HOW TO STUDY FOR EXAMS IN COLLEGE - Prioritizing & Scheduling (Honor Student Tips)

This is a video that I wished I had watched when before I started college. I’ve made a lot of studying mistakes throughout my 4 years of engineering school and my studying methods and habits have changed and evolved a lot. I’ve tweaked my studying methods in order to save the most amount of time while getting the most benefit. In this video I’m going to share with you guys some studying tips that I’ve learned throughout my 4 years of
engineering school.

Number 1 is going to be prioritize your classes. For each semester there will always be classes that just seem easy and classes that just where you don’t even understand half of the things that’s taught. For example in my hardest semester of engineering, I’ll probably make a video on that soon. The hardest classes for me included linear algebra, complex analysis, and differential equations. The easiest classes for me were thermodynamics and statics. I made a mistake of spending too much time on classes that was easy for me and classes that I liked instead of doing this opposite.
This was because I was sugarcoating myself and letting the bad habit of stroking my own ego get the best of me. List out all the classes you’re taking this semester and see which ones you’re struggling the most and which ones you think are easy. Generally, you want to spend the most amount of time studying for courses you’re struggling the most on.
But there’s a catch. You also wanna prioritize classes interms of their credits/units. For example, if you’re taking a general ed class on history along with 5 other engineering classes and a lab for my university labs generally only account for 1 credit. Since it shares a relatively little amount of weight on your total GPA I would put them last on the priority list.
If the labs in your uni has the same credit as the lecture based classes I would go back to just prioritizing them in terms of difficulty. You have to examine which courses are actually relevant to your major as in which ones will be the most important when trying to land your first job. For example, if an employer has to decide between 2 applicants with an identical GPA of 3.80, If they see that on average applicant A has better grades when it comes to engineering specific classes than applicant B. Chances are, they’re going to pick applicant A. A little disclaimer for the previous example we’re assuming that they have the same interview score, same personality, same exact resume structure. So literally same everything except for the grade distribution. I’m not a hiring manager so I don’t know this for a fact but after talking with a lot of professors and engineers, this seems to be the case.

Tip number 2 is involves constructing your study timetable (in a strategic and effective way). Typically, I spend 1 weeks preparing for my midterms and 2 weeks for my finals. Because the content for the finals is usually more difficult than the mid-term. However, if you feel that in general you tend to struggle more than your peers feel free to spend more time preparing for exams. To structure your timetable in the most strategic and effective way. First, decide how much time You’ll be dedicating to studying per day. On Sunday and Saturday I’ve got no class so I can actually study the entire day for 8 hours so that totals up to 33 hours per week of studying not including classes. You may think that Saturday and Sunday should be reserved for taking a break from studying and chilling and that’s fine. But just remember that if you had only just sacrificed 2 weekends to study the B+ that you got for that one classes could’ve an A. So at this point it’s all about priorities and how bad you actually want to improve your GPA. I’m not gonna tell you to study 10 hours per day. But the results you get is dependent on how much effort you put into it. Personally, I think that 33 hours per week of self-studying and revision is actually on the low side. I free up as much time as possible and study around 40 hours per week and on my harder semesters up to 50 hours per week. You have to balance between studying one subject for long enough so that you engrain the concepts and the problem-solving procedures into your brain but at the same time you don’t want to burn out on that one subject. I like to rotate different subjects every 3 hours. I didn’t take into account studying during the actual exam week but I will of course be studying even during exam weeks. I always like to have at least a 3 hour review shortly before taking the exam. You want also want to make sure that the closer you are to the exam, the more frequently you should be studying for that subject. This technique is called active recall and spaced repetition.

Видео HOW TO STUDY FOR EXAMS IN COLLEGE - Prioritizing & Scheduling (Honor Student Tips) канала Panpan Somboon