It’s that time of year again, when a semester nears its end, and students such as yourself start taking your big final tests and assignments. There’s a lot of tips out there to help you, but here’s the tips that actually helped me through my grad, post-grad and single courses that I’ve taken throughout my own learning journey.
Sleep a lot
It’s really simple: If you’re tired, you can’t think or remember things as well. Especially the night before a test or assignment, you want to make sure you get a good seven hours of shut-eye, at least. That’s the average amount anyone over 18 needs, according to the CDC. It can be hard to get that sleep if you’re stressing, but it’s worth it. So, make sure you block the time off. Which brings me to the next thing.
Schedule your time
Planning a scheduling your time is the key to your success. Block off sleep time, block off study time, block off downtime, block off meals – schedule as much as you can, especially if you’ve got a bunch of tests in a row. As soon as you know when your test and assignments are due, start blocking your time, be it on a calendar on the wall, on your phone’s calendar app, anywhere you can make a schedule. At the same time, don’t stress if things don’t wind up going exactly according to plan, or unexpected things happen along the way, especially if you feel burnt out. The important thing is to be thinking about how you’re spending your time.
Don’t cram
Speaking of not getting burnt out, cramming is a sure-fire way to make that happen. By cramming, I mean doing a whole lot of studying at once to try and stuff a pile of information into your short-term memory right before taking a test. Not only is it bad for you, but it doesn’t work! Here’s a whole BBC article that calls it the worst way to learn. So, not only does it not help you remember things very well, you’ll feel tired and stressed afterwards.
Use your social connections
In college, you’re surrounded by a community, and so you should use it. Classes are smaller, so you can get to know people easier, which will help you at test time. So, book a study space, or just find a space somewhere, invite some classmates and turn it into a group session. Here’s a specific thing that always helped me: Explaining things to other people. It’s like the Rubber Duck principle in computer programming: Talking through it with someone else will help you work it out. Having to explain it does something with my brain, shores up my own knowledge. So, turn that study group into a teaching circle, and everybody wins. Centennial has study rooms in its campus libraries to facilitate group study. Use them!
Remember: It’s not all about grades
Don’t take this as an excuse to slack, but something to help you stress less: College is about experience, not tests, grades or lectures. This isn’t high school, you’re not here to get straight A’s. You’re here to learn the skills to get into the career you want. Really, you should focus on what abilities, skills and career connections you get from a class, not the letter grades you’re getting on tests and assignments.
One thing you can do is figure out the minimum grade you need on a test to pass the class. If you’ve been doing alright, you’d be surprised at how low of a grade will get you a pass. Again, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it, but it can be a big relief to remember that the point of a diploma is to prove to an employer you’ve been trained in the skills, and once you graduate, no one’s going to be checking your grades.