Hey bro, let me tell you a story. When I was in secondary school, the one subject that was the bane of my existence was geography. It was full geography so there was a lot of content to memorize. You had to know like 10 different examples and 10 different explanations each chapter and I would always find myself panicking, anxiously flipping through the textbook.
before every exam. Like, you know when you have to put your bags outside the class before the exam and the teacher's like shouting, telling everyone to hurry the hell out and get back in the class. And I was just there flipping through the geography textbook, trying to ignore what the teacher's saying.
My problems usually start a week or so before the exam. I'll be trying to study the content. I'll literally go outside of my house. Sit down, start reading the textbook, then I'll close it and try to recall what I just read.
This method is actually quite effective for memorization, but it's so goddamn difficult. Every single time I try to do this after memorizing like 2-3 pages, I would think to myself, I'm so done with this crap, and then I'll just end up doing something else. Because of this, My geography grades always hovered around like a B4 for most of my secondary school life, which is like 60 to 40 percent. However, I started doing something a little different, and during my prelims, I managed to actually get an A2 for geography, and I got an A2 again later during my O levels, which isn't the best, it's not like an A1. but it was a significant improvement for me.
I was honestly quite shocked when I received the A2. I'm telling you this story because most of the strategies you find online for quick memorization, these scientifically proven strategies like spaced repetition, forgetting curve, active recall, making, I don't know, like flashcards to read when you're having dinner or something. And these strategies probably do work very well for some people, but...
Be honest with yourself. You've probably tried using them, right? Or rather, you've tried to try them, but you couldn't, and that's why you're here watching this video. Realistically speaking, do you actually see yourself revising the content that you were taught every few days, and are you actually disciplined enough to set up like an entire system, or print out hundreds of flashcards just to revise for an exam? Okay, if you are, and these strategies that you find online do work for you, then just click off this video right now.
My advice is absolutely useless to you. But if you know that advice doesn't work for you, keep watching. The strategy I use to memorize content easily, not just for geography, but also other content-heavy subjects like chemistry, is that I spammed practice questions. 10-year series. past year exam questions, all that good stuff.
I know it sounds so like uncool but before you click off, let me explain my point. The main problem you have in memorizing content is not in how you memorize content but in what content you memorize. Because honestly, and you probably already know this from experience, only about 30 to 40 percent of what you are taught in school actually have a realistic chance of being tested in an exam.
If you look carefully at like for example the O-level papers in the past 17 years, you realize that there are two to three certain topics that get tested basically every year with like three different questions on that same topic in just one paper. And then there are other topics that get tested literally once in the entire 17 years. And even then, these topics have like an insignificant weightage like one mark in the entire paper and you would have been able to literally score like A1 even if you completely ignore these topics during revision. Point is there are some topics that will account for a much larger proportion of your marks than other topics and you already know your time and your attention is limited so you can't give equal attention to each topic.
You have to allocate your time according to the importance of each topic. And the most easiest, most actually kind of brain-dead way to do this... is to just spam practice papers like the TYS.
When you do a, let's say, chemistry paper, and you encounter like 3 organic chemistry questions in a row, that's worth like 20 marks, followed by like 1 1-mark question on, I don't know, ammonia or something, it's gonna be very obvious which topics have higher importance. And you don't even have to like analyze the paper or whatever, because when you do the questions, like properly do the questions, write out the answer in full, You're already learning and memorizing the content according to the importance of the topics. Even when you have to refer to your notes to like copy the answer, you're still slowly but surely learning the content, right?
When you get like two chemical bonding questions asking for basically the same answer in two consecutive papers, you're definitely not going to forget the answer. Now this method is not like scientifically proven to be the best or- optimized for memorization but the reason i like it so much is because it's just so braindead a few weeks before the exams or during holidays you can just open up your tys or print out some past year papers and just do a bunch of them at first you can do them open book with like no time limit at all then you can slowly progress to maybe close book with some time limits and if you don't understand anything just ask the one smart guy in your class or like your teacher during school they'll be more than happy to help and you don't have to like worry a lot about like learning curves or whatever and the best part is if you do this enough there really isn't even a need to like sit down and read and study the content because you already know like 80 to 90 percent of what you actually need to know if you are anxious about the 10 to 20 percent of the remaining content because you know you start to panic if it comes out even if it's like one mark then no problem you can just quickly read through that part the day before the exam okay in your mind right now you're probably thinking of one of three issues with this method so i'll adjust them right now issue number one you haven't learned enough content to do a practice paper i'll admit my method is more suited for like a month before the exam or like during the June holidays when you've already learned most of the content for the next exam. But if you really want to start practicing now, you can just focus on finishing and putting effort into whatever topical practices that your teachers give you.
If you're like a Singaporean in secondary 3, you can consider doing the topical 10-year series for the topics you've already learned. Because even within a topic by itself, there are some bits of information that are tested more often than others. Issue number two, you cannot get your hands on practice papers. Most schools have a Google Drive with their past year exam papers with answers. So try to find that, like ask your classmates or something.
Second resort, ask your teachers. Don't be shy. Talk to them, text or email them. Ask if they can send you past year papers from your own school or other schools. I don't know about you, but personally, I would be pretty ashamed of myself if I let social anxiety be the thing standing between me and getting straight A's.
Last last, very final resort, you try to get practice papers online. And once you've learned all of the content, just focus on the 10 year series. Issue number 3. You have the practice papers but you have no good answers for them or just no answers at all.
This is especially a problem for the 10-year series since the 10-year series answers for the open-ended questions specifically are often like substandard because someone was just paid to write them. It's also a problem for the humanities like history and geography because humans, teachers just don't like revealing the answers. Because unlike math or the sciences, there are multiple good answers for a single question. For this, my advice would be, just do the papers anyway. The benefit you get in terms of revising the content from just doing the papers, not even marking them, is still like actually quite insane.
Despite this, I would still highly recommend like every once in a while, asking the respective teacher if they can mark your work. Or at the very least ask them to look at like one or two questions per paper that you are not so sure about. Once again, don't let social anxiety be the barrier between you and straight A's. In fact, this is exactly how I improved my geography grades during the June holidays.
Every morning, I just dedicated like an hour to doing questions from the geography 10-year series. I didn't care like how many questions I was doing or how slow I was writing. I just did them. And I pretty much didn't mark them at all except for like 3-4 question parts which I showed to my teacher to mark.
And it still helped me improve massively. So here's the actionable step. Just dedicate like 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours every weekend or every day doing the holidays.
For example, the June holidays. And dedicate this time to doing some practice questions for the subjects that you are weaker at in terms of content. It doesn't matter if you have to constantly flip through the textbook or your notes when doing them.
It doesn't matter if you take literal days just to finish one paper. You will still improve exponentially over time and you'll soon know most of the content like the back of your hand. Also, try to print out the exam papers you are doing because if you refer to the questions on a device like a laptop, it's quite weird.
You can't annotate the questions and then... Suddenly there's a notification from WhatsApp and then you get distracted and it's all screwed up. Also, one very, very important thing. If you don't understand anything, ask your teachers.
Text them, email them, ask them during class, whatever. If you need to, literally ask for a consult. Like if you put yourself into your teacher's perspective, most of them are dying to help you improve your grades. They want to see you succeed. And honestly, asking questions is like an academic cheat code.
If you look at all the straight A students in your class, you probably see them like swarming the teacher after each period just to ask about some very specific weird thing that they kind of 50% understand but not really. And because of that, they have to ask that question. So you definitely have every right to ask about basically anything.
Even if it's like a really stupid and obvious question, it's too... better knowing the answer than not knowing the answer. I hope you found this video helpful. Please give me any criticism or feedback in the comments and I wish you a good day.