Are you a finals student worried about how you can walk through the crazy finals week schedule? Do you want to learn tips that can help you study for your final exam? Here’s an article that offers you all you should know about studying for your finals week. Not all study techniques work for every student, so read through the tips and experiment with a few to find what works best for you. Let’s go!
How to Study for Finals Week?
How to Study for Finals Week?It’s common for college students to fear the unknown as they approach their final year in college. The fear intensifies as you approach your final exams. Although this fear is justified in the sheer amount of pressure that comes with this period, students can still pass through their finals without issues as long as they know what to do.
Unfortunately, many typical high school survival mechanisms, like caffeine overdose, sleep deprivation, etc., would be counterproductive during this period. In addition to explaining how to study for finals in college, this section will also provide useful tips that’ll help you survive your finals week in college under different subsections.
5 Study Tips to Ace Your Finals Week in College
Let’s begin by explaining some study tips that’ll come in handy as you prepare for your final exams in college. This period is already hectic, so you want to make optimal use of the little time you’ll get to study. The following final exam study tips can help you scale through, irrespective of the kind of learner you are.
Avoid the Urge to Procrastinate
College life is filled with different activities. As you approach your finals, you’ll see these activities quadruple. With so many things to do and very little time to do them, you’ll often feel the urge to procrastinate your studies. Don’t forget that your preparations for your final exams should start at the beginning of the semester. Have a clear plan of how you want to combine studies with all these activities.
Beyond making these plans, learn to execute them. Often, the difference between procrastinators and goal-getters is the ability to create study plans and stick to them, irrespective of how things play out.
Check Your Exam Times
Often, we see students wait until the last minute before checking their exam timetable. Other times, students just assume their exam schedule based on past experiences throughout college. Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for disaster. We recommend checking the dates and times for your finals before your study. Knowing what’s coming and when it is coming can help you create an effective study plan.
Besides, you’d also know whether you have two exams clustered on the same day so you can reach out to your professor to schedule a different time.
Study Smarter, Not Harder
Students often get tempted to reread their textbooks and cram for their finals. But while this can seem like a quick fix, it has disadvantages. In fact, it often backfires, leaving students completely blank during their exams. It’s okay to reread your materials over again, but don’t do it because you want to “cram” information that you’ll need for the exams. Instead, read, understand and try to rephrase each topic in your own words. Rephrasing information in your words helps with retention. Other techniques that may help include:
- Spacing out study sessions.
- Researching more content materials.
- Using smart study techniques to game the system.
Get a Good Sleep the Night Before Your Exam
You can study for so long and still fail your finals if you refuse to rest your body. Several available studies have already shown that sleep has the power to enhance your mind’s ability to concentrate. It also helps to fortify your memory so that it becomes easier to reclaim knowledge. So, next time you feel like sleeping, get a few hours of sleep before continuing.
An excellent way to get around this is to start studying early so that you won’t need all-nighters to cover your materials or prepare for other parts of the exams.
Be Flexible With Your Strategies
We’ve often seen college students confess to using the same study strategies throughout their exams, irrespective of the format of each exam. That’s a lazy way to prepare for an exam and would not work in your finals, where flexibility and the ability to provide applied answers are needed.
Learn more about each exam and focus your study approach to suit the exam format. Is it a multiple-choice exam? Does it require practicals? These questions can help you adopt the right strategy for each exam.
How to Survive Finals Week in High School: 5 Tips
Whether it’s in high school or college, final weeks are usually stressful and surviving requires poise, resilience, and strategic planning. Like college, you must also learn how to study for finals in high school. Here are useful tips that can help.
Organize Study Sessions
Unlike in college, group discussions and study sessions are rare in high school. But it doesn’t mean they’re completely unavailable. As you approach your finals in high school, most of your activities would already be geared towards preparing you for college. One of the habits that’ll help you through your finals and even in college is joining groups and study sessions. Most study sessions will involve going through exam materials and study guides. This tactic can help you build a better study habits while refreshing your memory and making study time fun.
Don’t Waste Reading Days
As a serious student, you’ve probably created a weekly timetable and allowed different days for studies throughout the week. As your final exams approach, your studies will become more random and unplanned as you use all available time. Still, you shouldn’t completely jettison reading days set by you or your school. These reading days are typically created to give you a mental reset from the activities associated with finals and energize you for the next few weeks. Make the best use of them, and don’t forget to have fun while at it.
Remember the Big Picture
In the end, school flies by. Your session is just weeks away from finally coming to an end. So, instead of allowing stress consume you during this period, perhaps you should create time for mental breaks and enjoy other activities before leaving high school. Don’t deny yourself the freedom of soaking up all that school offers you, even in your finals.
Create a Schedule for Your Social Media Presence
While it’s not advisable to focus too intensely as you approach your finals, it’s also bad not to focus. Yes, devoting too much time to studying can cause fatigue, but dividing your review sessions into many parts can lead to ineffectual and scattered learning. We understand it’s unrealistic to completely turn off social media for a whole week, so we recommend scheduling. Create time to check your favorite websites and platforms before or after your day. However, beware not to get carried away with news feeds and messages that you forget time. In addition to the potential of being distracted, social media use can get you so carried away that you’ll forget to manage your time efficiently.
Don’t Compare Your Studying to Others’
Group studies are good and helpful, but only to the extent that they don’t become a distraction. It’s important to avoid comparing yourself to others. You’ve developed study habits that work for you over time. Your friends have their study habits too. Don’t attempt to compare your study habits with theirs.
Also, avoid unnecessary conversations during group studies. It’s okay if you can’t cope with studying around friends. Pick your books and move to a quiet place where you can study. The goal is to find what works best for you and stick to it.
How to Study on the Day of the Exam?
It’s normal for students to get hyper and anxious as their finals draw close. Hence, the desire to learn how to study for a final exam in one day. The last 24 hours will seem even more stressful, as you have an entire syllabus to revise. But it can also be the turning point if you know how to manage it well. Here are tips that can help.
- Remain calm: you’ll likely get more panicky as the exams approach. However, irrespective of the circumstances, it’s important to try to remain as calm as possible. Stress and anxiety will make concentration more difficult. One of the ways to calm your nerves is by taking short breaks to relax and clear your mind. During these breaks, try activities like yoga, listening to music, and talking to a friend.
- Gather your materials: you already have a very short time to study. You don’t want to waste any more time looking for one material or the other. So, it’s wise to take the time to gather materials like pens, blank papers, class notes, textbooks, etc., before you start studying.
- List down important topics: the best approach to learning within a short time is to note all the available topics and arrange them on a scale of preference. Start studying, starting with the most important topics and moving on to the least important ones. This way, you’ll be sure to cover all important topics, even if there’s very limited time for it.
- Leverage charts, flashcards, and graphs: charts, graphs, and flashcards are wonderful tools to help you retain information. There’s already little time to study. You don’t want to waste any more time studying bulk and unimportant information. You can use flashcards and charts to highlight important information so that it’ll be easy to scroll through them when needed.
5 Study Tools for Your Finals Week
One of the right answers when looking for how to ace your final exams is the use of study tools. These days, there are so many study tools available to make study easier and more exciting. You just need to find what suits you and stick to them. Here are five popular study tools to help you ace your finals.
Highlighters
As humans, our brains love colors. Highlighting important information helps our brain to recall such information for future use. Beyond helping our memories, highlighting can also make studying easier. However, you must also learn how to highlight, even though there will be many things you think should be highlighted. Note that you don’t have to highlight everything. Some important tips to help you highlight properly include:
- Read before highlighting
- Designate color systems for different types of information
Flashcards
Despite being less popular these days, flashcards are still a trusted lifesaver for last-minute studies. Flashcards are effective tools for boosting information retention through active recall. Although there are readymade flashcards for every subject, a good way to boost retention is by writing flashcards yourself. After all, there are available studies that point to the ability of handwriting to help retain important information.
Post-it Notes
Here’s another excellent visual tool that’s effective for memorizing information before an exam. They can serve as brainstorming tools, bookmarks for reading, or to help you keep track of homework. Rest assured that these notes will help you keep track of everything and stay prepared.
Study Apps
There are so many downloadable study apps on your phone’s App store. These apps often serve as all-in-one study organizers, with scheduling and study timetables that you can sync with your calendar. They typically come with customizable task managers with functionalities specific to students’ lifestyles. Read reviews to find the one that best suits your study pattern. Some study apps you can check out for college use include:
- Studyblue
- Refme
- Goconqr
- myHomework Student Planner
Educational Websites
The internet is an amazing platform with loads of information that can help students excel in their academics. With tons of educational websites available these days to help you study, you can find all you need to prepare better for your finals. You can even find websites that connect you with study groups and professors to help you. Be careful about meeting up with people physically from these websites. It’s best to keep your conversations online to avoid getting caught in any criminal web.
Wrapping Things Up: How to Study for Finals Week?
Final exams and semester-end papers are the most challenging parts of college. This period is often marked by the pressure to combine your studies with many other activities that come with finals week. You also want to keep your head cool while at it, and that’s why you should know how to study for finals in college. Fortunately, we’ve provided all the information you’ll need to know about studying for finals week in this article. Hopefully, you can leverage all the information in this article to prepare better for your finals.
