Welcome back to the blog! It’s been a while!

Exam season just finished, so I’m finally able to get back to the blog and release stuff again! Unfortunately, my days are usually filled with college prep and extracurricular work, so I’m just as busy as I used to be, but I don’t need to think about academics too heavily (at least for the next couple of months).

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Anyway, since my midterms just ended, I wanted to write a little bit about some things I learnt from this exam season. This was a “first time” year for a couple of things: the first time I did something apart from study alongside exams (work on my college essays), and the first time I studied consistently throughout the year.

It was quite a unique experience, to be honest; I didn’t feel as prepared as I usually was, but I ended up doing much better than I expected to.

But I digress. Here are three things I learnt from my midterm exams!

1. Ideas over specifics

It’s quite common for us students to get overly obsessed with the specifics of the subject we’re learning. Honestly, I’ve been like that all my life myself; I think being obsessed with the specifics is what usually gives me the confidence to do well.

This time, though, I didn’t spend as much time on the specifics. I didn’t mug up the studies my textbook cited in psychology, I didn’t remember formulae for math (which, to be fair, is unnecessary since we have a formula sheet anyway), and I didn’t memorize dates (at least, unimportant dates) in history.

I can’t say this didn’t have an impact; my answers weren’t as detailed as they could be, and I don’t think I was as confident as I usually am. Before the first exam took place, I definitely believed I would flunk; I hadn’t a clue about most of the specifics, so I expected to completely blank during the exam.

But to say that it had an outsized impact on how well I wrote the exams would be a bit of an overstatement.

I ended up being able to write most answers fairly well, because most of them don’t require perfect knowledge of the subject matter, most of them require perfect understanding of the subject matter. And as much as Cambridge wants to group knowledge and understanding together, they aren’t the same.

What I’m getting at is that probably 80% of the knowledge required for doing well in an exam is not perfect knowledge of the specifics in each subject, it’s perfect knowledge of the ideas in each subject. The remaining 20% is specifics.

2. Consistency pays off

This is probably nothing new to all of you; everyone knows that studying throughout the year is better than studying right before the exam.

This was the first time that I was actually able to do that, though. In previous years, I’ve tried to start studying earlier, but I would just stop because of a lack of motivation (and, to some extent, boredom).

The reason studying consistently helps is not because you’ll be able to remember things better (at least, I hadn’t really experienced that), it’s because you gain some familiarity of the concept much earlier. This allows you to gain a much deeper understanding of the concept much quicker, letting you work on memorising stuff instead of trying to learn the main concepts from scratch.

A great example of this is my psychology paper: I had studied the schizophrenia portion earlier in the year, but I hadn’t studied impulse control disorders until much closer to the exam. I ended up knowing significantly more in schizophrenia, even though it’s way harder and longer than every other chapter in clinical psychology.

Similarly, history was much easier to study: I had a good idea about the sequence of events because I had been reading the textbook throughout the year, and therefore, while studying, I could focus on analysing evidence and creating mental models about how I would tackle particular essays if they came in the exam.

3. Flexibility is underrated

In the past, I’ve been pretty stubborn about the way in which I study. As someone who literally functions off of systems, I would make flowchart-esque systems for studying basically every subject.

Unfortunately, most of the time, I wouldn’t end up sticking to it perfectly because of a lack of time.

This time, I was basically forced to be more flexible with my study habits. I had to abandon my usual flashcard- and question bank-heavy methods of studying (again, because of a lack of time) and try to just learn the concepts for the exam series. In addition to that, I was feeling immense levels of burnout, and I was basically unable to function properly on many days leading up to the exam.

Even though the flexible study method was basically forced on me, I took some great ideas away from it (like changing study session goals from being time-based to output-based). I think being flexible is a great way to experiment and pick up new things that can help augment an existing system, and I intend on doing so for my preboard and board exams this year too!

That’s all for this week! Thank you so much for reading!

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