you&#39;re tempted to just study like eight hours straight but trust me the efficiency decreases dramatically and you want to be uring that you&#39;re making the most out of each weakness study session and by doing the breaks in between them it&#39;s a great opportunity for you to recover your focus your energy and then be able to really uh tackle the next about as effectively as possible I think another important part about these breaks though is that they don&#39;t have to be just these 5 minute breaks that you&#39;re in Bedding but they can be also in Junction with let&#39;s say you getting ready for bed right like you getting ready to bed is probably going to take 15 minutes for you to wash up like that should be integrated within your study schedule so that counts for a break when you go and eat dinner which you absolutely should do you should eat food you should also include that as part of your brain and so create this study schedule where you have about 45 minutes per these weaknesses or these Concepts and then go ahead and integrate these 5 minute breaks or also additional breaks in between with your eating with I also think you should have some movement in your break so be active sometimes so you don&#39;t want to fall asleep obviously I think that&#39;s a great basis to have in terms of a study schedule again it doesn&#39;t have to be perfect but then of course ensure that you&#39;re spending some time right before you go to bed reviewing your strengths as well so majority of this time it&#39;s going to be focused on your weaknesses but of course we&#39;re going to freshen up on our strengths as well at the end step number four I believe it is make use of your friends here again okay so what I mean by this is your friends if they&#39;ve stayed on top of the material up to this point in time and they have their own strengths they might be able to explain to you some of them in a manner in which it is easy for you to comprehend where they remove the fluff of the textbook Source or whether it be a lecture that you might be tempted to look at but if your friend already knows material pretty well you should go ahead and just listen to them as they reduce the fluff and then just tell tell you the meat of of the content that&#39;s of importance now obviously in most cases I tend to tell you guys to not just take that at face value of what your friends tell you because your friend&#39;s ability to comprehend information doesn&#39;t guarantee that they know everything that you need to know and that&#39;s why you should always double check with it but at this point you&#39;re running out of time right so a great way to be efficient with this is make use of your friends um I I definitely don&#39;t think you should spend the majority of your time doing a study group for the remainder of the 24 hours just because it can be very distracting if you don&#39;t have the right type of people around you but if you got those few select friends where you know that there are really smart or that they&#39;re always on top of their material then go ahead and call them give them like a 10 15 minute call and try to figure out hey are there certain Concepts here that you could explain to me in a way that&#39;s easy for you to understand it&#39;s like a double win because they&#39;re prac practicing basically the fan technique you&#39;re trying to understand the material great it&#39;s a win-win make use of your friends it&#39;s a great opportunity for you to do that step number five find a focused space man this is so important because you got to find a space here now with this remaining time that&#39;s so limited that you are not being bogged down by distractions okay so if you are in a household that&#39;s really loud I&#39;ve experienced that growing up maybe you don&#39;t study in your house right maybe you go out to a library or you go to a friend&#39;s house or you find a different environment that&#39;s going to be quieter now if you&#39;re forced to work inside the house still I have a perfect option for you hopefully you have some sort of noise cancelling headphones if not I use these um it&#39;s like a few dollars on Amazon just these earplugs they do a pretty darn good job of blocking out a lot of the noise I&#39;ll have a divider I I use this gring up so I literally bought one of those cardboard dividers and it&#39;s so important that you do that because people fail to understand that your mental focus usually follows your visual Focus so if you&#39;re visually distracted you&#39;ll be mentally distracted as well so divider does a really good job of eliminating those potential distractions visually and allowing you to really focus on the material in front of you or your pieces of paper or your computer whatever it is so I think a divider is a really great idea especially if you&#39;re in a busy chaotic space so you have your earplugs you have your headphones um you have your divider and the next one that you should have is a timer so this timer is really cool basically it&#39;s like the gravity timer you have like 30 minutes 60 Minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes and you&#39;ll literally flip it and it&#39;ll it&#39;ll give you the time and I I love this I I think you should always have a timer on you because if you&#39;re going to be sticking to your schedule you want to be ensuring that all your brakes are taking at the reasonable time you&#39;re taking the amount of of breaks that you should be having you should be studying for those 45 minutes or whatever you determine is effective for you a timer is a really important thing to have here right another thing that you should have snacks so you should have your dinners and and you should allocate time for that and I don&#39;t think you should be eating your dinner while studying just because um I think that&#39;s a very stressful thing to do like if you go and eat dinner just give yourself like 15 20 minutes to eat the dinner and then come back but throughout you might be hungry so have snacks that are not going to be sticky on your fingers have some nuts have some fruit but make sure you got some like forks and stuff so again your hands aren&#39;t sticky you got to go wash your hands but you should have snacks there for you so that when you get hungry throughout it you can continue to feed yourself and you can continue to sustain that level of energy without needing to get up and go to the kitchen and again interfere with your focus so if you have that in front of you you&#39;re going to be well suited in terms of your workspace to optimize for the most amount of success this is crucial you don&#39;t want to be bogged down by Distraction it&#39;s only going to grow in frustration if you got your door open people are coming in you&#39;re going to get mad at the people coming in trying to distract you you&#39;re going to turn off all your notifications on your phone you&#39;re going to lock in you got a little bit of time left let&#39;s make sure that this time is focused and it really counts step number six we are going to be using active techniques for our revision there are four ways that I&#39;m going to be discussing about how you can do this the reason why you want to stay away from passive techniques is because one they&#39;re low utility two they take up a lot of time so when we&#39;re talking about like rereading something rewriting something this isn&#39;t the time for it I don&#39;t think there&#39;s really much of a time for it I think passive techniques can kind of go in the dumpster I think sometimes passive techniques can have a space but definitely not now when you are really limited on your bandwidth you should be utilizing active techniques so let&#39;s go through them before I go through them let&#39;s talk about what active techniques really are so it it&#39;s a great way to accurately assess your knowledge as you are constantly testing yourself without the source material in front of you that&#39;s like the most basic answer I could possibly give you but passive is like when you were looking at the material in front of you rewriting it rereading it all that stuff but what what you want to be doing is assessing your knowledge and actually forcing yourself to retrieve the information without the source material in front of you is really really important for understanding and retaining so a lot of times we focus on what can we put into our brains like what can we shove into our brains but it&#39;s just as important in research has shown that it&#39;s also as important that you you pull that information out with these active recall applications cool now that we&#39;re on the same page let&#39;s talk about some of the ones that I would encourage so I think the bluring method is fantastic so the bluring method is you find what source you will be reading you&#39;ll make it into a logical chunk for you and then you&#39;ll close the source and on a piece of paper you will blurt out you will write out everything that you recall from it so again just a simple way to accurately test for your knowledge now obviously you&#39;re going to have areas in which you don&#39;t remember great you you found areas to Target for your for the revision right now the areas that you did recognize and the areas you were able to recall accurately great now that&#39;s become a strength of yours and this is where you can start to change those colors on the document from maybe red to to yellow yellow to Green eventually so the blury method I think is a fantastic option if we&#39;re talking about the next one that I encourage you to utilize is the fan technique so the fan technique it&#39;s funny I I spoke about this earlier but maybe I should have explained what the fan technique was then it&#39;s your ability to explain a concept almost as if you were speaking to a fifth grader right so when I say that to you though you might be thinking oh I just have to simplify the information I just have to make it really really baby termed I just got to use really simple words but that&#39;s like half of the the task here it&#39;s also about making sure that the information is accurate too right and and a great way to supplement your explanations with analogies and examples and that will further require you to deeply understand the information first and then you&#39;ll speak it aloud and try to practice with it so a great tip I got for it if you just want to start out simple literally just get your teddy bears out get your I don&#39;t know whatever just imagine you have a friend get your pillows out and speak to them like they&#39;re the individual that you&#39;re trying to explain the concepts too um I think probably better Alternatives here especially as you&#39;re running out of time are one if you can do this with a friend if you can try and explain to them certain Concepts and they can correct you on areas um that that&#39;s ideal cuz that immediate feedback that you get is going to serve you well so sometimes you might think that you are simplifying and being accurate with a concept but then your friend will be like yeah actually I don&#39;t think that you understood that correctly like this is what I think the explanation should be like that&#39;s a great way to get immediate feedback but if you don&#39;t have a friend around you what I do all the time is I will literally record myself on my Mac and try to explain it the reason is is because I&#39;ll listen to that back in 2x speed and I will do that self assessment for myself so the find technique is great and the third way that you can do this are with practice tests and I think this is probably the best way to do this as you&#39;re running out of time again it had already scoped out the content for you and as you&#39;ve done the learning and the fing techniques for the some of the areas that might have not been covered exactly on that past paper now it&#39;s your time to do that pass paper right it&#39;s your time to go through the process of answering these questions and and what what I encourage you to do though is when you are going through the past papers not just figuring out the right answers but truly questioning if you understand the material right like if you&#39;re going going to go through the past paper make use of that so in other words this is what I see a lot of times it&#39;s like you will take a guess and then you&#39;ll look at the answers right away and you&#39;ll think yeah that&#39;s kind of what I meant I I know that material and then you go to the next one and then you&#39;ll do that constantly but in reality you probably didn&#39;t know that material and most likely that question is going to be reframed different on the exam and if you don&#39;t know the material you&#39;re probably not going to do well on the exam question so be sure that that you are really challenging yourself to provide thorough answers even if it&#39;s a multiple choice question like actually explain or write down why those answers you think are correct before looking at the answer sheet but also take the time to think about the other answers and why they were wrong and just consider different applications in which that question could potentially be asked and this is really helpful right so this is your opportunity to really test yourself with these past paper questions but again it&#39;s only effective if the intention behind it if the process that you&#39;re applying is effective so so utilize this in terms of my advice and if you&#39;re going to use practice papers which I think you should approach it in that manner with with a lot of intention so if if those are the three main ways that you are going to be using active recall I think the fourth one that most people tend to skip out on that I think can be really helpful are different ways of learning an information right or different ways of viewing a piece of information so I think visual aids and pneumonics are great opportunities for you as well just because at the very least they break up the monotony of sometimes just trying to do the same type of revision instead when you can view knowledge with pneumonics or you can view knowledge with a visual diagram I think could be really beneficial I think diagrams are probably what I would recommend the most I think pneumonics have their place but I think depending on what subject and depending on uh what topic it might be hard to come up with these pneumonics and you coming up with a pneumonic might actually take more time than you just learning the material but when you are talking about these visual diagrams they can go a really long way so as you are starting to understand some of these Concepts right like you you&#39;ve created a list of these important Concepts that are going to be covered on the exam already if you look at them and you start to group them and you start to create relationships between them it&#39;s your opportunity to really see the big picture understanding of everything and how things start to interconnect what do I mean by this well it&#39;s like I don&#39;t want you guys to fixate so much on these individual compon components because just CU you know individual topics doesn&#39;t mean that you&#39;re going to have the skill to synthesize them in real time on the exam and that&#39;s how most exam questions are when you get into higher education right they&#39;re inferential they&#39;re not going to be ones that um require you to regurgitate um a piece of information when you get into higher education it&#39;s all about trying to synthesize new knowledge with what you do know it&#39;s about contextualizing it&#39;s about comparing contrasting and that requires an ability to understand how these Concepts link together so diagrams are a great way to visually represent this so I urge you to try this yourself so we talked about the blurting method the fan Technique we talked about using practice tests but using them effectively and now we&#39;ve talked about visual diagrams and potentially utilizing pneumonics as well step seven sleep as obvious as this might sound I know and I also know that you&#39;re probably tempted to not do this even though you know it&#39;s obvious don&#39;t pull an all nighter I&#39;m going to be a hypocrite if I said that I never pulled an all nighter before but it&#39;s so ineffective because you have to understand the way the neuroplasticity Works your ability to consolidate information and to be able to retain it depends a lot on deep rest and that&#39;s usually your sleep that happens that night so absolutely sleep okay you should account for in your schedule an opportunity for you to sleep enough all right so you&#39;re probably not going to be able to sleep like your 8 n hours if you can fantastic but if you are really in a crunch and you&#39;re talking about these really really complex classes you might have to sacrifice an hour or two but you do want to make sure that you&#39;re getting quality sleep so that you&#39;re able to have that neuroplasticity happen you&#39;re able to also think about your performance right we know that when we are drowsy we&#39;re not performing at the level that we should be performing at so you&#39;re better off like even if you don&#39;t necessarily review every piece of individual information I would actually advise you to sleep then try to spend another 3 hours looking at that information individually why am I saying this because I just talked to you about the importance of a diagram and understanding how information links together the reason why you do that too is because sometimes when you have such an interconnected web and you understand why things are linked together and how things are linked together then you can actually fill in the gaps a lot of times even if you don&#39;t know the individual material at its depth you understand how it works in relation to the other pieces of information that&#39;s why that diagram is so essential and so that&#39;s why I would recommend that you would just sleep because if you can sleep and you have the higher performance the next day you&#39;re you&#39;re going to be able to challenge your brain to be able to look at those gaps of knowledge and fill them in yourself in real time under that pressure trust me I think that it&#39;s it&#39;s hard to convince somebody to sleep when they are trying to pull an all nighter but if you have organized your time in an effective and efficient manner so that you&#39;re covering your weaknesses you&#39;re taking time to freshen up on your strengths if you&#39;ve done this those first three steps already then most likely you would have been able to manage that time so that you can go to sleep at a reasonable hour so make sure you sleep okay step number eight I&#39;m going to talk about an all- Encompass what you can do on your exam day so you&#39;ve gone through the part of revising you&#39;ve done a lot of the hard work at this point but it doesn&#39;t mean that you shouldn&#39;t be optimizing the day of and there are ways to do this the first is to make sure you eat a breakfast make sure you eat a lunch I don&#39;t know what time your exams are I take a lot of Master&#39;s classes so sometimes my are like 8:00 p.m. right and so even that gives me time to spread out my study schedule a lot more than if I just had the night before hopefully that makes sense but I am ensuring that I eat all my meals the last thing that you want to be doing when you&#39;re are sitting for an exam is hearing your stomach Rumble and not having the energy to finish an exam right your performance has a lot to do with the food that you fuel your body with with the ability to get a good night&#39;s sleep so don&#39;t discount the importance of that the second part here is to monitor your caffeine intake especially if you&#39;ve lost a good amount of sleep you&#39;re going to be tempted to just dose up on caffeine but the issue is you get that jittery feeling you&#39;re you&#39;re super anxious um and now you have this whole testing anxiety and then you also have the fact that you didn&#39;t sleep and you you&#39;re dosed up on all this caffeine so I think caffeine is useful especially if you&#39;re tired um and it can boost your performance but just monitor how much you&#39;re taking okay I I I don&#39;t think you should be you you know drinking two cold brues like it&#39;s probably not going to serve you as well as you would like it to it&#39;s probably going to do a lot more damage and it&#39;s going to do a lot more harm than any good so just just monitor it but I think consuming It generally is is totally fine number three breathing techniques I&#39;m not going to go into the ones that I use specifically but if you go up on YouTube and just search up breathing techniques there&#39;s a lot of guided ones for about like 5 minutes or 10 minutes weirdly enough they&#39;ll do wonders for you right because what happens a lot of times is we have this tension in our body that goes unnoticed like there&#39;s serious tension there and it influences our Behavior influences our cognitive function and just releasing some of that tension helps you be more like you it helps you to actually perform well under that pressure and just be able to recall the information the night prior effectively so breathing techniques are a great opportunity to do this but the best part is is like they they don&#39;t take long and and for those that think breathing techniques are weird like think about the greatest athletes like you look at Steph Curry you look at LeBron you look at your favorite football players like all of them have their breathing techniques that they go through before their games or during their games it&#39;s like the moment is big but but try to ground yourself try to be mindful of the situation and so that you&#39;re able to perform the way that you want to perform and you don&#39;t combust under the pressures of the external situation so I think that&#39;s really important for you to try now the next tip that I&#39;m going to give you for the day of is probably the most important one and this is going to wrap everything up and that&#39;s to review your cheat sheet of weaknesses of topics that you knew were going to be a focus and that&#39;s why I told you to do this early on so now at this point what you should have is hopefully a list that has a lot of green on it obviously it&#39;s probably not going to be the case you&#39;re going to have some yellows maybe even some Reds but those Reds hopefully you&#39;ll be able to fill in the gaps in real time um because you&#39;re able to have a great understanding of how the information links or maybe the information just isn&#39;t on the exam and that then you&#39;re then you flucked out but yeah that&#39;s a great cheat sheet for you because you can immediately look at that and you can refresh through it and it does a lot of good in terms of reassuring you that you know the material because what happens a lot of times right before exams we&#39;re like our brains are going 1,000 miles per hour because we know the pressure that comes along with an exam especially if it&#39;s like weighted 30% or 50% of your score so when you go through that paper you&#39;re like yeah I do know this material yeah these are all the things that I needed to cover and I did Cover a majority of them does a really good job of visually showcasing to yourself that you know what you&#39;re doing and that you are as prepared as as you possibly could have been and now I&#39;m going to wrap this all up by saying this I teach you how to do well in school right and I teach you that getting good grades is important but it&#39;s not everything right and what I start to see people do is they start to prioritize the grades more than the experience itself and then it makes the entire Journey absolutely miserable look if you can implement the right strategies and you can take your failures for what they are and then be able to change your techniques in real time it makes the journey a lot more fun it it allows you to control what you can control and then make incremental progress to where you want to be so even to this day it&#39;s not like I get Aid&#39;s on every single exam there are sometimes where I don&#39;t perform as well as I would like to but I take that for what it is it&#39;s like yeah that grade is not perfect but it&#39;s also not make it or break it right I&#39;m still going to graduate most likely so I&#39;m not going to put that extreme pressure on myself if even if I get a grade that I don&#39;t like but I&#39;m also not going to just just ignore it right like I&#39;m going to say all right maybe I don&#39;t leave just 24 hours on the clock before this next exam but I just want to say this as a word of reassurance if you&#39;re watching this video and you&#39;re applying these types of techniques I&#39;m proud of you I genuinely am you are ahead of a lot more people than than you could imagine there&#39;s a lot of people that just give up all together and it&#39;s really unfortunate because um learning can be a really enjoyable experience if done right and hopefully these types of tips and techniques that I teach you really embody that I spoke at like 100 mph in this video specifically because I know that you only got 24 hours left so maybe I missed some things maybe some things were unclear and I&#39;d be happy to clear it up in the comments below so please leave your questions there and I and I&#39;m more than happy to help this is just really um came from this DM that I just got and this person was saying like June like I&#39;m freaking out like please help me I created a whole voice message for them was about like 20 minutes long um but I was like this is probably something useful for all of you guys to hear as well so um take it for what it is utilize it save it so that you can have more success even if you just got 24 hours left uh give this video a thumbs up if you&#39;ve learned anything and of course subscribe with that all being said until next time please take care of yourselves I love you guys so much and I&#39;ll see you all at the top

Transcript for:How to Prepare in 24 Hours Before Your Exam

Transcript for:
How to Prepare in 24 Hours Before Your Exam