This is a special message if you are studying for an important exam and want to pass. College entrance exams, public service contests, the bar exam, or professional certifications. There are mistakes you need to avoid.
One clarification before we continue. Sometimes the secret is not studying more. The secret is to stop losing points. Because on the eve of the exam, the best study is not to study.
Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But notice: most people lose points in the final weeks before the exam, and not from a lack of content. You studied all year. You know the material. And even so, you arrive at the exam exhausted, anxious, without knowing where to start.
Today I will show you the mistakes people make before an important exam. And I can tell you upfront: one of the most common mistakes has nothing to do with studying. It has to do with sleeping poorly. But not in the way you imagine. Stay calm and I will explain.
1. Leaving heavy study for the end.
Do you know what the most classic elementary school mistake is? Studying on the eve of the exam. And do not think this is only a mistake children make. It is the mistake of the doctoral candidate in graduate school. Of the engineer taking a certification. Of the lawyer taking the bar exam. Only the scale changes: the child leaves it for the night before, while the adult leaves it for the final week.
You know exactly how this happens. You do that quick review thirty minutes before, write everything down in a rush before the memory evaporates, hand the test to the teacher, and feel that relief: “Ahhhh, great, now I can forget it.”
Notice that phrase. “Now I can forget it.” It reveals what that strategy is actually good for: short-term retention followed by forgetting.
Memorizing is different from learning.
Want proof? The person who memorizes gets outraged when the teacher reschedules the exam. “Oh, professor! But I studied thinking the exam was today! If it is next week, I will have to study everything all over again!” Look at the incoherence of that complaint. If the person had actually learned it, the material would still be there next week.
In school, unfortunately, we were trained to memorize mechanically. It is make-believe: the teacher gives a top grade to whoever crammed the night before, and everyone leaves happy. If you always got top grades in school and still failed your major college entrance exam, it is very likely you lived that make-believe game.
But in real life there is no make-believe. Civil service exams, professional certifications, university entrance tests, the bar exam, oral board evaluations, language diplomas: the volume of content is far too vast to be crammed the night before.
To understand why, think of your memory as a workshop with two parts. There is working memory and there is long-term memory. Studying on the eve of the exam is piling material onto your working memory, and that does not work. I explained this inner working of the brain last week, in episode four hundred forty-four of the series Hello! Seiiti Arata (source).
And even when it works, the cost is enormous. This has a name: brute-force memorization. Reading and rereading. Repeating and repeating. It is the most inefficient way of all. It is slow, exhausting, makes you sleepy, and brings intense frustration. The final week is not for learning new things. It is for retrieving from the Archive what you have already stored.
2. Arriving at the exam without taking mock tests.
You solved hundreds of practice exercises. Congratulations. But how did you solve them? Calmly, one by one, with coffee breaks, without a clock, lounging on the couch. Then exam day arrives: five hours sitting on a hard chair, an answer sheet, proctors pacing the room, and the clock ticking away.
The first time you face that pressure cannot be the actual exam.
Notice something that few people realize: taking an exam is a separate skill from knowing the subject. Managing your time. Keeping your focus during the fourth hour. Deciding when to skip a question. All of this must be trained. Nobody runs a marathon without ever running past five kilometers in practice.
And look how interesting this is. Remember the make-believe game from school? The mock exam is also a simulation. But it is a constructive simulation. Simulating is pretending it is the real thing so that, when the real day comes, it feels like just another practice session.
Take at least a few complete, timed mock exams, at the exact same time of day as the real test. The closer it feels to exam day, the better.
3. Panicking because you slept poorly the night before.
It is the night before the exam. You went to bed early, did everything right and nothing. Two in the morning, staring at the ceiling, counting sheep. And then the thought hits: “That is it. I slept badly. Tomorrow I will fail the test.”
Remember I mentioned at the beginning that one of the mistakes had to do with sleeping poorly, but not in the way you imagine? It is this one. Often the problem is not the restless night itself. It is what you believe about it.
Two researchers conducted a curious experiment with university students (source). They told participants that a device could measure their sleep quality from the previous night. It was a deception. The results were assigned at random. Half were told they had slept above average. The other half were told they had slept below average.
Afterwards, everyone completed attention and verbal fluency tests. Those who were told they slept poorly performed worse than those who were told they slept well. And the most important detail: cognitive performance did not depend on how participants actually thought they had slept. It depended on what the researchers told them.
Do you see? Simply believing you slept poorly can cost you points, even if your night was not actually that bad.
Important note: this is not an excuse to sleep poorly on purpose. But it shows that morning panic takes a heavy toll. Look at the word preoccupation. PRE-OCCUPATION. It means occupying your working memory ahead of time. Precisely at the moment when you need it clear and available for the exam.
And there is more: one bad night does not erase what is already in your long-term memory. The sleep that consolidated your knowledge was the sleep from previous weeks, not the night before the exam.
So, if nerves cause you to sleep poorly, do not keep repeating to yourself “I slept badly, I slept badly, I slept badly.” Get up, have your coffee, and go. Your long-term memory is still intact.
If you want to build your ideal game plan to achieve the best possible result on exams and tests, I invite you to visit this link.
4. Entering the exam without a plan.
Look at the irony. You planned months of studying. Calendars, binders, four-color highlighters. But you never planned how to use your exam time. Then you freeze on one question and spend twenty minutes on it. You lose track of time. You leave the answer sheet for the very end and finish rushing, with your hand shaking, praying you do not skip a line.
Some people think having a plan is too rigid, and that the best approach is to “feel the exam” in the moment. That is make-believe all over again. Improvising under pressure is an unnecessary risk.
Decide beforehand, calmly, at home. How much time per question or per section? What is your rule for skipping? For example: if you are stuck for more than three minutes, mark the question and come back later. Where do you start? At what point do you transfer your answers to the final answer sheet?
Every decision you make in advance is one less decision you have to make during the exam under intense pressure. And if you took the mock tests from mistake number two, you will have already tested that plan.
Memorizing is different from learning. Cramming on the eve of the test serves the make-believe game of school, not real life.
Space your study across the previous weeks, prioritize past exams, and train with timed mock tests. On the eve of the exam, do not study new material and do not pull an all-nighter. And if nerves make you sleep poorly, do not panic, because panic only makes it worse.
Obviously you do not want to be the desperate student who pulls an all-nighter, drinks five cups of coffee, and arrives at the test looking like a zombie. Just as you do not want to be the careless student who assumes everything will work out and walks into the room with zero strategy.
That is why I extend an important invitation: have a concrete game plan for taking the test using the techniques at this link.